Vision, policies, and plans are more or less useless unless they are known to all who may be concerned with them. Lord Montgomery, commander of the Eighth Army, made it a rule that the plan of the campaign should be made known to every soldier.
Preaching will forever remain at the core of the church’s program. Along with teaching, preaching is one of the chief sources of spiritual power. Any attempt to reduce its importance is, in my opinion, a dead-end street.
The message of preaching forever remains the same, but the form changes to successfully reach the hearers, just as the Bible itself has been retranslated in our time to great advantage. I was once given a framed page from the Geneva Bible of 1560—and I can’t read it. It is the Word of God, all right, but its form is such that modern people cannot easily understand it.
One of the most significant developments in the church today, as I see it, is that old-style “preaching” is going out, and “communication” is coming in. Those preachers who have adjusted to the change in people’s listening habits and interests are having no trouble drawing a crowd; they’re able to match the gospel with current needs. (Certain legendary preachers will not change, and do not need to change. They became who they are in another generation. But they cannot be imitated successfully today.)
How the Ears Have Changed
This need for change has been brought on by several concurrent happenings, one of which is our transformation into a society of television watchers.
TV has conditioned us to getting information quickly in short blasts, “capsules.” In the dramas, a whole life situation is developed and solved in thirty minutes or an hour. In the newscasts, world issues are given a couple minutes, and authorities are asked to sum up “in the thirty seconds we have left.”
So audiences expect quick analysis, direct answers. About the only place people listen to a lecture is at church, and they are less equipped, less willing, and less able to receive extensive information in this form. Preachers who want to communicate cannot completely ignore this.
Television is also an intimate medium. The camera zooms in close and makes things very personal. Viewers have learned to watch for subtle expressions rather than grand gestures.
That’s what got Frank Clements, the governor of Tennessee a generation ago, crossed up when he delivered the opening speech at a Democratic convention. People called him “cornpone” afterward. But H. V. Kaltenborn, then the dean of news reporting, who did not see Clements on television but heard him in the convention hall, said it was one of the greatest political speeches he had ever heard. On a platform or in an open field, all of his magnified gestures and raised voice would have been natural. But when the camera came bearing down on his face, it made him look corny.
In addition, television has tended to portray preachers as arm-waving Elmer Gantrys. Theatrical preaching is lampooned. When people see it used in church, no matter how sincere the preacher may be, they sense it is not completely believable. It doesn’t seem real to a generation accustomed to the poise of a network anchorman.
As I visit churches, I’m amazed how many preachers still shout, even with microphones available. I went to a church not long ago with no more than a hundred people, and the pastor was screaming. I said to myself, What is he saying that demands yelling? I took some of his points and repeated them to myself quietly—and they weren’t bad! He could have been so much more effective with that audience by saying things in a normal volume. But by habit, he didn’t think he was preaching until he had raised his voice, stomped the floor, and kicked the pulpit.
It is not only the media that have decreased the respect for “old-time preaching,” but also the changing moral environment of our society. There was a time when preachers, like doctors, were automatically respected. Today, people do not automatically say, “The preacher is right and I am wrong.” They do not see sin as bad and faith as good. No longer is the Bible the moral dictionary for most people. Right and wrong have become confused. Preachers are often seen as caricatures.
Some of the damage has been self-inflicted by preachers wanting to be thought of as “one of the boys.” It is comfortable but damaging for ministers to get up in the pulpit and talk, without restraint, about their weaknesses and doubts rather than their beliefs and hope. God has called preachers to a unique office, one that we dare not belittle.
Fulton Sheen once chastised those priests and nuns who wanted to be an “equal among equals.” He castigated them for giving up their power of “substitutionary grace.” While Protestants might not accept that theologically, they cannot avoid Paul’s willingness to say, “Follow me as I follow Christ.”
Another part of the modern depreciation has to do with the image the electronic church is creating. The cost of TV is so high that, of necessity, television preachers spend a great deal of time raising money. Therefore the unchurched tend to think preaching means money grubbing.
Malcolm Muggeridge once said television is not a good medium for spreading the gospel because it is essentially an entertainment medium. I think he is right. Newscasters recognize the entertainment factor—and so do most TV preachers. The ratings influence programming, which puts pressure on television preachers to be ever more dramatic and overly dynamic. This, too, tends to make people question their sincerity.
What we need today are preachers who can go onto a platform and be believable and persuasive—an example of God’s power. We are coming into a time when people will be most influenced by communicators, not by “preachers,” at least those who persist in the old form of three points and a poem delivered with a seminary brogue or an unnatural tone of voice.
Three Kinds of Communicators
The preachers and teachers I hear divide into three general categories: orators, speakers, and talkers. Effective communicators select the style that fits their personality and develop it into a consistently high skill.
• Orators. Few of these are left. Oratory demands the soul of a poet and the articulation of a great actor. Orators love ideas and design artistic phrases to properly attire them. They have the ability to present them dramatically without artificiality. Few individuals are noble enough by nature to be orators. There is something celestial about oratory. I wish I could do it, but I can’t.
I found that out in the middle of one of my first oratorical efforts. I suddenly stopped and told the audience, “Folks, I am not an orator, but I read a book on it, and I was so inspired that I tried it, and you’ve just seen me prove I can’t do it. Now if you’ll just let me talk to you, I promise never to try that again.” And I haven’t.
Unfortunately, I hear a great many preachers who were taught the basic skills of oratory, and from that egg has hatched an ugly gosling—an awkward, unreal caricature, owning all the disadvantages of oratory with few, if any, of the advantages.
Oratory, like grand opera, has a very limited audience and fewer capable performers. Or, to use another metaphor, oratory is a pocket watch in a wrist watch world.
I once met a young country preacher before a Sunday service. To my amazement, as soon as he walked into the pulpit, he changed his voice tone, tempo, and body actions. He delivered a badly beat-up oration that sounded like a poor impersonation of R. G. Lee. No one had told him how disastrous it is to imitate the unique. He would have been much better using his own style.
• Speakers. The speaker has a subject and an outline with understandable points, well illustrated, including some one-liners people can take home with them. The illustrations are from life, proving to the listeners that the speaker lives in the same world they do, faces the problems and sees the difficulties they see. They find answers they can use.
Speakers such as Chuck Swindoll, Dick Halverson, James Dobson, Howard Hendricks, and Charles Colson consistently rate high on religious radio surveys. These are the communicators most young preachers and teachers should emulate. It is not easy, however, because seminaries traditionally have not taught this style of communication.
• Talkers. A talker (and I’m one) is a lazy speaker—at least that’s what a great many people think. I, of course, would differ. To me, it is more difficult to be a talker than a speaker, for a speaker decides what he is going to say and sticks to it.
Talkers are more conversational, do not use a formal outline, and yet the good ones know exactly what they are trying to accomplish. They pause and talk to individuals in the audience. Everything seems extemporaneous, and the power of the style is that people do not see any art or structure. Therefore they are not distracted from the message itself.
Most often, good talkers carry two or three messages in their mind and adjust as their radar senses what the audience is receiving and understanding. Using fewer dynamics and dramatics, the talker doesn’t develop the verbal momentum the speaker or orator does.
For example, Arthur Godfrey was a talker. He was believable, informal, personal—the kind of person you would like as a friend. Will Rogers was a talker. Hugh Downs and David Hartman also have the talker’s personality.
Although there are differences in style between talkers, speakers, and orators, the dedication and necessary degree of preparation is the same. Only the kind of preparation is different.
For anyone who decides to be an orator—and I’m not saying you should not, even after pointing out the difficulties and the lack of general interest—I must admit I cannot offer much help. I only warn: you had better be great, or you will be terrible.
On the other hand, for those wanting to be a speaker or talker, here’s a format that has been helpful to me.
1. Select a strong single idea.
2. Give it a handle, a one-liner, so people can carry it home.
3. Illustrate it so they will remember it and apply it to themselves.
4. If necessary, extrapolate from the idea to the principle. (Too much extrapolation, however, becomes condescension. If you have a good idea with a good handle and illustration, most people will get the principle.)
For instance, here are the elements of a talk I gave last week:
The idea: Live today so as to make tomorrow better.
The one-line handle: “Don’t make a junkyard of your old age.“
The illustration: A young man who walks out on his family is giving up his children and his grandchildren in his old age. He is giving up memories of life shared. He’s taking on the guilt of irresponsibility.
I spelled these out in some detail. I didn’t need to extrapolate: “Are you ever tempted to live for the moment … to make a junkyard out of your old age? Do you ever feel like taking your savings and blowing it all on one good time? Are you ever tempted to get into dope or escape into alcohol? These are the ways we make junkyards out of our old age.” None of this was necessary; the handle and illustration had done the work.
Addressing People, Not a Subject
Whether speakers or talkers, we must think of what our listeners need to hear, not what we need to say. Our material should not be an expression of egotism, our “much learning,” or the things people have complimented. Our content should grow out of a careful analysis of the needs of the listeners. I try to remind myself I’m speaking to people, not to a subject.
That may sound purely semantic. But many preachers are authorities on a subject without being authorities on the audience. They feel they have communicated whether the listeners got anything or not.
During World War II, when we needed to train technical people very quickly, we had a program called Training Within Industry (TWI). One of the basic tenets was “The teacher hasn’t taught until the student has learned.” If an applicant for a welding job went through TWI and came out unable to weld, we didn’t blame the student; we blamed the teacher.
As communicators, if people don’t get what we say, it’s our fault, not theirs. Our job is to influence the thinking and actions of the people who hear us. I am not relieved of my responsibility just by enunciating syllables to show my knowledge of the Word. I have succeeded only when they understand and apply the scriptural principles.
I used to do some professional speaking with Norman Vincent Peale at chambers of commerce and other civic meetings. I asked him one time, “How do you decide what to speak on?”
He said, “On Friday I ask myself, ‘What is the most common problem I’ve run into this week?’ That helps me to decide.” He was talking to people, not to subjects. No wonder he’s been so popular throughout his long career.
A misconception has gotten into a lot of preachers, based perhaps on something Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” That’s just one of the foolish things out of Emerson’s mouth. It’s basically Eastern philosophy—the guru out on a mountaintop, and people trudging out to hear him.
A lot of empty churches have proven Emerson was wrong. Even Jesus said, “Go into all the world.” He didn’t say, “Sit here, and the world will come to you.” One of our problems, I think, is that we have built a fishpond (the baptistery) and then invited the fish to come in and swim. It has not been the nature of fish to do that. We will have a lot more success if we go out to the lake, their natural habitat.
I used to get up at five in the morning and go to Lake Barkley in western Kentucky to listen to the fishermen. I like to be among enthusiastic people, even if they’re doing something I think is strange. Here were perfectly intelligent people getting up at four in the morning to be at the lake by five. Why? Because that’s when the fishing was the best. They were even buying night crawlers and red worms. Why? Because that’s what fish like to eat.
I doubt if fish would really go for steak. But I see Christians all the time trying to use bait they like. We have to ask, “What will the unbelievers be attracted to?” We don’t prostitute the gospel, but we change its form to make it attractive.
If the class I substitute-teach were suddenly to drop from seven hundred to one hundred, I would not feel righteous for giving them “the pure Word” and blame them for not listening. I would say, “I have apparently lost contact with these people and their problems.”
A singles group asked me to do a retreat: five lectures of two hours each, followed by discussion. I got there and realized what I had prepared was not the most useful thing for them. I didn’t deliver a single one of those lectures.
Instead, we had a tremendous amount of dialogue. Then I’d go back to my room and stay up half the night synthesizing what we’d talked about so I could bring it back in a cogent form the next session. I left there wobbling on my feet because I hadn’t had any sleep. But I got a lot of reaction from those people saying, “This was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.” I was dealing with their problems, taking what knowledge I have of scriptural principles and applying it to their current needs.
One woman at that retreat, a successful interior decorator, wrote me later: “I delayed writing you because I had decided at our session to do three things. I wanted to be sure I had done them before I told you.”
Nothing pleases me more than that.
Principles, Not Prooftexts
Sometimes we get superstitious about Bible words, as if they had special power. That’s why some of us were slow to change from the King James Version. If we gave up that particular combination of words, what might happen?
The principles are immutable. They are the way God runs this world. As long as we don’t violate the principles but make them applicable to people in a form they can understand and put into practice, we are communicating God’s truth.
Not long ago, I was speaking to a business group on “how a Christian takes loss.” By eight o’clock the next morning, the president of a company was in my office asking how I would like to lose several million dollars, file for bankruptcy, and have to move my wife out of our home.
I assured him that was not a high set of items on my priority list. I asked if that was his situation.
“Yes,” he said. “I heard you talk about loss, and I want to talk about mine.”
It would have been easy to escape my responsibility by giving him a few verses of Scripture, offer to put him on my prayer list, then slap him on the back and walk him to the elevator. That would also have been hypocrisy.
I spent an hour and a half with him, going through his options. We discovered some he had forgotten. A major loss casts a shadow over us, and often at these times, we need someone else to help us plan a way through the confusion.
Finally I said, “Don’t interpret this loss as the judgment of God, because he’s not as interested in your success as your maturity.”
Now I could have backed all this up with verses of Scripture, but that wasn’t what he needed. He needed the principles of Scripture, and he needed someone to help him apply them. I don’t feel I have a right to speak to people about solutions that I’m not willing to help them apply.
Making the Message Clear
The great communicators are great illustrators. I realize some preachers are sensitive about storytelling. Once at a ministers’ meeting, I was urging the move from old-time preaching to communication, and a young man came up afterward and said, “I would like to be more effective—but I’ve listened to those famous communicators you named, and all they do is tell stories.”
I replied, “Isn’t that what Jesus did?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, rather reluctantly.
Jesus illustrated mainly from current happenings. He didn’t tell a lot of Bible stories—which comes as a great surprise to many people. His illustrations became Bible stories after he told them.
We don’t need to limit ourselves to his stories to convey the truth. We need to take the truth he conveyed and put it into believable, current illustrations.
The Sunday morning class I frequently guest-teach has a lot of sophisticated, highly successful Dallas people. Not long after the Southern Baptist Convention had been in town, I told them the story of a large Christian meeting that was held downtown at the Hilton. The chairman came out of his room a little bit late to get the program started. He discovered a guy had been mugged in the hall, and he stood there a minute trying to decide whether to stop and help, which would mean delaying the convention, or … he finally concluded his platform responsibility was primary, so he rushed ahead.
Out of a room on the other side of the hall came one of the official messengers, anxious to get downstairs for the opening. He saw the guy who had been mugged, but since he was representing a large church, he really needed to be at the meeting.
Then along came a nonbeliever who took the guy to the hospital. He told the hotel manager that in a few days, this fellow would be better and would be checking back into the hotel. He would leave his American Express charge open so that if the fellow didn’t have adequate credit, they could just add the expenses to his account.
Now obviously, that was nothing but the Good Samaritan story. I went on from there to say, “The question of this story is not ‘What occupation do I have?’ It doesn’t mean you’re supposed to go patrol the halls of downtown hotels looking for people who’ve been mugged.
“What this story is about is defining who is a neighbor. A neighbor is anyone who provides you and me an opportunity to do good.”
Such stories, I realize, are not looked upon with favor in some preaching circles. Some Christians feel the “offense of the Cross” means we don’t try to make the gospel attractive or interesting. I disagree.
My responsibility as a communicator is to get as many people to hear as much of the gospel as I possibly can. It isn’t my responsibility to run people away. I could do that by just not having the meeting.
Being Sincere and Personal
Two of the most important traits of a communicator are sincerity and the ability to establish a one-to-one atmosphere quickly.
One of my friends, who has developed persuasion into an art, told me, “The most important thing in selling is to be sincere. The other person must believe you believe what you’re saying, even though he may not believe what you’re saying.”
Sincerity goes all the way from dress and manners to preparation and presentation. Audiences can read a speaker’s integrity. Sometimes in front of a crowd, I will change my material just to be sure I don’t say anything I don’t feel. If I were scheduled to do an inspirational talk and I didn’t feel inspired, I wouldn’t get up and prove it. I would change my attitude or my material.
Closely related to sincerity is learning to go one-to-one with the audience as quickly as possible. I do not want to be a speaker and them a mass audience. I want us to be friends.
John Stein, the great impresario, told me the common denominator of successful platform personalities is that people quickly feel they are persons, not performers. I notice how quickly Billy Graham does this even in a large stadium. He will say something like “You are not here by accident. You are here by the will of God.” Immediately he is one-to-one with them. They are no longer anonymous.
I’ve never heard worse advice than to tell a speaker to look a foot above the audience’s heads. That’s fine—if you’re speaking to the wall. Your words will bounce right back to you.
Using Your Radar
Radar is the ability to discern what’s really happening in an audience through their unintended cues—the noise level, the changing expressions, the movement of heads in agreement or disagreement.
If you have no radar, then you must decide what topic you want to treat, write down your remarks, deliver them, and hope for the best. I assure you, communicators do more than this.
You want to start using your radar before you get up to speak. I often start by arriving early, before the crowd does, so I can watch them choose their seats. If people fill up the back, they’re expecting a sermon. If they sit up front, they’re expecting a show. At church the cheap seats are up front; at a theater they’re in the back. That’s just human nature: If something’s going to be “good for you,” you get as far away as you can. If it’s going to be entertaining, you get as close as you can. It helps me to know what the audience is anticipating.
I also like to listen to the noise level of a group before they’re seated. A group of accountants makes very little noise. A group of salesmen makes a lot. You also can tell whether the group enjoys one another—are they homogeneous as they move around, or are they in little groups?
I spoke at a large deacons’ meeting not long ago where before the meeting, the older deacons were all standing around talking to each other, with the young deacons standing “afar off.” I asked one of the older men, “Do you know the younger deacons?”
He said, “No, and I’m not going to try to know them.”
That was important information for me as I spoke!
Another important clue is what people laugh at and the quality of their laughter. A psychiatrist and I sat together during one speech, and suddenly he nudged me and said, “Listen to the hollow laughter.” People were laughing courteously, the way kids laugh (or even groan) at puns.
It pays to watch who laughs. Not everyone does. If you get only the old-timers to laugh, you’d better find something pretty soon to give the younger people before you lose them. One of the most wonderful preachers I know has lost all appeal to young people, and his audience is getting older and older. He’s going to have a real problem soon, because the old-timers won’t be around long. It’s young people who fill the nursery.
Beyond laughter, I watch for any point that gets a reaction. Women generally react more openly than men. But if you start compromising yourself just for reaction, doing the sentimental things that many women react to, the men will soon turn you off, and you’ll be talking to the Women’s Missionary Society. So if you do something sentimental, remember to do something a little tougher, too. Everybody should leave the meeting having gotten at least one thing. If they don’t, they will question whether they ought to come back. They may come back for ritualistic purposes, but they won’t listen when they do.
While reading noises and movements, of course, you can’t be bothered by one or two deadpan people. Some deadpans are listening intently. One of the worst mistakes I ever made while giving a talk was to let one person irritate me. I got to talking to that one person and forgot the audience. Even if one person goes to sleep, that’s not bad. (Now if they’re sleeping all over the audience, that’s another story.)
I like to watch people who take notes and see if they’re taking notes at the right places. You see a lot of people who don’t know how; they’re writing down the wrong thing, and you want to stop and say, “Hey buddy, you missed the real point!” (Of course, then he might say, “I wasn’t listening; I was doing my income tax.”)
How is it possible to use your “radar” and still keep your actual words coming out straight? It’s like learning to drive a car. The first time you sit behind the wheel, you’re overwhelmed with instructions: Stay in the lane, don’t ride the clutch, remember your turn signals, don’t jam the brakes all at once.… But before long, you drive with all the ease in the world—and you read the highway signs to boot. It has become second nature.
The mind is capable of doing fantastic things once we get interested in developing it. A speaker ought always to be reaching out, increasing sensitivity, awareness, calculation powers. There isn’t anything like hard work to make a good speaker. When I speak, it’s nothing for me to spend forty to fifty hours on one address. The audience has no idea; when it looks effortless, they think it’s extemporaneous.
Jackie Robinson playing second base had a marvelous ability to relax. You’d think he was asleep, but when the ball came his way, or he was running the bases, you found out differently. Art should always appear effortless. But it takes effort to appear effortless.
How to Use Humor
Humor should be used to sharpen the truth, not to dull it. Humor should never help people escape from a truth; it’s easy to let people off the hook.
How can humor dull the truth? Here’s an example: “Yes, we’re all sinners—but how else could we enjoy life?” That remark would be buying a cheap laugh at the cost of an important point. The crowd would laugh—but there’s an old saying, “While the audience laughed, the angels cried.” That’s one of my tests of appropriate humor: Do the angels laugh too?
I’m not a very good joke teller. Instead, I use situational humor. Jokes make you a comedian; situational humor makes you a Will Rogers. He had the ability to use humor to set up points. He did not dull them. I prefer to have the doctor lubricate the needle before he sticks me. That’s what humor can do: lubricate the needle.
Good humor ought to be like good spice, permeating the whole. I object to a speaker who uses humor only at the opening of a talk. When I speak, I’m never more serious than when I’m humorous, because I am firmly convinced I can say almost anything with humor if I work at it.
It’s true that some people have a greater gift for humor. But nothing is more attractive to an audience than somebody who has the humility of humor. A wealthy young businessman who’s developing a national reputation asked me about public speaking, and I said, “Tell stories.”
He said, “My ego wouldn’t let me.”
That’s what keeps a lot of people from using humor. They want to seem heavy, profound. Others view humor as a high-risk venture; what if the punch line bombs? That, incidentally, is why I practice any major piece of humor on several friends before I ever use it in public.
For example, I said to my rather affluent class the other Sunday, “I’m very depressed today.…” (Normally I’m not depressed, and they know it. I also don’t believe in using an audience for my own therapeutic purposes. I’m there for them; they’re not there for me. So I wasn’t complaining.)
“I guess the reason I’m depressed is that Mary Alice and I just got back from two weeks in a very posh Colorado resort. And I realized I was the only one there with a green American Express card.
“Do you know how embarrassing that is? All my friends had gold or platinum. It was just so hard to feel good about yourself. I mean, how are you going to impress a waiter with a green card? When it came time to pay the bill, I found myself hiding my card with my napkin.…”
While I built up the spoof, they were laughing, but they were also thinking: That’s one of my problems, isn’t it? I could have stood up and preached against materialism and comparing ourselves with our neighbors, but they wouldn’t really have heard me. Humor made the point much better.
But I had to practice that parody on several friends in private conversation, to see how they responded, before I ever used it on an audience.
The Power of the Parenthesis
There’s more effect than most people think in “the power of the parenthesis.” People tend to believe parenthetical remarks because they seem extemporaneous.
That’s why I never say to an audience, “Last night when I was talking on this subject.…” That makes the listeners feel they’re getting something warmed over. They start listening to my words as a speech, not a communication.
Instead, tremendous results can come from inserting things that seem off the subject but really aren’t.
For example, before one crowd I said, almost as an aside, “I came home tired the other night, ate dinner, sat down, went to sleep, and woke up just feeling terrible. It was one of those nights when I would have had two big belters if I were a drinking man. But I guess I’m old enough to know drinking just causes problems—it doesn’t solve them.”
I dropped that remark because one of the big problems in that group is social drinking. They’re under constant pressure at parties. Some of them may just be waiting for a rationale to refrain. (I remember talking to an executive who drank because everybody else did. When he asked me why I didn’t, I said, “Because I have a right not to drink.” He had never thought of it as a right, and he stopped drinking as a result.)
These asides can be more effective than making a full-blown point. The truth seems unthreatening, it catches people off guard, and I’ve found that for some strange reason, they remember it longer.
This is why I could never read a speech. I might as well send it in the mail. I’d lose the personal feedback, the eye contact, the body language, and especially the opportunity to throw in parentheses.
We do these things in conversation all the time. You may be talking to someone about a business matter, and you say, “That reminds me of something that happened at our house the other night.” It’s a little psychological break, a breather. The mind can handle this as well as keep track of the main subject.
In fact, the main subject often proceeds better after that, because you’re relaxed. Sometimes I even say, “Excuse me for that little diversion.” But I sense people appreciate the diversion if it makes sense.
The Joyful Debt
I still get as excited about preparing a speech as I did years ago. I’m not as excited about giving it these days, because I’ve spoken so much.
I have a little saying by which I test myself occasionally: “You’re not ready to speak for God until, after preparing, you’d rather have somebody else speak.”
One of my friends said, “That lets me out.” I know the feeling, but I stand by my test.
When a pastor says, “I don’t mind standing up in front of people; preparation is what kills me,” I suspect he’s not a communicator as much as he is an exhibitionist.
When you realize every person in the audience is giving you thirty to sixty minutes of their lives, the numbers get pretty big. I’m humbled at the number of human hours I’m responsible for. I owe them something. Even small crowds deserve my best.
I hate to admit this, but it’s true: Most audiences are not expecting much. They haven’t gotten much in the past, and they’re not anxious for you to start talking. You may be nervous, but they’re not.
If you give them something a little exciting, new or helpful, they will appreciate it. They got more than they expected. And they’ll probably be back to hear you next time.
Copyright © 1986 by Christianity Today
