Our listeners know us, trust us, and see in us lives that largely back up what we preach. That accomplishes more than mere homiletical skills ever can.
— Haddon Robinson
Your sermon ends, and you’re pleased with it. Then someone from the congregation approaches with a beaming smile.
“Nice sermon, Pastor. Say, did you hear Charles Stanley on television this morning? He has been preaching on grace for several weeks. Powerful messages! He says that …”
The church member means well, but you can’t help but feel people are comparing you — unfavorably — with someone who is a ten-talent preacher, a communication king.
When I was in seminary, celebrated preachers spoke in our chapel and at local conferences: Harry Ironside, Vernon McGee, Roy Aldrich, Stephen Olford, Ray Stedman. After hearing these preachers, others were inspired. But I walked out of the service wanting to quit. I remember once reading a sermon by Peter Marshall and literally weeping in frustration because I could not produce a sermon approaching his. Reading a communication king made me want to get out of preaching altogether.
Many pastors can identify with those feelings. Today many more “kings” rule the homiletical landscape. Media preachers are some of the most gifted, and they enjoy extra advantages like researchers, audio or video engineers, and freedom from the drain of everyday pastoring.
In addition, local pastors preach in the communication age. Every day of the week, our people hear the best communication money can buy, from smooth tv newspeople, to dazzling entertainers, to hilarious comedians—all of whom are supplied with words by professional wordsmiths. Madison Avenue spends millions on thirty-second tv spots or one-page magazine ads that communicate with allure and power.
How have the communication kings affected the expectations people have for the preaching of the local pastor? In basketball, a dunk used to be a novelty, but now even the guards “play above the rim.” Have the communication kings raised the level of play required of everyone? Does the local pastor have any advantages over communication kings? Are communication kings friends or competitors? What can we learn from them?
Jarred Judgment
We have to admit it: communication kings are skilled and talented. And they are good in the very field we’ve given our lives to. It’s only natural for a pastor to feel intimidated.
We mustn’t blow this out of proportion, however—which is precisely what preachers, given our make-up, are tempted to do. A pastor’s soul is sensitive. All well and good, but the dark side is pastors tend to be more thin-skinned about slights and criticism. If twenty-five parishioners say, “Good sermon” to the pastor on their way out of church and one woman half-kiddingly says, “Well, there’s always next week,” we spend the rest of the afternoon wondering what she meant by that.
Two experiences of my own illustrate this hypersensitivity, which can cause us to doubt and sometimes misread the effect of our preaching.
Several years ago, I spoke at a youth workers convention, but I felt the message went poorly. When I used a key illustration out of place, it put me off balance. I had that sensation of mentally stepping outside myself and thinking about how badly my sermon was going even as I preached it. I noticed a few young people reading magazines.
When I finished, I felt the sermon had bombed, and I just wanted to escape the building.
Several months later, I was chatting with a couple of people who had been at the convention, who said, “We really appreciated your message.” Assuming they were just being kind, I brushed off their comments.
Six months later still, I was packing for a trip and grabbed a handful of sermon tapes to listen to on the plane. The next day, as I rummaged through the tapes, I noticed that I had inadvertently grabbed the sermon from the youth convention, a message I had no intention of listening to again. But I changed my mind, and with a slight cringe, I put it in the tape player.
I was stunned. I had said what I had wanted to say in the sermon, and I felt I had said it well. Now that several months had passed, I could listen objectively. My feelings while preaching that sermon had not conformed to reality.
Of course, it works both ways. On another occasion, I spoke at a church and felt the sermon was a tremendous success. After the service, as I was waiting in the back of the sanctuary for the pastor, I noticed a pew card someone had written on. I read it with some dismay: “I wonder how long this guy’s going to preach. There’s going to be a long line at the cafeteria.”
Obviously my sermon had not had much impact on this unknown scribbler.
The point is this: our high sensitivity to the effectiveness of our preaching sometimes jars our immediate judgment. And in relation to the communication kings, it puts us immediately on the defensive. When we recognize that, it already begins to relieve some of the pressure we feel. But there’s more.
The Advantages of the Local Pastor
Although those who preach to national audiences via tv, radio, tapes, and conferences have a lot going for them, the local pastor also has some huge advantages. We’re playing on a more level field than we imagine.
We benefit, first, from a personal, loving relationship with our listeners. When we stand in the pulpit, we have the credibility and spiritual authority that comes only from having been with people in their times of need. When we preach on the power of prayer, parishioners know us as the pastors who have interceded with them when they were unemployed. When we preach on compassion, they know us as preachers who have wept with them at the funeral home.
Our listeners know us, trust us, and see in us lives that largely back up what we preach. That example accomplishes more than mere homiletical skills ever can.
The local pastor also enjoys the advantage of local accent. Listeners quickly pick up when a speaker is an outsider.
I once heard a preacher use a baseball illustration by saying, “The batter got a four-base hit.” People use the terms two-base hit and three-base hit, but anyone who knows baseball would say the batter hit a home run. The speaker, it turned out, was not American.
What’s true on a national level is even more true at the local level. There are many local “accents” that only the local pastor can appreciate and use to advantage.
Language accents. In some parts of the country, people say supper for the evening meal; in others dinner is the word. Some towns use pop and others soda when referring to soft drinks. In New England we call milk shakes, freezes. Some regions speak more slowly, with a twang or drawl, others at a clipped rate. In the West, people say, “I’m going with you.” In the Midwest, they say, “I’m going with.”
The preacher naturally adapts to such nuances, and thus identifies with people in a way national tv preachers cannot.
Social accents. In a blue-collar town, people tend to use rougher vernacular, and they usually disdain bookish language. They are suspicious of experts; instead, they respect common people and their common sense.
In a middle-class, college-educated suburb, people value higher education and use more abstract speech. They often defer to experts, and they respect sophistication.
The local pastor can tune his or her sermon to reflect these social accents. Furthermore, the local preacher can refer to town jokes or mention the nicknames for significant landmarks and buildings in the area.
For instance, in the Chicago area, “The El” is shorthand for one of the local commuter train systems, and “Metra” is the name for the other. By simply referring to one or the other in an illustration, the pastor will have set a scene that locals can identify with.
Historical accents. The local pastor knows the events significant to residents: the big fire, the great flood, the high-school basketball championship year. A local pastor can say, “I read the obituary for Coach Peterson in the paper yesterday. You all knew him. He taught history to most of your children. He was a stalwart in our community, who inspired young people. He reminds us how vibrant and alive someone can be, and how quickly death comes.”
A local illustration like that affects a congregation more profoundly than quoting Aristotle or Byron on death.
All these accents give the local pastor a rapport, a trust, the advantage of being an insider, someone who knows the people.
Thomas Long, professor of preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary, once said that great preaching these days is local, that is, it arises out of and makes reference to local events, local language, and local people. The communication kings may have a national following, but local preachers who can speak with the unique accents of their people can have a stronger impact.
Partners and Mentors
We do have advantages then. Still, the communication kings influence our congregations significantly, and we cannot pretend otherwise. We don’t have to respond with insecurity and defensiveness though. Here are two positive responses that may help you take advantage of their ministries.
• Be grateful. It’s natural to be jealous of the great preachers, though we rarely recognize jealousy as such. It usually takes the form of carping criticism of their ministries whenever their names are mentioned.
Communication kings attract jealousy like a picnic attracts ants. In a culture that honors individualism and competition, great communicators seem to have more “success” in ministry. And if someone else wins, we assume we have lost.
It doesn’t have to be that way. A friend who pastors in Denver is learning to get over jealousy. Some time ago, a number of people left his church and started attending a nearby megachurch. He struggled with resentment and anger for several days. He decided his only hope was prayer, so he began praying for the megachurch and its pastor. He regularly prayed, “Thank you, God, that they are touching people we could never reach.”
His attitude turned around. Thereafter, when he heard about successes of the megachurch, he could rejoice because his prayers were being answered. His praying helped him realize his church and the megachurch were on the same team, part of a larger network. When the bigger church succeeded, the team succeeded.
He’s also learned to express that attitude from the pulpit. Publicly praying for “rival” preachers teaches a congregation and reinforces for the pastor the idea that small ministries aren’t competing with large.
In a similar way, if a parishioner says, “I really get a lot out of Charles Stanley’s sermons. You ought to watch him,” we can respond, “Isn’t it wonderful the way God has given these gifts to Charles Stanley and how he’s reaching so many people?” It sounds corny, but it’s an old idea, and a biblical idea, and I’ve discovered it works. We can rejoice with those who rejoice.
The highest goal of team members is to win. The woman who swims the second lap in the relay is grateful that her teammate took the final lap in record time. Rivalry — and thus jealousy — isn’t the issue. The gold medal is, and so gratefulness is her usual attitude.
• Imitate strengths — not weaknesses. The Michael Jordans of the preaching world inspire us to, as the commercial says, “wanna be like Mike.” Easier said than done. Ironically, what pastors often imitate are the communication king’s idiosyncrasies and weaknesses.
Communication kings succeed despite their weaknesses, not because of them. But their idiosyncrasies are so visible, that’s what those who imitate them pick up on.
One prominent preacher had the habit of gesturing a phrase too late. He’d say, “It was a wide, wide desert,” and then a half-second later, he’d spread his arms wide. With him it never distracted; his strengths overcame his problem. Dozens of his followers, however, now gesture late, and it looks like a cheap imitation.
Another celebrated preacher shakes his leg whenever he gets wired up. For him, that’s an endearing mannerism. But when those trained by him do the same thing, it looks as though they have a nerve disease.
Some successful preachers of the past loudly sucked air or said, “Amen,” between virtually every sentence. Many have imitated them, to their detriment.
In order to learn from the strengths of great preachers, we need to listen to one of their sermons three or four times. It takes that many hearings to get some emotional distance from the sermon and analyze what the speaker is doing.
First, try to understand what the sermon does well and then ask why. Does it affect your emotions in an authentic way? Compel your interest in the introduction? End with a great sense of resolution and inspiration? Why are the main points so memorable? What gave the sermon authority?
In addition to analyzing sermons, we can profit from the continuing study of homiletics, which provides us with the categories we need to analyze what effective communicators do.
For example, my continuing study of preaching books and articles has helped me see how modern listeners have evolved. Modern listeners respond well to an inductive approach to sermons, where a number of examples from life are given and then principles extracted from them. Listeners are a bit bored when we begin by expounding principles, even if the principles are illustrated. Many modern hearers prefer to explore a subject and discover answers along with the preacher, rather than simply being told the conclusions.
Once I became aware of this pattern in modern communication, I was able to notice how effective communicators exploited it successfully.
Every year I choose a different noted preacher, some living and others from the past — Peter Marshall, Charles Finney, Alexander Maclaren — and study him for a full year. I read his sermons and his biography. If possible, I listen to or view tapes of his sermons. I read anything I can find about how he prepared sermons. Then when I get stumped in the middle of writing a sermon, I can ask myself, “How would Spurgeon have handled this? What would Clovis Chappell do to make this live?”
I also study secular communication kings to figure out their approaches. I was watching John Bradshaw, a pop psychologist who talks about relationships and the inner child. I concluded that part of Bradshaw’s popularity stems from his talking to people about people. I wondered, Does simply applying the Bible to people make people feel preached at? Does talking about their lives from the Bible, using the Scriptures as a way to explain their experiences, their struggles, and then bringing in the Bible’s solutions help them listen? That’s a subtle difference that may have a major effect on how secular listeners respond.
One characteristic of great athletes is they can make everyone around them play better. They aren’t just stars; they make ordinary players into a star team.
The communication kings may have made me feel insecure and at times inadequate, but I’m a better preacher today because of them. Their examples have inspired, challenged, and instructed me. We may not all play above the rim, but they’ve elevated our games, helping each of us to make the most of the one, two, or ten “talents” God has given us. We’re not competing against the communication kings; we’re competing with them.
Copyright © 1993 by Christianity Today
