All Things to All People

A sermon full of generalities hits no one in particular.
— Haddon Robinson

While Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts, was without a pastor for over a year, I preached there often. The church is remarkably diverse, having Harvard professors and high school dropouts, doctors and lawyers as well as house cleaners, political activists and those who don’t even read the newspaper, people with multimillion dollar investment portfolios and minimum-wage workers. In addition, members are of many races and colors.

I stood before such diversity each week amazed at the responsibility I had to reach them all. As I prepared my sermons, I stewed over how my sermon could reach the entire cross section.

As preachers, our task can be expressed simply: to become all things to all people. To actually do it is a formidable task.

Sobering Demands

When we fail to speak to the entire cross section in our churches, it is often because we act like the doctor who has only two answers; as long as a patient asks the right two questions, the doctor can help. Or we resemble the doctor who only knows how to set a broken arm: if a patient complains of a bellyache, the doctor breaks her arm so he can set it.

Reaching broader audiences makes sobering demands on us.

• Sacrifice what comes natural. When Paul said, “I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some” (1 Cor. 9:22), he wasn’t talking just about evangelism. He was also talking about helping converts grow. “To the weak,” to believers who had weak consciences, he became weak; he restricted his freedom for their sakes.

Speaking to a broader audience requires a sacrifice from us. We give up our freedom to use certain kinds of humor, to call minority groups by names that make sense to us, to illustrate only from books and movies we find interesting, to speak only to people with our education and level of Christian commitment. Sometimes such sacrifice feels constricting.

A pastor who objects strongly to the women’s movement, for example, might take a passing shot at its leaders and activities. By doing so, though, he risks needlessly alienating many women in the congregation.

Sacrificing what comes most naturally to us, though, is what gives us a platform to speak. Just as a legalistic Jew wouldn’t regard Paul as credible if Paul ignored the law, so many women, for example, won’t regard a preacher as credible if he shows zero sensitivity to their issues.

Why go to all this trouble? First, because it is right, and then because it is wise. Because the people we are most likely to offend are those on the edge, those cautiously considering the gospel or deeper commitment but who are skittish, easily chased away by one offensive move from pastors. Those already secure in the fold will probably stick by us in spite of our blunders. The new people we’re trying to reach are as easily spooked as wild turkeys.

A young couple moved into a Chicago suburb and attended one church for several months. The church helped them through the husband’s unemployment. Several times the pastor met with the man, who had advanced degrees in ecology and was interested in deeper involvement in the church.

Then he and his wife abruptly stopped coming. The pastor repeatedly tried to contact them, and finally after several months, he was able to take the man out for lunch. He asked him why they had not come to church in such a long time.

“In several of your sermons,” the man replied, “you made comments that belittled science. If that is the way you feel, I don’t think we’re on the same wavelength.”

The pastor remembered the remarks, which were either passing comments or rhetorical flourishes contrasting the power of Christ and the weakness of humankind. But the consequence was not passing: a man who showed promise of moving into deeper discipleship had been diverted.

• Reach people where they are. The Bible is nothing if not a casebook of how to bring truth to people where they are. In the Gospels we see that Christ never dealt with two people the same way. He told the curious Pharisee that he needed to be born again, the woman at the well that she needed living water. He brought good news to each individual, but he did so at the person’s point of contact.

The New Testament epistles differ from each other because they brought the same basic theology to bear on diverse problems. In 1 Corinthians Paul defended the doctrine of the Resurrection against those who doubted it; in 1 Thessalonians Paul brought that same truth to believers who were worried about what would happen to those who had already died in Christ.

From beginning to end, we see God adjusting the message to the audience without sacrificing the truth — same theology, different questions. Truth is never more powerfully experienced than when it speaks to someone’s personal situation.

Target-group Preaching

When we try not to exclude listeners, we are tempted to preach in generalities. For example, if I say, “Irritation bothers us all,” I’m speaking to no one in particular. A sermon full of generalities hits no one in particular.

We do better to focus specifically on two or three types of people in a message (changing who those two or three groups are each week). The surprising thing is that the more directed and personal a message, the more universal it becomes.

I might illustrate a sermon on conflict by saying, “You live with your roommate, and your roommate has some irritating habits — like not cleaning the dishes right after the meal. Or you’re married, and your husband comes home and plops himself in front of the tv without any regard for what your day has been like.” Although I don’t address the situations of many listeners directly, they can identify with these common experiences and the feelings they elicit.

A few times a year, I may preach an entire sermon to one particular group in the church.

“This morning I want to talk to young men or women in business, twenty-eight years of age, with your eyes on a long and successful career. Jesus is talking about someone like you in this text. I’m not talking this morning to the retired person. I’m looking at those on their way up the ladder.”

Or, “This morning I want to talk only to the teenagers. Some of you adults enjoy a short winter’s nap on Sunday morning anyway, but this morning I give you permission to do so. Today I want to talk to young people in junior and senior high. You are an important part of this church, and I’d appreciate it if you would listen.”

All the application in that sermon would be for young people, but only a rare adult would tune out. In fact, information overheard can be more influential than information received directly. When you come right out and tell the congregation you’re addressing a limited group, ironically, it galvanizes everyone’s interest. Specificity is far more effective than giving general principles and saying, “May the Holy Spirit help each of us to apply this to our lives.”

In order to anticipate in some measure what different members of an audience may be going through, I use a suggestion given to me by a good friend, Don Sunukjian. I prepare my sermons using a life-situation grid. Across the top of the grid, I label columns for men, women, singles, married, divorced, those living together. On the side of the grid, I have a row that includes categories for different age groups (youth, young adult, middle-age, elderly), professional groups (the unemployed, the self-employed, workers, and management), levels of faith (committed Christians, doubters, cynics, and atheists), the sick and the healthy, to name a few. I develop my grid based on the congregation and community I am preaching to.

After I’ve researched my text and developed my ideas, I wander around in the grid looking for two to four intersections where the message will be especially relevant. For instance, in one sermon on money, based on the parable of the shrewd branch manager in Luke 16, I went through my grid and thought of a widow in the congregation whose husband had been the president of a major corporation and had left her a large amount of money. She once had said to me, “What a curse it is to have a lot of money and take God seriously.” Since I knew others in the congregation had significant incomes, I thought specifically about how someone with more money than they know what to do with would hear and feel about this passage.

But hers wasn’t the only situation I was concerned with. A second intersection on the grid I explored was the working poor.

A third group of special concern was those visiting the church for the first time who would say afterward, “All pastors do is preach about money.”

For those with no discretionary funds, I talked about how Christ focuses on the attitude of our hearts, not on the amount we give. And for church visitors, I included some humor and spoke directly to the objection.

I regularly update my grid with new insights I gain about people.

For instance, after one service a woman told me how she and several other African-Americans had taken out an ad in the New York Times to explain their resentment of homosexual activists drawing on the black experience to describe their experience. “They identified themselves as a minority,” she told me. “We’re both minorities, but that’s the only thing we have in common. They don’t know what we’ve gone through. They don’t know the pain of being black.”

She helped me understand what a disadvantaged minority feels, and someday I’m sure I’ll include in a sermon how God can help those who feel the pain of being black in America.

How can we gain an appreciation for lives unlike our own, from cleaning ladies to investment bankers? The same way novelists do: by listening and observing. Pay attention to the people you counsel, the conversations around you in restaurants and stores, to characters in novels and movies, to common people interviewed on the news. Note how these people state their concerns, note their specific phrasing, their feelings, their issues. Get an ear for dialogue.

I know one pastor who holds a focus group each Thursday before he preaches. He eats lunch with several people from diverse backgrounds, tells them the ideas in his sermon, and asks them how they hear these ideas. They often raise issues that had never occurred to him.

In addition to applying a message broadly, I try to illustrate broadly. I am tempted to draw many of my illustrations from sports, which may not appeal to the majority of women (who, significantly, comprise more than half of most congregations). I intentionally try to include illustrations that women identify with, stories focused on relationships, drawn from the worlds of home and family or what they experience in the workplace.

As I watch tv I look for illustrations. My own tendency is to draw from what I read, but most people in a congregation do not read the materials I read. They live in a different sphere from mine, and I try to honor that in my sermons.

The Most Common Ground

Pastors preach each week to diverse congregations, but their listeners have a great deal in common. Every person in the pew has these desires:

— They want to meet God or run away from him.

— They want to learn something.

— They want to laugh.

— They want to feel significant.

— They want to be motivated, in a positive way, to do better.

— They want a pastor to understand their pain and the difficulty they have doing what’s right, without letting them off the hook.

One of the most important tools for addressing these universal concerns is through illustrations. People identify with people more than ideas. They gossip about people, not principles. Though they are grounded in specifics, good stories transcend individual experiences so that people from a variety of situations can gain something from them. When hearing a story, listeners tell the story to themselves, inserting their own experiences and images.

An older woman once said to me, “Sometimes the Christian life is like washing sheets.” She described how she washed sheets by hand in a large washing bucket, how she would push one part of the sheet under water and air bubbles would move to another part of the sheet and float that section above water.

“I push it down here, it comes up there,” she said. “I can never keep the whole sheet under water.”

As she described the scene, her story became my story. My mind jumped back a half century to my boyhood. I recalled my mother washing clothes in a tub and having the same problem.

Furthermore, in stories, listeners put themselves into the scene, becoming participants of the story.

I heard Gordon MacDonald, preaching about John the Baptist, tell this story: Several management types were at the River Jordan as the crowds came to John, and they decided they needed to get things organized. So they set up tables and begin to give tags to those coming for repentance. On the tag is written the person’s name and chief sin. Bob walks up to the table. The organizers write his name on the tag and then ask, “What’s your most awful sin, Bob?”

“I stole some money from my boss.”

The person at the table takes a marker and writes in bold letters, embezzler, and slaps it on Bob’s chest.

The next person comes forward. “Name?”

“Mary.”

“Mary, what’s your most awful sin?”

“I gossiped about some people. It wasn’t very much, but I didn’t like these people.”

The organizers write, Mary — slanderer, and slap it on her.

A man walks up to the table. “Name?”

“George.”

“George, what’s your most awful sin?”

“I’ve thought about how nice it would be to have my neighbor’s Corvette.”

George — coveter.

Another man approaches the table. “What’s your name?” he is asked.

“Gordon.”

“What’s your sin?”

“I’ve had an affair.”

The organizer writes, Gordon — adulterer, and slaps the sticker on his chest.

Soon Christ comes to be baptized. He walks down the line of those waiting to be baptized and asks them for their sin tags. One by one, he takes those tags off the people and sticks them on his own body. He goes to John, and as he is baptized, the river washes away the ink from each name tag he bears.

As Gordon told that story, everyone in the congregation mentally wrote their own sin and slapped it on their own chests.

To come up with images and stories, I sometimes write idea networks on a sheet of paper. If I’m talking about home, for example, I’ll write the word home in the center of a sheet of paper, circle the word, and then surround it with any associations that come to my mind: “home sweet home,” “welcome home,” “it’s good to have you home again,” “home on the range,” “going home for Christmas,” “stole home.”

These associations will in turn inspire other associations and memories, some personal, some cultural. What I’m doing is digging into the phrases and images our culture associates with home. Somewhere from that page I’ll come up with one or more images or stories with larger appeal.

On Their Side

I do everything I can to show people I respect them and I’m on their side. It’s another way I try to be all things to all people.

For instance, in my preaching I cultivate a conversational tone. Many people in our culture resent an authoritarian, lecturing manner. That style is what moderns mean when they use preaching in a pejorative sense (“Don’t preach at me!”). They consider it patronizing and narrow-minded.

I also show empathy. When I quote from Malachi, “God hates divorce,” I know there are divorced people sitting in the congregation who may begin to feel that God and Haddon Robinson hate them. So I’ll follow up that verse with, “Those of you who are divorced know that better than anyone. You understand why God hates divorce. Not because he hates divorced people but because of what divorce does to people. You have the scars. Your children have the scars. You can testify to what it does. God hates divorce because he loves you.”

I’ve found if listeners know you love and identify with them, they will let you say strong things. Most people are just asking that you be aware of them and not write them off.

I’m careful about terms. Even though you’re sure you don’t have a bias, a listener may think you do if your phrasing offends them.

I try to use gender-inclusive language. If I’m telling a story about a doctor, I might say, “A surgeon stands in the operating room. As she takes the scalpel in her hand.…” I intentionally use she over he in strategic spots to signal that I know women can be surgeons and lawyers and presidents.

I employ terms like spokesperson instead of spokesman. I say “he or she” instead of always saying he; or I use he sometimes and she other times. Such uses don’t have to be split fifty/fifty; even a few female pronouns in a sermon make a difference. Here’s a radical experiment: try using she all through a sermon except when you must use the masculine pronoun. You will get a sense of how much of our preaching has a male flavor.

I call minority groups what they want to be called. If someone’s name is Charles, and he doesn’t like being called Charlie or Chuck, I’m obligated to call him Charles. I used to say Negroes, then Blacks. I used the term Afro-American in a recent sermon, and afterward a woman kindly corrected me, “It’s African-American.”

Of course, no matter how hard we try, we’re still going to offend people.

Sometimes we need to apologize from the pulpit. “In last week’s sermon, my humor was in bad taste. I described overweight people with a term that was hurtful. I’m sorry. I sometimes say things I don’t mean, and you’re gracious enough to tell me about it. Bear with me.”

While preaching at Grace Chapel, I received at least a letter a week reacting to my sermons. When someone writes me, I always write back.

Some people send thoughtful letters, and I owe them a thoughtful response. Sometimes they’re dead right; they catch me in a prejudice. I have to admit that.

Sometimes you get letters in which people are vitriolic through no fault of yours. The best you can do is say, “Thank you for writing. I’m sorry I offended you. I wanted to communicate a great truth of Scripture and failed to get that across to you. I’m sorry.”

Hazardous Land Mines

If we focus too hard on not offending, or if we read too many letters from the offended, we can become paralyzed. We start qualifying every sentence. We end up with weasel sermons that are defensive, cautious, and spineless.

Yes, at Christmas we need to acknowledge that for some people it’s the most depressing time of the year, but we can’t let that rob the season’s joy from the congregation. Yes, on Mother’s Day childless women feel extra pain, and we can acknowledge that, but everyone has a mother to honor, and we shouldn’t squelch the church’s honoring of them. Although I’m aware of the land mines, I assume my listeners are usually forbearing and understanding. If I make a mistake, I can apologize. I’ve found the majority give a pastor the benefit of the doubt.

I try not to get uptight, defensive, or hostile in the pulpit, for that only provokes people to be more easily offended. Saying, “You shouldn’t be so sensitive,” or “I get so sick of all this politically correct language,” does no one — you or your people — any good.

And there are those times when a pastor must preach truth at the expense of some sensitivities, yet we must do so with a burden in our hearts, not chips on our shoulders. There is no greater courage required of pastors than to preach what may cost them their pulpits.

There will always be a healthy discomfort as we try to be all things to all people. It’s biblical, but it demands we walk a fine line. We want to be as appealing as possible but not at the cost of compromising the message. When we walk that line well, though, we experience something unequaled: a variety of people with a variety of concerns from a variety of settings all attentively listening to the good news.