A Way with Words: Preaching That Transforms Congregations

Introduction

IN SEMINARY, we were taught that the congregation should clearly know the main point we were trying to make. After every sermon preached in class, our professor went to the board and asked, What did you hear? Sometimes what the preacher thought the sermon said matched what was heard, but usually, especially at the beginning of the semester, the gap between intent and impact was pretty large.

Exercises like this are essential in helping new preachers learn the art of getting their message across. Even the most experienced preachers can sometimes be amazed by what parishioners tell them about their sermons in the receiving line after service. We all need to be proficient in the art of sermon preparation and delivery. Faithful exegesis and competent rhetorical techniques matter greatly to preachers and their listeners.

Unfortunately, the basic homiletical skills I encountered in seminary or read about in preaching books were not adequate to deal with the reality I faced in my parishes. Sitting in the pews were people who had been in church much of their lives and had a clear sense of what they thought their faith and their congregational life should be. Any point I made in a single sermon, however clearly expounded, wasn’t going to alter those expectations. The congregation might learn something new, and some of them might even embark on my important suggestion of the week, but the rubber band of their faith life snapped back quickly. Even more troubling to me, their current understanding of their faith and their congregational life was not leading to a thriving, growing church.

In this context, preaching became vitally important. Where else could I share a message of the reign of God that might move people? Yet, the overarching goal of my preaching had to develop. Instead of choosing one main point each Sunday and working to deliver it effectively, I began to look for a way to think about my preaching that would help me accomplish the larger adaptive task before me. A breakthrough came when I began to think of myself as preaching one continuous sermon over a course of eighteen months, rather than a series of different sermons week after week.

This book is designed to help a preacher think about preaching a sermon that lasts between one and three years. While the topics covered could be applied in almost any preaching context, some situations can most benefit from these concepts. First, I assume that you and your congregation connect frequently. You are the primary preacher and a large portion of the congregation is there more weeks than not. Second, I also assume that your connections are not just in the pulpit, but that you are the primary pastoral caregiver and the leader of the church board. Third, I assume that your congregation needs to make some significant changes to grow and thrive. These changes could be helping a sleepy congregation start evangelizing, directing the congregation to meet a new neighborhood challenge, or convincing a growing congregation to focus on developing the structures needed for the next stages of development. In the rapidly changing environment we live in, every congregation needs to make some significant changes to be who God is calling them to be in the next phase of their life.

However you read this book, I hope that you will have a new perspective on how to approach preaching from a long-term perspective, while being challenged to preach with greater prayer, passion, personality, and physicality. God’s call to us as preachers and as leaders of congregations is too important to take one sermon at a time or to give anything less than our full selves.

— Part 1 —

The Long-Term

Sermon

— 1 —

Teaching a New Language

You were taught to put away your former way of life . . .

and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to

clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to

the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

—Ephesians 4:22–24

PAUL’S WORDS EXPRESS the challenge for pastors. We strive to teach God’s people to put away their former understandings and practices in favor of new life created in the righteousness and holiness of God. Then, when we look out at the congregation as we prepare to preach, we don’t see what we hoped. Most every Sunday morning we have offered the congregation what (we think) they needed to know in three rhetorically balanced and clearly expressed points. Heads nodded, notes were taken, and, perhaps, even an occasional Amen was muttered. Yet the evidence of our words taking root, much less bearing fruit, can be lacking in the parish’s life and ministry. Paul dealt with that situation by writing a six-chapter letter, but that approach is unlikely to be as successful in our contemporary congregational lives. We need another way to think about what we are trying to accomplish in our preaching, and how we evaluate our success.

Our goals and evaluation are more difficult in congregations that have been around for a while. A congregation with dozens of new Christians showing up each month might look at baptisms or new members with some satisfaction. Most of us preach in a different context, however. The majority of churches, especially in the United States, are smaller and have a slower trickle of new members. While the eventual goal of preaching may be to get our wider community to come into personal relationship with Jesus Christ, our more immediate work with the people of God needs to have intermediate goals. The preaching task in these situations is to help the faithful in our community to make the needed changes in their individual and parish lives so they can live out the Great Commission and the Great Commandment.

The world outside of the red church doors is not the same world most of our current church members were brought up in. We all know that. Changes in travel and communication, changes in extended family relationships and commitments, and changes in work and school activity schedules have all turned the traditional role of the local church upside down. Add to these practical changes the spiritual challenges of generations who are unfamiliar with the basic Christian narrative and an increase in a variety of non-Christian spiritualities, and the preacher has an enormous task to help even the most dedicated congregation respond effectively to the world around them.

Regardless of the big societal changes around us, we know that important, smaller-scale changes also need to happen regularly in a congregation’s life. After years of focusing on an outreach program, we may need to do more evangelism. When the largest Sunday school class in recent years graduates, the teachers may need a break to go to a Bible study class themselves. We may need, for painfully obvious reasons, to drop everything and work on conflict resolution and rebuilding loving relationships. The changes and transitions that seem most straightforward to us still require time and patience to lead a congregation through them.

I remember getting frustrated by what seemed to me to be the glacially slow pace of the congregation coming to understand the need for an obvious change. Then I realized my time and the congregation’s time did not progress at the same pace. I was focusing on the parish’s life, conservatively, forty to fifty hours each week. For a particularly important issue like the one I was dealing with, some part of my brain was probably concerned about it almost every waking moment. (I know that isn’t healthy, but most of us have been there about some issue or another.) Unfortunately, from my perspective, no one else in the parish was quite that consumed. My core leaders spent maybe five to ten hours a week focusing on the parish, which was very faithful. The issues I processed in one week took my leaders five to ten weeks. Most of these same leaders, however, had also been in the church for a long time. They had spent decades at church, learning one way of operating and diligently living that way out. When I preached, or spoke to them outside of the pulpit, I wasn’t starting from a blank slate. Tapes were already playing in their brains—tapes that had to be erased and rewritten. No wonder things took so long, even for the church’s dedicated leadership. For the person in the pew, who may average two hours of church time each week for two or three Sundays a month, things take even longer. A change that took me an intense week to process may take more than a year for the bulk of the congregation to understand and live into.

People who study change know how long the process takes. They also understand how frustrated leaders can get, and so warn against impatience. In his book Leading Change, John Kotter says that one of the primary reasons that change efforts fail is that the vision for change is undercommunicated by at least a factor of ten and maybe a factor of a hundred or a thousand.¹ I know that when something is important enough for the congregation for me to spend two or three sermons on it, by the time I’ve finished I feel like I have said everything I need to say; I’m ready to move on. Kotter cautions me, however, that maybe the congregation still needs to hear it another twenty or thirty times. Or maybe even another two hundred or two thousand times. When I think about important changes that did not take root in the way that I had hoped, I can usually find places where I stopped sharing the vision for that particular change far too soon. Maybe a crisis came up, maybe I began a push right before Holy Week or the summer or another time that pulled away everyone’s energy and attention, or maybe I just got bored and moved on.

Change, of course, doesn’t happen in a clean, linear kind of way. The reign of God doesn’t materialize simply because we gave twenty sermons or even two thousand sermons instead of two. Even so, thinking about the time spent does tell us something about how we might approach our effectiveness as leaders who preach. One piece of good news from Kotter is that many of the same elements that make up good preaching are also the best ways to help people understand the vision for change. Kotter lists as key communication elements the techniques of drawing verbal pictures, repetition, leadership by example, explaining perceived inconsistencies, and elimination of jargon and technobabble.² His two other elements are communications basics that we can easily incorporate if we think about preaching more expansively than the fifteen minutes following the gospel reading. Kotter suggests using multiple forums and having opportunities for give-and-take.³ Many preachers have found their sermons more effective by getting feedback afterwards or even input before preaching, and every congregation has multiple avenues available for a pastor to reinforce their vision.

We know, too, that good preaching is going to illuminate and reinforce the work being done in the rest of the congregation’s life. Today, perhaps more than any time in the last century, the sermon is foundational in leading a congregation to where God is calling. No longer can a quality sermon expect to see fruit by merely instructing, cheerleading, or exhorting. If the sermon’s purpose is to get people to do one thing or to make one change, we are probably thinking too small. The person who pays close attention and does whatever is asked might go home and try a spiritual exercise, read a Bible passage, or find a way to bring up Jesus in one conversation that week. Then, the following week, they will drop that discipline in favor of a newly assigned sermon task. Such behaviors aren’t the fruit we need. Instead, we need to preach a new approach and understanding, with corresponding new actions and habits, and such preaching takes significant time and intentionality.

I believe that our contemporary preaching task is more like teaching people a new language than it is getting them to do something at the end of the sermon. When children are learning a language, the act of speaking and reading allows them to gain the skills, experience, and worldview needed to be able to process what they need to hear. This approach does not make any of the individual books or conversations unimportant. On the contrary, each particular element becomes even more important because not only does the content need to be appropriate to the situation at hand, but also the vocabulary and word-building skills have to be in place. Talking about a chrysalis to a three-year-old child is not going to be helpful; neither is reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to a sixth-grade science class. The goal of our particular teaching lesson, however, is not only for a child to put out a leaf for a caterpillar to eat or to spell chrysalis correctly, but also to come to recognize the beauty of God in creation while living an environmentally sustainable life. The immediate goals should help the long-term one. Focusing exclusively on the easy wins can lead us to forget the difficult place we need to be going.

Using the analogy a little bit differently, we might compare preaching to law students learning the legal language. While they have to work with specific cases and statutes, the particulars are all in the service of forming lawyers that will have the right capacities, approach, and skills. No one, however diligent, can memorize all the laws, and many of them will be modified by legislatures after those students have graduated. Nevertheless, knowing how to write a brief, where to find relevant precedents, and how to handle various proceedings are all the fruit of intense study sessions, even though the specific details may never be encountered again.

One central outcome of giving people a new language is that they are able to use it. Children on the playground can look for and talk about caterpillars, and lawyers can go to court. Christians who hear a sermon about a new aspect of their walk of faith can talk about it together. Too many