Preaching Better: Helpful Hacks

 

I have been listening to sermons by mostly Episcopal Clergy for over 52 years. I have also taught preaching at seminaries and in numerous workshops. And of course, I have preached many sermons. Often, I find some common mistakes we make that contribute to making listening to our sermons difficult for our members. Here are a few things that I have discovered, used, and recommend to our clergy who want to be more effective preachers of the word. 

Remember that sermons are oral communications. One comment that I often hear from our clergy is that they would never get into the pulpit without a manuscript in front of them. When I hear this, I say something like “that’s fine as long as you don’t read it to your congregation.” What is wrong with reading a sermon? 

The point here is that the rules of oral communication and the rules for written communications are different. The oral communicator has the advantage of eye contact, of allowing voice inflection to underscore a point, and of using body motions and expressions to communicate.  Written communications use a different set of assumptions. 

For example, writing allows for more precise language, and I often think that such preachers are communicating more with their seminary professors than with the folks in their pews. It also allows the reader to gaze back in the text to remember the thread of thought. This doesn’t work in oral communication. This is why many written sermons sound like essays. I recommend to such preachers who really prefer this method to consider adding printing out the sermon for their congregations or sending them out as emails. 

I once met a pastor from Korea that had a congregation of over 10,000 members. He told me that his sermons went out to his members the week before he preached them and then the small groups in his congregation discussed them after he preached them. Most of us Episcopal folks don’t have the discipline to do such work, but then we don’t have 10,000 members who pay us to primary preach. I should mention that was a Presbyterian and his sermons were longer than 20 minutes.  My point is that he used the written form to enhance his oral communication. If you use a text, try this to enhance your effectiveness. 

Why All This Matters.  To further drive home the importance of the difference in oral and written communications, I point out to manuscript preachers that just about the best compliment they will get goes, “Gee Father (or Mother) you preached that sermon just like you weren’t reading it!” Bishop John Coburn was the only Episcopal preacher I’ve heard that always used a manuscript but never seemed to read it. I asked him once about this. His response was telling. He said he would never be comfortable in a pulpit without a text, but then he added that of course he memorized the sermon before he preached it. 

I recommend Preaching Without Notes by Joseph Webb as a wonderful book to underscore this difference and to show ways that manuscript preachers can bridge toward more effective oral communication. For example, he reminds his students that if you have a story or narrative in your text, it is easy to look up and tell the story. Like any good story or joke, they have a beginning, middle, and ending. Often the ending has a unique twist to it. This draws people more into the communication process.  

In a recent Podcast on changing peoples’ minds, the speaker, also a writer, shared that research shows that narratives and stories are much more effective in opening people up to new things while rhetorical arguments tend to only reinforce people in their opinions and attitude as a natural internal resistance and pushback to what they are hearing. Have you won any political arguments lately? Probably not by arguing.  

One last thing on oral communications, most of Jesus’ sermons and teachings were narrative and stories. Well, who wants to preach like Jesus? 

And Illustrations Matter!  I have heard and read several teachers on preaching who tend to treat illustrations as “superficial.” This seems to suggest that illustrations are nice but more like fluff compared to didactic material. Contrary, I have found that our listeners often need an effective illustration to drive home the message and make it memorable. Good preachers I know keep files of illustrations to use at appropriate moments. They know that if you can’t illustrate it, it may not be as insightful as you think. 

But what do I mean by “effective illustrations?” First, I mean that an illustration should be directly related to the point you are illustrating. This takes time and thought which by the way is why I seldom write or create a sermon on Friday or Saturday. I prefer my study and first outline be done on Monday. Then I ferment and finally I edit and create the final outline. More on outlines in my next blog. 

Second, I greatly appreciated Bruce Thielemann’s insight that there are some illustrations that are particularly effective at speaking to our listeners’ cultural understandings. One example from historic American culture is what he calls “the myth of the wisdom of country folks verses the foolishness of city folks.” 

A guy from Houston gets in his sports car and takes a road trip to East Texas. He goes down a freeway, then turns on a county road, and finally follows a gravel road till he gets to a farmhouse where the farmer is sitting on his front porch. He spins his convertible to a stop and says to the farmer, “Hey old man, have you lived here all your life?” The farmer thinks for a moment and responds, “Not yet!” 

Such a story makes even city folks laugh at themselves. Thielmann lists five of these cultural examples that I’ve used often. It is worth reading his notes on preaching. He is my favorite preacher of all time. 

Let me close this first blog on preaching hacks with an insight that has helped me when it comes to illustrations.  I read an article back in the early 2000s about “younger” people. By this the author mean “people younger than 40.” I was 58 at the time. He wrote that the average American under 40 years of age have seen 98 movies for each book they had read. I tried this out on folks at the Cathedral. I stopped using books as a reference in sermons and started using movies whenever I could. This got immediate positive feedback especially from parents who told me that their children paid a lot more attention when I mentioned Star Trec or The Lord of the Rings. I noticed the parents did too. My rule is to never mention a book when a movie would work better for our listeners. And even if your congregations are bell-curve 65, even we watch movies. (For NCIS fans, I call this the Tony Principle. 😊) Everything you need to know to illustrate is found somewhere in a movie!

In my next blog, I will share how I transformed preaching that I learned in seminary into more effect oral communications.