Slow-Cooking Your Sermons

Kenton C. Anderson advocates crock-pot sermons in a microwave world. Some suggest that swift pace is essential to keep the listener’s attention. But Anderson, assistant professor of applied theology at Northwest Baptist College and Seminary in Langley, British Columbia, disagrees. Instead, he says, preaching is easier to digest when it’s slow-cooked.

Why preach a slow-paced sermon?

In the kitchen, time can be a useful ingredient for deepening a rich and full-bodied taste. You don’t want to rush things in the pulpit, either. Listeners often consume their sermons slowly, more slowly, at least, than preachers want to serve it.

The problem is the rate of delivery. We preachers take hours in preparation meditating on the text. By the time we’re ready to preach, we want to offer everything we’ve gathered. Yet while we have had the advantage of hours in the study, the listener has to process the whole thing in 30 minutes. It is just too much for many people. There often is an enormous difference between the speed at which a hearer processes words and the speed at which they understand and accept ideas.

Understanding takes time. Changing beliefs, attitudes, and paradigms takes time.

How do you offer the listeners time to digest without losing their attention?

The old adage is that less is more. My suggestion is that we offer more by attempting less. This is where Haddon Robinson’s “big idea” approach to preaching can be helpful. One good textual proposition is probably enough. The advantage of such a cutback is that it gives us opportunity to do a better job with the material that we have.

What might “a better job” sound like?

I recently preached from Ephesians 3. I might have been tempted to lay out a list of parallel propositions like, “God’s love is high, God’s love is wide, God’s love is long, and God’s love is deep.” I could have bolstered each point with detailed analysis and description. The commentaries are full of fodder for such an approach.

Instead I chose to describe Paul’s heart for the Christians in Ephesus. I described Paul’s concern that these new disciples would be strong enough to stand up against the contrary winds of contemporary culture.

Then, I invested time in struggling through the implications of the text: God’s love is not offered as a means of escape from cultural opposition. God’s love, rather, makes us strong enough to stand against the opposition of the culture. Paul talks about how God’s love helps us to be rooted and to be strong (vv. 15-19). God’s love is not solely a shelter, but a bulwark.

What’s the key to keeping the listener’s attention, even at a slower pace?

The preacher ought to take time to help the listener imagine the difference that the point could make in life. Paint pictures and create emotion. Describe tangible objectives that help the listener appreciate what an appropriate response might look like, smell like, taste like. In my Ephesians sermon, I helped my listeners visualize and experience what it would feel like to be so confident in the love of God that we did not have to be afraid of others.

In sum, preachers ought to slow down, not dumb down. Force feeding platefuls of propositions will only leave the listener with indigestion. We need to let the listener savor our sermons.

—This interview is from PreachingToday.com, our online journal and illustration service.