Different audiences, even different people in the same audience will respond to different styles, content and delivery.Avoid words they won't understand - like jargon. Technical terms can be explained.
Kids sadly often look bored in churches (even kids much bigger than this one ;) but only when people persist in talking too long, or over their heads.
Sometimes the invisible audience is the most significant to address!
Labels: communication, preaching, writing
¶ 4:26 PM
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Writers and speakers have to earn attention. Readers and listeners need to be rewarded. The more time we expect them to expend the greater that reward should be.So, effective communication should be as brief as is convenient to communicate the message clearly. This rewards the audience with maximum benefit for their effort.
So, be brief!
Labels: communication, preaching, writing
¶ 3:54 PM
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But not so brief as to be cryptic. :-)
I subscribe to an email from Steve at Actuate Consulting, which today offered some bullet points on Effective Communication. Since communication is at the heart of most of what I do I thought I'd filter and adapt Steve's ideas into a series of short posts.In my book the number one has to be: Effective communication is clear. If people do not understand, asking: What did she say? or What did he mean? communication has not occurred. Communication has not occurred unless a sensible message is received, no matter how much you spoke or wrote.
The best aid to clarity is a picky proof-reader. How I wish my students had spouses or friends with the courage to say: I could not follow this bit? What did you mean here? How I wish more biblical scholars and preachers would learn that to say something simply and clearly is better than to say something that sounds profound, but fails to communicate ;)
Labels: communication, preaching, writing
¶ 12:42 PM
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Tools in my Granddad's workshop were sharp, honed and glistened with a thin film of oil. My mother's dad was a carpenter. I'm not a carpenter, the tools in my garage are a disgrace, granddad would be ashamed, blunt and hardly usable, sometimes even rusted...
So, in Carey chapel recently, when Rachel asked some Carey staff if they could tell her in one word: What makes a good sermon?
I had the answer...
Over the years I've heard lots of sermons: students, visiting preachers, churches I visit... Frankly, too many sermons are like the tools in my garage, blunt, occasionally rusty, and often being used for the wrong job.
Like many people who grew to adulthood in the TV age, I have a short attention span. Like many people who spend a lot of time on the Internet, my attention span has probably shortened in recent years. I'm used to sound bites, and quickly clicking on to another destination. I recorded one of Spurgeon's sermons for LibriVox.org, the site that provides free audio books, it lasted nearly 45 minutes! Presumably, in the Nineteenth century, Spurgeon fans could keep their attention focused that long. I can't. My students can't. And my children (grown up though they are) certainly can't!
So, I have the answer to Rachel's question. In one word. "Sharp". A good sermon is sharp. Like the finely honed tools in granddad's workshop, a good sermon cuts straight to the point. As few extras as possible. Like those tools it HAS a point. A good sermon is brief, to be memorable. It has a point; it should leave its hearers with some call to action. Their living should change somehow from hearing it.
Pointed, memorable, and short, a good sermon calls me to conversion. Either to that first conversion where we turn to God in Christ and away from self and sin, or the regular smaller conversions that follow the first big turnaround as Jesus takes over as master of our lives more and more. That's pointed! But how many sermons fail to make a connection to my daily living that requires me to act?
If that "point" is blunt, then the sermon is worthless, merely good advice from some smart guy (and it is often a mistake male preachers make) to others whose lives are pretty much "together", but just need a little tinkering. I don't need advice on living; I need to be brought face to face with my saviour.
Other sermons have a point, but they are rusty. The point is blunted by too much other stuff that creeps into the sermon by the back door. Funny stories, scenes from the latest movies (that I have not yet seen), reminiscences from the preacher's previous church... if these "illustrations" really DO illustrate, they can help me remember, but if they fail in that, they merely blunt the point, like rust on my chisels.
So, in one word (since the six hundred I was allocated are nearly used ;) a good sermon is "sharp". Short, so busy TV educated, Wikipedia consulting scatterbrains like me can concentrate for the 15-20 minutes without wandering too much. Sharp, they prod me to change; they aim at conversion - avoiding the temptation to be clever or wise. Memorable, after all, if your sermon has three alliterative sections, that between them neatly encapsulate the message of the Bible text, but I forget them before my car has left the church car park, what use was it?
Like granddad's chisels a good sermon is sharp!
Labels: preaching
¶ 5:38 PM
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I love your analogy and I agree. "Sharp" is a great word to describe a great sermon.
Thanks for sharing.
Blessings,
Mark
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Kingdom Living has made a list of about 70 Christian Sermon Links. It starts with an Theologian, Alister McGrath, and includes Wolfhart Pannenburg (the list is not restricted merely to the living as Karl Barth gets in) and includes a numberof great and famous Biblical Scholars, like Ben Witherington III, Craig Blomberg, D. A. Carson, James Dunn, N.T. Wright and Walter Brueggemann. It also includes Evangelical heroes like Eugene Peterson, John Stott, Marva Dawn (so it is not quite a male only zone ;) Ravi Zacharias, Tony Campolo, a selection of worthies from the Wheaton College Chapel and Will Willimon.But also among the top seventy preachers of the current age lists Tim Bulkeley.
So, in the spirit of the occasion I'd like to thank my mummy and daddy, my hair dresser (there is only one - hair that is, though actually Barbara has been the only one in the other sense for years now)... actually I'll stop this acceptance speech before it gets out of hand. But seriously, folks: Thank you, Kingdom Living!
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Pardon me, but there is another elephant in the room. It is smaller and less important than the first one but it is there... and Mark has decided to talk about it:
Preaching is the big fat elephant in the room. Most preaching is appalling, disconnected and boring and yet no one talks about it. We all pretend that everything is ok.. we wouldn’t want to offend the preacher. They are doing there best and all that… But I think we need to talk about it.I think Mark's diagnosis is right. Too much preaching is second rate, if we are going to be disconnected from life, or boring then there is little point in preaching at all. And if we are going to be disconnected from the "word of life" there is NO point. And, Mark's right, a lot of preaching IS either disconnected or boring. His 4 points (what he claims an unscientific and biased sample of sermon tasters want) are spot on too:
- Unless preaching brings the word of God to life it is pointless - no one wants to hear my (or your!) opinions or wisdom.
- Unless preaching leads to action it is worthless except as entertainment, and frankly Shortland Street is more entertaining than most sermons! (Actually SS is preaching, and often contains an implicit call to action, it's just that the message is never Christian and often not even morally sound.)
- The least significant of the four, requiring preaching to be memorable, will largely be covered by the combination of 1, 2 and 4 - get them right and it will be memorable even without Marks funny hat ;-)
- Preaching is boring, because it lacks excitement it lacks zing largely because often one or both of the first two are weak. You'd have to work hard to make biblical preaching that connects to my life unexciting, but it can be done... But, if the preacher has been grabbed by the word, and plans to act on it themselves... That is bound to be exciting, because lives will change (not just pagans who are converted, but long term Christians who are too ;-)
Labels: justice, poverty, preaching
¶ 3:19 PM
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these are interesting point, so how do we imporve preaching - what would it look like? Thanks.
By 
Brian, at
December 22, 2007 5:22 AM
Hi, Brian, the $64,000 question... the trouble is, I think it looks different in different times and places with different people and different biblical texts. If it is to REALLY keep my interest then it MUST somewhere include the chance for discussion, or at least engaged response, often it will include co-construction as a group of people works out together what the Spirit of God intends by a passage for them today, it will not speak down to me from some exalted "spiritual" plain that I have yet to reach, but sometimes reveal to me the preacher's struggles, however it will encourage me to grow... it will always engage Scripture with life, since that's what preaching IS. It may sometimes even be a 20 minute lecture, but not too often, and not too much longer, I am a bear of reasonable brain, but short attention ;-)
By Tim, at
December 22, 2007 7:14 AM
From a pragmatic point of view, it is unlikely that preaching the 'word of God' will ever occur in certain denominations. Currently, anybody who expresses an interest in expository preaching is told they are not up with the times, and should be telling nice stories and using attractive multimedia presentations instead. Expository preaching is 'passe'. The pastor-recruiters from certain denominations are only looking for people who can deliver something akin to 'story-time at the library', and then cap it all off by posing a few vague and fuzzy questions at the end of it. So, the reason you're not likely to end up with 159 penetrating sermons on Job over the space of the next year is that the people in charge confuse 'insipid drivel' with 'postmodern Gospel'.
By Deane, at
December 22, 2007 12:03 PM
Personally Deane, I'm not so fussed about whether preaching follows the traditional pattern of "expository preaching", I rather like inductive structures and narrative presentations, I'm even fonder of dialogue where the congregation joins in making the sermon, what fusses me is the source of the "word". If preaching descends to being just "good thoughts" - let me out! And for an inductive sermon to move me I need to hear clearly how it came from the text it ends up with, it must NOT sound like merely a peg ;)
By Tim, at
December 24, 2007 8:27 AM
I'm not fussed about the form of preaching, either--whether propositional, inductive, narrative, or what. By "expository preaching", I mean preaching that derives from the given text itself, and can be contrasted with fitting a text into a preconceived topic or category. I think there is a difference--and this is probably much the same as your own distinction between "the source of the word" and "just good thoughts".
Umberto Eco identifies the difference when he defines "critical reading" of a text as "to read in order to discover ... something about its nature", and contrasts this with mere "use" of a text, which is "to start from it in order to get something else, even accepting the risk of misinterpreting it from the semantic point of view".
Eco illustrates this distinction humourously, by commenting:
"If I tear out the pages of my Bible to wrap my pipe tobacco in them, I am using this Bible, but it would be daring to call me a textualist."
By Deane, at
December 24, 2007 1:09 PM
