The preacher was rhapsodizing over the grandeur of creation. Like many trained communicators, he employed illustrations to give his abstract ideas concrete form in the minds of the listeners.
He spoke in sets of three and began by drawing a mental picture of his first visit to the Grand Canyon. My mind began to roll a movie of our family vacation there two summers before. Indeed, it is a wonder of creation.
Then he reminded us of an airplane trip in which he was treated to the beauty of a sunset above the clouds, and I chased that sunset with him from east to west.
By then, I knew we were about to see another visual picture, and I checked out of his sermon. My thoughts turned to those in the congregation who find it difficult to draw mental pictures. What were they hearing? Were they experiencing the grandeur of creation, or had they begun to think about the Super Bowl game to be played that afternoon?
All Kinds of Learners
The very term illustration is a testament to the homiletical admonition to draw vivid word pictures that bring the audience into the story and give tangible features to abstract ideas. But recent research in psychology and education points out that not everybody carries a movie camera around in his or her head. Some people remember things best by replaying a mental tape recorder. And a third group gets in touch with its world by, yes, touch, taste, and smell-through bodily sensations and movement. In short, we preach to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic souls.
I was first introduced to this idea, called “neurolinguistic programming” (NLP), in a D.Min. class at Fuller Seminary. The professor explained the various ways people learn, and each of us tried to figure out which learning channel was predominant for us: Did we make mental pictures to remember a past experience? When recalling a conversation, did we remember accents and tones of voice, or did we picture the speaker? Did some bodily sensation kick into memory, such as the awareness of the person sitting beside us at the concert, or the warmth of the room or the sweaty palms the first time we spoke in preaching lab?
To our surprise and delight, we discovered our primary “representational system” matched our behavior in class. The visual learners took copious notes and drew charts and diagrams. The auditory learners placed tape recorders on their desks and listened to the tapes as they drove home.
One of the kinesthetic learners had amazed me for days. Rarely had he taken a note, but he contributed thoughtfully to the class discussion. While he had appeared not to be participating, he’d absorbed a great deal of material. He’d also completed a rather complicated needlepoint project! Obviously, his fingers were helping him learn.
Further reading in the area of neurolinguistics helped me understand my own family. My husband tries to put together Big Wheels or TV carts without looking at the directions. He isn’t interested in diagrams, but if I read the directions to him, the object gets assembled. Properly. As an auditory learner, he remembers names to the point of making me look like a dunce at the coffee fellowship.
When I discovered my younger son was primarily kinesthetic, I asked his school teachers to touch his shoulder while talking to him, to provide him with tactile reinforcement for the things he’s learning, and to allow him to walk around frequently (and quietly) between tasks.
When studying Greek in seminary, I found listening to vocabulary through headphones of minimal help once I had learned to pronounce the vowels. That type of listening wasted my time, but making charts and flashcards to stimulate my visual memory proved helpful.
The Sense-able Preacher
How can knowledge of NLP help a preacher craft a sermon that communicates with all three kinds of learners?
First, I’ve found it useful to become aware of my own primary representational system. To find out what yours is, pay attention to the verbs you use in normal conversation and preaching. Do you try to “focus” your congregation? Do you hear yourself say, “Picture this,” or “Look at it this way”?
Or do you help them “get in touch” with God? How about “grasping the idea”? In counseling, do you “hear” what someone is saying or do you “see” their point?
As we become aware of our words, we discover our vocabulary usually matches our typical way of sorting the input gathered from our world. A survey of my sermon barrel helped me pick out my predominant means: the visual. When preachers get a glimpse of their vocabulary, they can amplify their verbs and help listeners get a handle on the concepts they seek to convey-so to speak.
Once we become aware of our vocabulary and identify our own learning style, we can work to reach people from the other two styles by the examples we use in sermons and the vocabulary we employ.
For instance, if the preacher who wanted to impress his congregation with the grandeur of God’s creation had tried to reach all three learners with a single Grand Canyon illustration, he might have chosen his best visual illustration and added a description of the sound of the birds or the wind. He could have breathed deeply (as he probably did standing at the edge of that great precipice) or shared the fear of heights that grabbed at his stomach.
If he insisted on using three illustrations, he could have stayed with his picture of the Grand Canyon, but then added, as a second example for his auditory listeners, something about the roars of lions and the whistles of the great whales. His kinesthetic listeners would have been touched by an illustration of the first time he held his newborn son and felt the softness of his skin, the shape of his fuzzy head, and the contours of perfectly formed fingers and toes.
Not only would these added illustrations have added variety, but people would have had three different ways to remember the grandeur of God’s creation.
Maxed Metaphors
Metaphors help us preach effectively to listeners’ different learning styles. I like the simple definition of metaphor from high school English: a metaphor is one thing being spoken of as if it were another.
Our metaphors must pass several tests. They must (1) fit the context, (2) be a part of our listeners’ experience, (3) be easily identifiable, and (4) be compelling. A metaphor should reorient people’s thinking, even if just for a moment. A compelling metaphor can create expectation or puzzlement or surprise.
My parents attend a large church with several pastors who share the task of preaching. I’ve heard my parents comment about their favorite preachers, and as I read over these preachers’ printed sermons, I can see why some sermons are more memorable than others. Part of the power is in the metaphors.
Walt Gerber begins a sermon, “I have discovered a very ‘happy’ truth in our study of the Ten Commandments! Rather than being a ‘restrictor’ on the showerhead of life, God’s Ten Commandments open floodgates of joy and freedom to those who obey them.” Immediately I feel a rushing stream flowing across me.
Or take the first sentence of a sermon by Dan Chun: “What happens when Superman and Superwoman meet the kryptonite of loneliness and feel they can no longer fly?” Before Dan begins to put me into the life of John the Baptist, I visualize and feel a strong person becoming lonely or depressed.
A preacher from another setting, Elizabeth Achtemeier, helps me hear. In one sermon she spoke about the praise God’s creation gives the Creator, praise we have interrupted with “the still, sad song of humanity. Think what we have done to the song of praise our Old Testament lesson called for from the old men and children. The song of the old man is now the mumbling stupor of the resident of a nursing home-in pain, alone, forgotten, and drugged to keep him quiet until he dies. The song of the child has become the whimpering cry of millions of hungry infants in Cambodia and India and famine-ridden parts of Africa, or conversely it has become the scornful laugh of irresponsibility on the lips of the over-gratified youngster in America.”
The words of this sermon, preached more than ten years ago, have stuck with me. Why? I remembered it because she appealed to my senses.
Likewise, I remember a mission speaker who came to my church when I was in junior high. When he talked about the story of the Good Samaritan, I could smell the oil in the victim’s wounds, feel the jarring ride to the inn on the spindly-legged donkey, hear his labored breathing and the sound of clinking coins as they were given to the innkeeper.
At the time, I wasn’t conscious of how he had captured my attention. Now I know: he’d given flesh to the extended metaphor we know as a parable.
Much of the change we desire in listeners may come later as a metaphor sinks in. Those who heard Jesus describe his relationship to them as a vine and branches probably thought of that each time they passed a vineyard or ate grapes. They probably wondered if they were bearing fruit. Likewise, they’d think of him as they tasted bread, herded sheep, or searched for something they’d dropped.
It takes practice and energy to create metaphors, but because they stimulate all the senses, they make a deeper impact than a simple illustration or joke.
More than a Spoken Medium
Naturally, preaching remains primarily auditory. Does that mean that to engage the visual learners, we’d have to draw or show pictures, or act out a mime during the sermon?
To reach the kinesthetic learners, should we get them working on a project that reinforces the sermon? No, such techniques are more appropriate for the classroom.
So how do we work NLP insights into preaching? One way is to remind visual and kinesthetic learners of things they’ve seen and felt. That in itself makes preaching more effective.
In addition, I pay attention to the various sensations that compete for the attention of one sitting in a sanctuary. The visual effect of banners, stained glass windows, or body movements of the preacher can enhance the message or distract.
The perfume on the lady in the row ahead, the hardness of the pew, and the opportunity to stand and stretch during the hymns affect the kinesthetic’s memory of the sermon.
The auditory learner will remember the words of the preacher as well as the modulation of her voice, the buzz in the loudspeakers, and the sound of traffic outside.
Seeing myself preach on video tape helped me be more conscious of the many nonverbal ways I communicate with my congregation. I discovered I talked too fast, I had a distracting sway caused by bad foot placement, and I hardly smiled. I’m still working on smiling, but I’ve cut the sermon length so I won’t be tempted to talk so fast; and I don’t sway anymore.
To help keep my kinesthetic/visual audience attentive to my words, sometimes I’ll make a note in my manuscript to gesture appropriately. The cadence of a sentence or paragraph is affected by how I break the text on the page (even the rhythm of a sermon affects a kinesthetic listener). These tactics can make the sermon more pleasing to the ear and eye.
No one yet has come to me after a sermon and said, “I’m a visual learner, and you sure did help me see your point today.” But as I’ve become more careful of reaching all kinds of listeners, I have noticed that people drop me a note of appreciation or stop me in the parking lot later in the week to say, “At so-and-so’s house yesterday, we were talking about your sermon … ” This helps me know people remember and sift the message after the service.
That Sly John
The Word incarnate, Jesus Christ, is who we preach. John said it well at the beginning of his first epistle: “Something which has existed since the beginning, that we have heard, and we have seen with our own eyes; that we have watched and touched with our hands: the Word, who is life-this is our subject” (JB).
John must have known NLP. God gave to humankind a Word that could be experienced with all the senses.
Today we preachers can give our listeners the same opportunity to encounter the Word through all the senses we bring to our sermons.
Leadership Spring 1990 p. 112-7
Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
