Preaching to Be Heard (eBook)

Preface

Preachers face a difficult task. Each Sunday we have to teach the Bible to a distracted people. Today, a relentless blitz of information overwhelms our people’s eyes and ears. All week long they are targeted by customized ads and pinged by their smartphones to check incoming messages, texts, updates, and calls. Communication is increasingly image based, articles are broken down into bite-sized pieces, and vlogs are even taking the place of blogs. Yet there we stand with an ancient text in our hands, asking our audiences to sit still for thirty to forty minutes while we talk.

But is technological advancement really to blame when people find our sermons boring? To be sure, our listeners more than ever suffer from attention overload. But it was still the ’60s when Clyde Reid sought to understand why the pulpit was under widespread disparagement. He lamented that “most sermons today are boring, dull, and uninteresting.… Whether we like to admit it or not, many persons feel that preaching today fails to capture their interest.”1 This was an issue long before we had social media or smartphone apps.

Even earlier than Reid, in the ’20s, Harry Emerson Fosdick penned his famous article “What Is the Matter with Preaching?” In it, he bemoaned what he perceived to be an epidemic in the pulpit of his time—sermons that fail to really engage the listener. There was little to be distracted with from our perspective. The problem was not the audience. These were people who took forever to do everything by today’s standards. Comparatively speaking, they had incredible patience—but not for insipid preaching.

THE PROBLEM WITH OUR EXPECTATIONS

For those who think that a sermon should be focused on Scripture, it is easy to write off Fosdick’s comments because he went on to disparage this kind of preaching in favor of a style that was more focused on the listener’s needs. Yet I still think Fosdick’s comments are tough to ignore. He was concerned with the flatness with which many preachers deliver their sermons, and we should be as well.

The problem has less to do with our audience and more to do with our expectations of them. Sure, people are very distracted. But people always have been. It is just difficult to sit and listen. We shouldn’t expect people to listen simply because it is the word of God and it ought to be heard. Fosdick’s issue with the preaching of his day was not just its high view of Scripture but its high view of the listener’s interest. He entirely missed it on the first complaint but nailed the second. Preachers “take a passage from Scripture,” he wrote, “proceeding on the assumption that the people attending church that morning are deeply concerned about what the passage means.”2 Now, mature Christians should enter the church service with eager anticipation for God’s word. But in reality, mature Christians are not always eager and, what’s more, not all Christians are mature. Because preachers are expounding the words of God’s special revelation, our listeners should be fully engaged every Sunday—the word of God is glorious! But this is what we must show our people rather than simply expect from them. As Craig Loscalzo has put it, “To expect a hearing just because you are ‘the preacher’ is naïve.”3

Rather than assuming that the seats on Sunday morning are filled with people who are champing at the bit to hear God’s word, we would do well to think through how we might get them there. We have the opportunity to bring the attention of our congregations to God’s word. But we must seek to do this effectively. When listeners are disengaged, communication is not happening. We must earn their attention.

Communication scholar Lionel Crocker wrote about two kinds of attention: the kind that comes from effort and the kind that comes from interest.4 The university professor who motivates students to listen attentively takes advantage of the fact that the students will receive a grade for the course. This is attention via effort. They are, in a sense, forced to listen. But Crocker argues that the speaker should aim for attention via interest. This taps into a person’s natural mechanism for listening. If something is interesting, focus is easy and need not be forced. According to Crocker, “It is futile for the speaker to say ‘They ought to listen to this.’ ”5 The speaker should win attention by demonstrating that what is being communicated is inherently interesting. Now, for the preacher expounding Scripture it is true—what subject matter is more vital to anyone than what God has revealed in the Bible? But this is precisely what we must convince our congregations to believe and remind them of each time.

As preachers, we need to help our listeners understand that they are not at church to merely sit through a talk. And they aren’t to listen simply because it is the spiritual thing to do. They are here to receive a word from God and there is nothing more significant or relevant in the world. They may not understand this in the moment we begin to preach. But there is a way to win their attention via interest, focus it on a passage of Scripture, and sustain that engagement throughout the sermon. That’s what this book is about.

PREACHING THAT IS WORTHY OF ATTENTION

Before delving into the process of maintaining an audience’s attention, I must square away an important item: not every sermon is worth hearing. Many sermons are like meals from typical fast-food chains—flavor at the expense of nutrition. It’s easy, fast, cheap, and tastes addictively good. Your preaching may be drawing a lot of people, but are they being fed well? It’s easy to master the art of drawing an audience. If we give them something pleasantly palatable we can fill empty seats. But if we don’t supply nutritious meals it is the people that are left empty.

I believe sermons that actually nourish souls are sermons that explain what a portion of Scripture means. This is called expository preaching. It is simply “that preaching which takes for the point of a sermon the point of a particular passage of Scripture. That’s it.”6 In it, preachers begin with a text and look for the point rather than begin with a point and look for a text to support it. This means we do not begin our preparation with the end in mind. We begin with the text and we surrender the sermon to its dictates. But we must say more. Expository preachers do not only communicate the point of the text, but they stick to the passage throughout the entire sermon. Everything in the sermon serves to shed light on the passage and what it communicates. This is preaching in its most ideal form.

Preachers who abandon exposition do not always do so intentionally. They do not always begin with a desire to scrap what Scripture says. It may be a lack of wisdom or training. It may be a lack of experience (how many of us wish we could take back some of our earliest sermons!). But there are preachers who know better, and perhaps there are more in this category than we might care to admit. They have forsaken a conviction to say what the text says and instead embark on a weekly search for something “that’ll preach.” Many preachers who get it wrong still have a respect and even a level of reverence for Scripture—they believe it is God’s word. But they do not give it primacy in their preaching. This is because they begin by asking the wrong question.

It is wrongheaded to begin the sermon process by asking, “What do I want to say?” The question must be, “What does this Scripture passage say?” The expository preacher wants to find the intent of a particular passage in the Bible and preach that. This is not to say expositors should turn a blind eye to what people are feeling. Indeed, even the most anchored expositor must surely think of the listeners’ needs when deciding which text to preach or which book of the Bible to begin working through. It is good for the preacher to factor the particularities of any audience into the sermon planning process. This is why Paul’s sermon to the crowd in the Areopagus (Acts 17) showed a different approach than his sermon to his audience in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13). But being mindful of needs is altogether different than making those needs the starting point. The text, inspired by the Holy Spirit, must remain in the driver’s seat. Not the needs perceived by the audience.

Truthfully, even if preachers could determine what is really happening in the minds and hearts of the people before them, the needs would not be uniform across the audience. Each person will have their own thoughts, their own struggles, their own perspectives. To push it further still, we must not assume that the listeners themselves have an accurate perception as to what their needs really are. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). At the end of the day, preachers who begin with the felt needs of the audience are really basing their sermons on what they perceive the listeners perceive their needs to be. Would it not be better to begin with Scripture? To believe that the Lord alone is able to “search the heart and test the mind” (v. 10)? To trust that these God-breathed words can make anyone in any situation complete and equipped for every good work (2 Tim 3:16)?

I met a young man who had recently finished a degree in ministry at a renowned...