Audio Transcript
Confronting what needs to change can be an awkward process. Especially within the church. But we must talk honestly about our flaws and weaknesses. So we get to church, we drag ourselves out of bed and go, overcoming all those hurdles we talked about last time. We gather with God’s people on Sunday. God calls us here, so we’re here, at church, connecting with friends. The musical worship is strong and well coordinated and well played. And then we sit through a sermon that seems, well, a bit off. Distant. A bit disconnected from us. Perhaps we didn’t prepare our hearts well enough to receive the message. Possibly. Or maybe the sermon itself was flat. Today on Ask Pastor John: The six traits of a forgettable sermon.
Colton is an aspiring preacher in Vermont, and he wants his sermons to be more engaging — or, more accurately, I should say others want his preaching to be more engaging. So he is learning from those around him. And he writes in today for advice. “Pastor John, hello! I have been invited into sermon preparation meetings at my local church to grow in my preaching. The feedback I get on my sermons is consistent: I sound too technical and I am not engaging enough. My conviction is to stay very close to the text so Scripture can speak with authority. But how do I receive this counsel humbly, becoming more engaging, while remaining rigorously faithful to the Bible? And what are common preaching traits that you would say lack audience engagement?”
Six Reasons for Low Engagement
Well, I do want to say right off the bat, it is possible to be rigorously faithful to the wording, the logic, the purpose of the biblical text and be engaging and not too technical. It is possible. If somebody told me, “Piper, your messages are too technical and they’re not engaging,” I would not blow it off. I would take that criticism seriously. I would make every effort to be both: engaging and rigorously devoted to the wording of the text.
So, Colton asks, “What are some common traits of preaching that lacks audience engagement?” Here are the ones I can think of, and in the process of trying to answer that negative question (what’s not engaging), I think we can put our finger on and clarify what is engaging.
1. Lacking Clarity
The preacher is not engaging perhaps because he is being unclear. He’s using words people don’t know, or (more often) the flow of his thinking is muddy. People can’t follow his train of thought. He doesn’t seem to get anywhere. It doesn’t make any sense. His connections are not clear. There’s no guiding line of thought so you know where you are. There’s just a kind of a haze that lies over the congregation. “I’m not sure where this is going, Pastor. Is it going anywhere? I can’t tell.” That’s lack of clarity, and it’s not engaging.
2. Too Abstract
Endless generalizations and very little specificity — or, to say it another way, nothing seems to be concrete. Everything seems to be abstract. For example, instead of saying, “People died of many terrible diseases in the Middle Ages,” you might say, “There was a decade in the 1400s when up to half the population in Europe died of bubonic plague, which was spread by fleas that lived on rats that ran off of boats that parked there in the harbors of Europe from faraway places.” That would be interesting: rats, fleas, 1400s, bubonic plague. Those are all concrete, not just “various diseases.” Concreteness is always more interesting than generalities.
3. Irrelevant to Real Life
What the preacher says seems irrelevant to my life. People don’t see the connection to their hearts or their minds or their daily lives at home, at work, and in the family. If you hear this criticism, it doesn’t mean you should stop preaching about God and the great things — the eternal things of Scripture — and start talking about daily tips for daily living. It means you should show people why God — why the whole counsel of God, why this particular glorious text — is wonderfully, beautifully, powerfully relevant for every second of their lives. Show them that. They need to feel that and see how you feel it.
4. Emotionally Distant
The preacher seems emotionally flat or distant. The importance of things is more caught than taught. If the preacher seems to feel that what he’s saying is dry, it’s probably going to feel dry to everybody else. In other words, the engaging preacher is engaged with what he says. His emotions correspond to the worth of what he’s talking about. Otherwise, he’s just a living contradiction. And while people may not be able to articulate what’s going on, they feel it. They know this isn’t right. This is out of sync, and it’s not engaging.
5. Not Interesting
The preacher is just not interesting to listen to. People get bored. And the most common antidote that people give for this problem is for the preacher to tell stories. Everybody knows that stories are interesting. Yes, they are. You just start a story, and you’ve got all the ears, but this is dangerous advice because stories are very time-consuming in a sermon, and they tend to entertain rather than illuminate. In other words, the payoff for the story — actually, the payoff for understanding the text — is usually pretty small. It was interesting. It was entertaining. Back to the text. But it didn’t shed much light on the meaning of the text.
“The engaging preacher is engaged with what he says. His emotions correspond to the worth of what he’s talking about.”
I would rather say, “Give the sermon the traits of a good story.” Let the sermon have a plot. It’s going somewhere. There are movements and turns. Let some of them be surprising. Suspense is a huge asset to being interesting. Asking and answering questions is a great way to create suspense in the listeners, especially if the listeners want to know the answers to the questions that you’re posing. If you pose good questions, they will want to know. They’ll be leaning in: “How’s this going to get resolved?” Use striking, unexpected, jolting turns of phrase. Let there be unexpected turns in the argument that make people scratch their heads and then say, “Oh, aha!”
6. Too Technical
I would say just one more thing maybe about being too technical. It takes very little effort and very little creativity to be technical. Usually being technical is a sign of laziness. It’s just easier to use your in-house technical language than to expend the effort and creativity it takes to find more helpful ways to say technical things.
So, let me close with an illustration of what I mean. Suppose you read these words in Matthew 7:11–12:
If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
And suppose in your preaching, having read that, now you want to try to get across the amazing logical connection implied in the word “so.” Your heavenly Father will give you what you need, so treat others the way you’d like to be treated (Matthew 7:7–11). Now, very few people notice that. This is going to be interesting if you show it to them (maybe).
Here’s what you should not do. You don’t say, “Now, this word ‘so’ is in the Greek oun. It’s a post-positive, which means it never comes at the beginning of a sentence in Greek, and it is an inferential particle, denoting result or purpose. It’s used 498 times in the New Testament, and 56 of them here in Matthew.” Virtually all of that is grandstanding. It doesn’t help anybody understand anything. It magnifies you and not the meaning of the texts.
Rigorous and Engaging
So, what should you do? Something like this: You say, “Suppose you’re a fifteen-year-old boy who wants to try out for the cross-country track team in his high school.” Now, immediately you’ve got all the fifteen-year-olds with you, right? And probably the adults as well. “Where in the world is the pastor going? What has that got to do with Matthew?” And they’re all leaning in.
“Let the sermon have a plot. It’s going somewhere. There are movements. There are turns.”
“And this boy knows that the coach won’t let anybody on the team who can’t run a six-minute mile at the beginning. I mean, you’ve got to run a six-minute mile to make the team, and you can barely run a ten-minute mile. So, you work all day — all summer. And when the tryouts come, you do it. You make it under six minutes, and you’re on the team. Now, here’s my question for you, folks: Why did you work your tail off all summer long?” And you wait. You may even say, “Come on — tell me. Talk to me.”
And somebody says, “So you can make the team.” I’d said, “That’s right. Did everybody hear that? Did everybody hear that word ‘so’? So you can make the team? Everybody knows what that means. So you can make the team. Everybody knows the purpose and the aim is to make the team. That’s why we use the word ‘so,’ and that’s what’s going on right here in verse 12 in Matthew 7. You have a Father in heaven who answers your prayers and meets your needs so you can love other people.” And from there, you go on and give your biblical explanation from other texts. Why is that? How does that work? Why is the pouring out of God’s grace in your life in answer to prayer the means by which you love other people?
So, yes, Colton, it is possible to pay rigorous attention to the wording of the Bible and be engaging as a preacher.
