As the nineteenth-century German theologian Tholuck said, “A sermon ought to have heaven for its father and the earth for its mother.” But if such sermons are to be born, heaven and earth have to meet in the preacher.
John R. W. Stott
Billy Graham preaching in an elevator would be a little overwhelming, but Fred Rogers of “Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood” teaching in the Los Angeles Coliseum might tend to underwhelm. The number of listeners determines much about the style of preaching. What flies with one group flops with another.
How you convince a handful differs from how you sway a crowd. Even the optimum content for a sermon will vary with the size of the congregation. Some subjects work best in the give-and-take of a group; others shine in mass meetings. Certain techniques lend themselves to a midsized crowd; others to an intimate setting. Skillful preachers select their subjects and techniques with an eye to the audience.
This is the subject William Kruidenier explores in the following chapter. Kruidenier is pastor of Emmanuel Christian Fellowship in Atlanta, Georgia. His analysis helps put dimensions on an often-perplexing question: Why do some sermons work better than others?
And, even better, he offers suggestions for designing sermons suitable for the various occasions.
On any given Sunday, whenever a sermon seems to fall short of what we’d hoped for (realistically or otherwise), we quickly look for a reason. Our notes (or manuscript) were flawed. We didn’t deliver the message powerfully enough. We didn’t get enough sleep the night before. The sanctuary was too hot. Or too cool. People just aren’t as hungry for spiritual growth as they should be.…
I think there is another explanation, perhaps more common than many of the above. It has to do with the match-up between the message and the group.
One helpful insight of the past decade is that not all groupings in a church are the same. Thinkers in the area of church growth have pointed out that when you gather the saints on Sunday morning, you have a celebration. In medium- and large-size churches, the individuals don’t all know each other personally, but that is not the focus; they are rather caught up in worshiping God.
Break into groups of anywhere from twenty to a hundred, and you have a congregation — people who know one another and view themselves as a special band (e.g., a choir, a “minichurch,” a permanent Sunday school class). The fellowship is lively, the relationships mainly horizontal. (Smaller churches maintain this closeness even on Sunday morning, which, in fact, is one of their assets.)
To take a quantum leap in intimacy, however, limit the numbers to ten and call for serious commitment and accountability. This is the cell.
A fourth kind of group is the class, where people gather not primarily to worship, fellowship, or grow personally, but to learn a new skill or body of information. An elective course on evangelism or the Pentateuch is a good example. The focus is on the content, and any worship or fellowship is a by-product.
Most of us are familiar with this. But only recently, as I’ve been immersed in the challenge of starting a new church and thinking through its formative structures, have I faced what all this means for homiletics.
Making the Good Match
Each kind of group has its own dynamics. What works in one setting will not necessarily succeed in another. But all too often, I have failed to match my proclamation with the dynamic of my particular audience. I’ve just stood up and done the single specialty I was taught in seminary: expository preaching.
What happens when parishioners hear expositions of Galatians on Sunday morning, 2 Timothy on Sunday night, and something from the Old Testament midweek, all in the same basic style?
They rarely sense that the pastor’s message is for now — for this group, this moment in time. They go home with a vague feeling of If you’ve heard one sermon, you’ve heard’em all. So why go to another service for more of the same?
Here is another problem. Suppose in the worship (celebration) service, I come to a text that mentions the training of children. From the pulpit I go into detail on techniques of child discipline; I even venture some comments about spanking. Many young parents who are listening appreciate the information — but go away frustrated because they weren’t able to raise their hands and ask follow-up questions. Meanwhile, the nonparents present (middle and older adults, singles) gaze out the window.
Certain types of scriptural truth raise certain needs in an audience that can be met only in certain group settings. That is why I have come to adopt the following guidelines:
Texts Appropriate for the Setting
Before opening the Bible, first ask, “What is the focus of this group?” If celebration, it is God. If congregation, it is social fellowship and kinship in Christ. If cell, it is personal growth and accountability. If class, it is skill or information.
Next question: What portions of Scripture originally spoke to these kinds of needs? Some obvious examples:
The Psalms, Romans 9, parts of the Major Prophets, and others lifted the attention of the original readers to the transcendence of God. Thus they make excellent choices to be expounded in celebration or worship services.
In contrast, much of the Pauline corpus dealt with problems in the Christian community. Proverbs and many of the Minor Prophets also speak to community issues. These can be used to promote the same results in a congregation-sized group today.
For the cell, where personal religion is the focus, books such as James, Proverbs, and the life of Christ from the Gospels are highly appropriate. They concentrate on personally living out the faith. They convict us; they promote self-analysis and confession.
The class works best when a task attitude is established: “We’re going to survey Romans,” or “Let’s learn the best way to do a word study in personal Bible investigation.” This is not a license for boring teaching. But it does allow us to speak more technically, less personally than in the other three groups.
Truths Appropriate to the Group
This is not entirely in line with my seminary homiletics classes, which urged me to discover at all costs the main thought of any passage of Scripture (in the mind of the original writer) and then convey that same thought to my listeners. While I was always encouraged to know and read my audiences, I was not taught very effectively how to apply the Scriptures on the basis of what the group dynamic would allow.
Some truths from a passage will connect with a particular group like lightning hitting a radio tower, while others barely sputter over the front edge of the podium. The preacher’s task is to select those that will strike hard and fast.
If I am working through the Book of Romans and come to chapter 8, verses 26-30 (“The Spirit helps us in our weakness.… We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.…” etc.), I can emphasize different aspects depending on the group.
Celebration: the sovereignty of God over his creation
Congregation: a lighter, less theological, more humorous treatment, full of instances from my life and others’ of how God’s sovereignty has worked itself out in daily and family living; a “hang-in-there” message
Cell: a hard look at my personal attitudes and actions when the situation demands that I depend on God’s sovereignty; counsel, exhortation, confession, forgiveness, a time of building and healing
Class: here I tackle the thorny subject of predestination from the perspectives of biblical, systematic, and historical theology.
Planning the Appropriate Response
Just as each of the four groupings has a different focus, each is different when it comes to response. The preacher does well to think this through ahead of time.
In the celebration event, my chief end is to bring individuals (both Christians and non-Christians) into contact with a transcendent, personal God. That means they need an opportunity to respond to him in repentance and faith. If I do not provide that before the end of the meeting, it is incomplete.
So there must be ways for non-Christians to meet Christ as Savior and Lord. There must be ways for Christians to repent of waywardness. Some of the methods to accommodate these are invitations, staffed prayer or counseling rooms available at the close, and allowance for individual responses such as hands raised in prayer or praise. These all show that we have not forgotten the goal of a celebration service: to bring men and women into contact with God.
My presentation in such a service is necessarily a lecture (one speaking to many without dialogue). In a congregationsized group, however, this should never be true. In a true congregation, the people know each other well and have developed the social skills of communicating with one another. This greatly aids the learning process if we take advantage of it. Therefore, we structure to allow discussion, dialogue, and even disagreement, so the body of Christ can hammer out the application of the Word to their lives together.
A well-designed congregation group, over the long run, is probably the most effective evangelism agent among the four types. It lets non-Christians hear and observe a loving community of Christians dialoguing together about Christ and their relationships to him. After the meetings, social interaction over refreshments or a meal lets the Word continue to be a stimulus for discussion.
The structure of a cell meeting must be the most flexible of all, since we never know what personal needs lurk behind the members’ masks of contentment. A properly structured cell group gives the Spirit of God freedom to leave the teaching outline after only the first point is covered if it raises a need in someone’s life. The cell leader can — and should — say, “Let’s pick up here next week,” whenever an unforeseen but worthwhile diversion comes along. This is acceptable pedagogy.
The class, of course, cannot just hand out information; it must discern whether the skill or content is being comprehended. Laboratory practice sessions (for students to use skills) or else quizzes (to measure retained information) must complement the teaching of the Word in a class group.
Specialists for Each Kind of Group
One of the discouragements we pastors bring on ourselves is attempting to excel in all four group situations. We assume that, having completed our training in homiletics, we ought to be consummate communicators at any level of group dynamic in the church.
Not so. Certain personality types and sets of gifts or abilities function much better in certain group situations than in others, and even seminary graduates are not exempt from this fact. We all need help discerning which roles in the body of Christ we might best fill. Then we could benefit from separate training, both exegetical and homiletical, tailored to the group dynamic best suited to us.
Far more lay teachers as well can be trained for local-church effectiveness if we align our training more closely with the needs and focuses of group dynamics.
Beware of Cross-Mixing Techniques
The above discussion is not meant to say that worship can occur only in a celebration service, fellowship in a congregation, growth and accountability in a cell, and instruction and training in a class. But it does say these goals are the easiest to accomplish in the various settings.
There are times when it is good to attempt to worship in a cell, or to encourage one another on Sunday morning. But such mixing should be done intentionally and intelligently, not accidentally. We must understand first what the best setting is for such a practice, and not expect as great a result if we choose to go ahead in a less than optimum context.
The things I have said here about preaching and teaching, like the four group classifications themselves, are not really new. The group dynamics have existed for centuries; only recently have we put names and definitions on them. So also, pastors long before me have sensed instinctively what worked best in one setting or another, and have gone about their ministry accordingly.
What is new here is, I hope, a clearer statement about why they succeeded. If we understand the kinds of groups a church needs to function well and meet the worship, fellowship, intimacy, and instructional needs of its people, and if we grasp how to narrow the focus of the Word of God in those groups to more effectively capitalize on their dynamics, then the net result should be more specific needs in more people’s lives being satisfied. And that is what ministry is all about.
Copyright ©1986 Christianity Today
