SERMONS FOR HEAD AND HEART - Christianity Today

Effective preaching feeds both the mind and the emotions.

Like most seminarians of my era, I was taught an essentially intellectual approach to preaching: analyze a passage and deliver the fruit of your study. I remember my professor of pastoral theology, a man whom I still hold in highest regard, telling us, “One should never use a personal illustration, because it can make the sermon too emotional and the minister too much a part of the sermon: ‘I, I, I.'”

For seven or eight years into my preaching ministry, I never used personal illustrations. But slowly I began to see that honest emotion is part of life, that the most powerful sermons always give people both something to think about and something to feel.

I’d been warned that appealing to the emotions would lead to manipulative preaching. But I found preaching that ignores emotion also has its dangers. If you do nothing in sermons but give information, if you don’t move people, they become Pharisees. They sit back and have all the facts, but they haven’t been touched where they hurt. And they can’t feel others’ hurt. They become people who, every time their child asks a difficult question, quote a Bible verse. Without sensitivity and compassion, that is not the answer. Being able to feel, to reach out and touch, is as important as knowing.

And, of course, preaching only impersonal “facts” does not rule out the danger of manipulation. Logic can also be used manipulatively. There are more than 230 forms of the syllogism. Only a few are valid; the rest are fallacies. An argument that sounds perfectly logical often leads to error.

The way material is organized can be manipulative. So can the way statistics are used. You know the old line: “Figures can’t lie, but liars can figure.” Even the choice of which Scripture texts to apply to the situation can be manipulative. When some Christians argue against governmental assistance for the homeless, I long to hear quotations from Jesus other than just “The poor you have with you always.”

Logic has also been used effectively to reinforce prejudices. I’ve heard speakers argue, logically, that blacks are more criminally inclined than whites because there are proportionately more of them in jail. It sounds like logic, but it’s manipulative and untrue.

I heard a TV evangelist preaching that America is a Christian nation. His logic: the Pilgrims came here to avoid religious persecution, and we put “In God We Trust” on our coins-points only superficially relevant to the issues. I was expecting him to say that, after all, the middle three letters of Jerusalem are USA.

So simply avoiding an appeal to the emotions does not guarantee integrity.

I obviously believe both good logic and honest emotion are necessary for effective preaching. It’s like the lesson from high school physics: impact equals weight times velocity. That is, the power of the sermon is affected by both solid content and emotional appeal. But since in my experience the emotional side has been the most neglected, let’s explore that element.

Twin Tracks for Sermon Preparation

There are no emotional schemata I follow, but I try, in every point I present, to make both a rational and an emotional appeal. I don’t tell myself, Now you need to put in an emotional plug here. But I try to make every point both logically and psychologically persuasive. I try not to leave any point without giving both some head-directed and heart-directed words.

If I don’t, it’s like watching an argument where one person is talking intellectually and the other is responding emotionally-no progress is made.

In a sense, I’m presenting an argument to the people-why they ought to do this or stop doing that-so I have to track on both levels because I don’t know on which level they’re tracking. Unless I address both levels, they’re possibly not going to hear me.

This double track begins well before I enter the pulpit. It affects my selection of theme and my approach to sermon preparation.

Need-Centered Preaching

One of my main considerations, right from the beginning, is the direction the sermon is going to take.

A young man once asked me, “What are you trying to do with your preaching? What’s your goal?” As I thought about it, I realized I have three goals:

1. To reconcile people to God. In my preaching, I want to provide the means with which the Holy Spirit can convict and regenerate.

2. To reconcile people to each other. If a man does not love his neighbor, he does not love God, no matter what he says. I also believe, in most instances, our witness to the world is more effective when we do it peacefully, beginning with the areas on which we are united. There are times when we have to go out with hammer and tongs. But I think, in general, we do better when we speak with the voice of passionate reason. Therefore a conspicuous goal in my preaching is to encourage peace and unity.

3. To reconcile people to their place in time and history. Most people, I’ve found, don’t feel they can adequately handle their environment, their situation. They may not express their deepest needs, but they know what brings them down. They certainly know what they fear. By speaking to these needs, by admitting these realities even within the Christian life, I find my sermons much more likely to feed people’s emotions.

I know, for instance, that most people feel lonely. Statistically, I recognize that when I stand up to speak, about 35 percent of the marriages are in trouble. Almost 40 percent of the people are on the edge of depression. Eight percent, if we’re to believe the statisticians, have confusion about their sexual orientation. Almost 50 percent are unhappy in their work. There’s a lot of hurt. I don’t care how affluent the environment, it’s there.

In Pittsburgh, our congregation includes people from mill workers all the way up to corporate vice-presidents who suddenly found themselves unemployed. We discovered, interestingly, that those who suffer the most emotionally are usually those higher up the line. The factory worker has friendships in the union and bowling league, and these continue even after he’s laid off. The vice-president, however, lives on a two-acre lot and doesn’t even know his neighbors. His friendships center around the country club, but he can’t maintain the dues without a job. What’s more, most people on higher levels avoid those who have been axed. It’s almost as if unemployment were a contagious disease, and they’re afraid they’ll catch it. So unemployed executives feel separated, and they collapse very quickly.

These needs are present throughout the congregation, and I try to speak to them. The overwhelming majority of my preaching is directed toward these feelings. I’m a need-centered preacher because needs are the door through which the gospel usually enters a person’s life. Remembering this helps my preaching feed both the head and the heart.

Address Specific People

Once I’ve identified at least one need that I’m going to address, I want to make sure it doesn’t remain simply an abstract concept.

One practice that has helped me is to set on the desk before me, when I begin my preparation, a card with the names of four or five people in the congregation who have this particular need. As I study, I try to hear the questions they would ask, to sense their responses, their thoughts, their emotions.

When preaching a theme related to the doctrine of assurance, I included the name of a person whose father, an elder in the church, died cursing God in his pain from cancer. I included the couple whose son was president of the youth group and had a beautiful faith, but who committed suicide. I didn’t want to talk about assurance unless it meant something to these people. They are the ones wrestling with the issue.

Thinking of specific people especially helps me in choosing illustrations. I believe illustrations are principally for motivation, only secondarily for explanation. So I usually don’t use an illustration just to clarify a point; the illustration must clarify the point and drive it home.

To choose illustrations that will do that, I have to be aware of the cultural ambiance of my people. Before I decide to use an illustration, I look at the names on my card and ask, Will this illustration motivate these particular people? Will it capture their emotions?

Give People Credit

There’s a danger in talking about people’s needs. They’re emotional issues anyway, and when we raise them in a sermon, we can often elicit the wrong kind of emotional response.

Most people have a low-grade guilt about their needs. Their attitude seems to be “If I were the person I should be, I wouldn’t have this need.”

As preachers, if we belittle the need or, just as bad, treat the need as a problem to be cleared up, we simply reinforce the tendency to feel shame and inferiority. I’ve heard preachers who didn’t help me with my needs, but they sure made me feel worse for having them.

In reality, of course, having needs is not a problem; it’s part of being human. Needs are an opportunity for the gospel to be accepted, lived, and practiced.

The way I try to touch the need without adding to the burden is by giving people credit-pointing out that almost every need is a result of something good and God-given. Negative emotions often stem from positive intentions. It’s a rare need that doesn’t have some dimension of goodness about it.

For instance, loneliness often means a person cares about people. If you don’t care, you’re never lonely.

Or when I preach on being afraid, I make sure to mention that fear can be a good thing-it’s the reason we look up and down the street before we step off the curb. There are proper fears. A quarantine sign is supposed to elicit a reasonable fear so people will be careful. Many times fear can have a salutary effect. Then I move on to talk about how God can help remove debilitating fears.

Or anger-I preached a sermon last Lent on “The Gripes of Wrath,” which pointed out that anger, righteous indignation, can be most proper. We have pushed the idea of tolerance to the place where nothing is intolerable any more, and that itself is an intolerable situation. I said, “The world needs more people who will get mad about things. We just need to channel our anger in the right direction.”

It’s important to affirm people as we address their needs, to start with the positive side of a need before we move to the elements that require repentance and change. This seems to unlock something, giving the sermon access to the emotions of our hearers.

It’s Okay to Be Liked

I strive to be liked.

There, I’ve said it, as heretical as it sounds.

As pastors we often don’t quite believe this radical idea: There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be liked.

In fact, to preach most effectively, being liked (or its cousin, being respected) is an important factor. In the study of rhetoric, the principle is called “the assumption of similitude.” It states that people assume they are similar to people they like, and if they see differences, they’ll bend themselves pretty far to be similar to people they like. That means, within limits, that if I want people to “follow me as I follow Christ,” it helps to be likable.

The principle also suggests that we tend to believe the people we like more than the people we don’t like. As long as this principle doesn’t lead us to deceit or making things sound rosy that aren’t, as long as we’re honest, part of ministry is striving to be liked.

Some pastors are naturally likable because of physical attractiveness or natural charm. Some of the rest of us have to work a little harder.

A funny thing happened recently after I had spoken to a gathering of pastors. During my talk, I made reference to my weight and how discouraging it is to be fat after trying desperately to lose weight. I mentioned I had lost 104 pounds, but I couldn’t keep it off. Now most of it is back on. At another point, I made a comic reference to being bald: “You can let the ravens of discouragement fly around you, but at least do not let them build a nest in your hair.”

Afterward a fellow told me he had relatives in Pittsburgh and he had visited our church over the years whenever he was in town. He mentioned the striking physical appearance of my predecessors at the church, and then he said, “I think it’s wonderful that First Presbyterian has chosen a minister who doesn’t look perfect.”

He wasn’t being critical, either of my predecessors or me. I’m sure he said it simply to affirm me. When you’ve been fat for fifty-three years, you get used to the comments, and I can talk about it without groaning internally. But this guy sought me out because he could identify with me.

“I’m glad you’ve shown us you don’t win all the battles,” he said. “To me that makes you more credible, since most of us don’t think of ourselves as winners either.”

The reason he liked me, emotionally, was not because of my strength, but because of my weakness. It’s true: I cannot stand up and talk about being victorious in everything with these pounds hanging in front of me. I’d be an obvious liar.

So for that reason I don’t hesitate to talk about my failures as well as my successes, and to make myself vulnerable to my people. When people can identify with you, they’re more likely to be touched not only on the thinking level, but on the feeling level.

Use Your Own Honest Emotion

Emotion must be handled with care. I never set out to elicit tears, but neither am I afraid of them, especially if the subject is something that genuinely moves me.

A few weeks ago, I preached on the text where up to half the kingdom was offered to Salome, and she says to her mother, “What shall I ask?” And a loving, wise mother could have said so many things that would have been good counsel. Instead, Herodia uses the girl’s opportunity to deal with her own hate: “Get the head of John the Baptist on a platter.”

I began by saying, “A lot of parents, when their children say, ‘What shall I ask?’ start pushing them into job categories or toward certain accomplishments instead of pointing them in truly wise directions.” The message was not intended to be an emotional thing. I had titled it, “A Letter to the Daughter of My Dreams.”

I’m unmarried. I have no children. But I was trying to say what I would say to a daughter if I had one. It began with my admission of feeling bereft because I’m not a father. I said, “When I was younger, I wanted to be married. And I still would like to be married. I feel a sense of incompleteness not to be-though I recognize that is heresy among many of my single friends. But, more recently, I have lamented not having children more than not having a wife. You know, there’s a certain immortality in children-bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh.”

The sermon was organized around the idea of pages. Page one was my first major point, page two was the second point, and so on. At the end I said, “My letter is altogether too long, but if I had time I would also want to mention these things,” and I briefly mentioned a number of very personal things.

Afterward I was out for dinner with friends in the congregation who told me that one woman, who has three daughters, was very moved. I did not see her. But as she left the church, one of the older ladies greeted her, noticed that her eyes were teary, and asked if she were okay.

“Yes,” she said, but nodded in my direction. “He does do that to you, doesn’t he?”

I have never consciously set out to make anyone cry, nor did I that time. I was saying those things because I thought they were important and they expressed my convictions.

A few times I’ve consciously set out to make someone angry, but that was bad judgment on my part, a lack of control.

But if we’re speaking the truth and people are listening to it, some of it is going to get inside, down among the heart strings. We have to be careful that we don’t start grabbing. Maybe we just touch them a little, so the soul plays the appropriate refrain.

The Essential Emotion

My desire is that, without being manipulated, people experience the sermon at the core of their being. And my goal in every sermon is to bring closure before people leave.

I don’t want people to leave until they have heard good news. I may have presented a serious and severe message, but I don’t want people to leave feeling they have to bear the burden alone. The mood with which we close the service is important.

Of course, we have other tools besides the sermon we can use. The final hymn can be used with great effect. At times, we’ll sing triumphantly, “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus.” Other times it will be a quiet “Abide With Me.” I try to design all the elements of the service-prayers, anthem, readings, sermon, hymns-so that when we come to the end, no one leaves more battered than they came. Challenged, yes. But not a belligerent challenge.

Even if they’ve been convicted of sin, I want them to feel good that there’s a gospel to respond to and a whole church body that’s here to help them do that. I’m not interested in them going out of here feeling beaten. If they do, there’s something wrong.

The closing emotion, the feeling I want people to walk away with, is a conviction that they are loved by God and loved by their pastor.

And to me, that’s as important as any doctrine they might learn.

Bruce Thielmann is pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Leadership Spring 1987 p. 58-63