So, You've Been Asked to Speak. Now What?

Follow these basic guidelines to prepare a talk.

You hang up the phone and your immediate thought is, "What have I gotten myself into?" You fluctuate between feeling flattered and panicked. You've just been asked to provide the opening message at the upcoming fall retreat. You said yes. Now what?

With God's help, you can do this with effectiveness and joy. Follow these simple guidelines as you prepare.

Choose a topic

If you haven't been assigned a topic, the field is pretty broad. The Bible is a big book and having free reign to choose to teach on whatever you want can be overwhelming. However, a good way to narrow down the choice is to teach to others what God is teaching you. So, as you think about your topic, reflect on your personal study or devotional times with God. What Scripture are you focusing on these days? What insights have you gained? What direction is God taking your thinking and processing? When a topic becomes part of the fabric of your being via the ministry of the Holy Spirit, you are able to share it more effectively with others.

Then ask yourself if this topic is one that will be relevant to your audience. If you are learning from it, very likely they will too, but you need to think about their chronological and spiritual maturity. If it fits them, or if you can revise it to fit them, you may have answered the first question of delivering a message. Once you have a topic in mind, ask God to confirm to you in some way that this is, in fact, the message that he wants you to present to the group you will address. Once confirmed, you have safely managed the first hurdle (and often, according to many teachers, the most difficult).

Begin your research

This part of preparing a presentation gives you a great excuse to read, study, and drink in all that you can on a given subject. The first and primary resource, of course, is the Bible. Use a concordance to find passages that relate to your theme so you can have an overall grasp of what God has already said about the subject. Then find support materials from popular Christian authors and commentators. Read and digest all that you can. Take notes on what you glean so you can remember and attribute the source if you quote an author. As you begin to process the information you are gathering, you will find certain key points that keep coming back to you as important to share with those who will be looking to you for teaching.

Write a summary sentence

Remember that after you present your message, you will want your listeners to take away something that they can remember and apply effectively to their lives. That will not happen unless you, as the speaker, stay focused on the primary point you want to make. Therefore, it is critical at this juncture that you write in one sentence the main teaching that you want your listeners to absorb. Too often, as teachers, we are so excited about all we want to share that we forget that audiences cannot absorb too many separate points in hearing the message only one time. We become immersed in our topic and can recite theme after theme that we have gleaned from our study. But our audience will be coming to us out of the busyness of their lives, will tune into our teaching for a time, and then will leave. We don't want them to walk out saying, "What was that all about?" We want to be perfectly clear about what our primary message is. We cannot be clear with them until we are clear in our own minds first. So the one-sentence summary is critical. Everything else we do in preparation and presentation will revolve around that sentence.

Formulate an outline

Now that we know where we are going, an outline will help us to get there. Put together an outline that will help your audience remember the logical progression of your teaching. There are several techniques that may be helpful:

Alliteration: the first word of every point begins with the same letter, which is a good memory device. For example, I once used this outline when teaching about Ehud the left-handed judge of the Old Testament:

Creativity
Courage
Collaboration

Parallel structure: Every point would be a single word, phrase, verb/noun pattern, or simple sentence. In teaching on the commandment against murder, I used this outline:

Understanding the command
Violating the command
Recognizing murder
Enhancing life

Acronym: the first word of every point will spell a word. That way, if your listeners can remember one word, they might be able to remember every point. I taught three sessions once at a women's retreat for which a spa theme had been chose. My outline was this:

Simplify
Purify
Attach

If they could remember, the word spa, they could remember the points I wanted them to walk away with.

Repeating: a key word in each point of your outline will also aid memory. Once when I was emphasizing the necessity of total commitment to God, I used this repetitive outline:

Radical perspectives
Radical relationships
Radical rewards

Even if the class did not remember the details of the lesson, I hope that they remembered that God wants us to be radical for him!

Word picture: allow your points to form a word picture much as Paul did with the armor of God in Ephesians or in his descriptions in of the members of the church being as parts of a body.

Fill in the details

Now that you know your topic and have an idea of a logical progression of thought, you need to fill in the substance of the message. If I have to give a timed presentation or one that is more formal than the lecture-discussion-type presentation that I normally engage in with my ongoing Bible study groups, I write out every word that I plan to say. I never say it exactly as I have written it, but at least by writing it out I can think through every transition of thought and explanation so that my audience can follow with ease and clarity the progression of the teaching. At this stage, too, you will find supporting passages of Scripture. The power is in God's Word, not in our presentation; therefore, we want to be sure that every point we make is supported in the Bible and not just something we thought made sense.

Also, to bring a point home with impact, stories and illustrations are essential. This is the stage in your preparation where you begin to look for just the right story or example to drive home the points you are making. Sometimes these stories come straight from Scripture—a parable, a biblical character, or a historical event. Sometimes they come from the news, from collections of illustrations, or from your own files. Keep on the lookout until you find just the right stories to engage the imaginations and emotions of your listeners as you present your key points. The stories will help them remember.

Plan the ending

This is where we go back to the summary sentence that we wrote earlier. As we review the outline, we ask if everything in that progression of thought helps the listener to understand the primary point we are trying to get across. If it doesn't, we need to revise our plan until it does. Then, we need to think and pray about finding a way to conclude our message in a way that will ensure that the listeners will understand and remember the main point, and that at least some of them will feel compelled to change their lives in some way because of what they have learned.

There are several ways that work well to end our teaching with that kind of impact. You might return to the main point at this juncture with a summary of your supporting points. Or you might conclude with a story that will connect emotionally with your audience or a quote from another writer or speaker that restates your main point in a memorable way. Sometimes we want to leave our audience with a challenge, and a list of self-evaluation questions might help to do that. Just remember that the ending is usually the most powerful part of any message. We must plan it carefully.

Practice until you're comfortable

Read the message silently. Read it aloud. Present it extemporaneously with notes. Time it. Revise it. Get to know it so well that it becomes part of who you are. Then when you get up to present it, do it with energy and conviction.

After all this, my speech-teacher friend sums it up this way: "Have something to say. Say what you mean. Care if they listen." She says that if we do these three things, we will do a lot of things right without any special training in public speaking.

It does take some work, but if God has put it in your heart to share his truths with others, you won't mind it. In fact, the research and preparation itself will bring you joy. But that will be nothing compared to the joy you will experience when you are halfway through your message, and you begin to see faces light up. They are listening. They are beginning to understand. And, by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, their lives can be changed.

Beverly Van Kampen speaks, teaches, and writes about the Bible. She is the author of The GodSense Devotional and, new this fall, The Bible Study Teacher's Guide. You can reach her through her website at www.beverlyvankampen.com.

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