Just to share a little more sermon preparation angst:
Do you buy the idea that sermons should ideally / normally / always (!) have one main point? I’m not sure I’m really convinced. But maybe that’s laziness!
Yet, its good if the sermon has a certain overall coherence, I guess. Of course it’s a problem if the whole thing’s self-contradictory, but I’m inclined to think, further, that its good, on the whole, for the sermon to have a clear single general thrust or direction.
I’m not over keen on reducing my sermons to a single pithy aim sentence, but perhaps I should be?
Presumably a walk through a Psalm could be faithful and edifying without being crunched out into three section headings?
I’m inclined to think a sermon that gives 4 things we need to know about God or even 3 lessons about Jesus and 2 reasons to follow him, would be perfectly acceptable. Would these be disqualified by the one main point rule? A problem of trying to squeeze everything into one point is that the point can be made so blandly inclusive that there’s not much point in making it.
Admittedly, we must not sacrifice clarity.
One advantage of having a summary sentence and saying it repeatedly is that there’s more hope that after the sermon someone might remember what you were saying. There’s not much hope for the congregation if the preacher cant summarise what he was on about!
I’m satisfied if, as a bare minimum, I can say something true and useful to my hearers from the text that’s been read. And I hope they’re not all completely asleep throughout.
If you confine yourself to the main point of a unit, when do you make the points that the text is making by the way, the things that the Bible really affirms but which aren't necessarily the melodic line of the book? If you wanted to say quite a lot of what the text implied, would the one-main-pointer have to take very small sections?
I sometimes fear my sermons are in danger of tending to be a jumble. Perhaps that’s because I don’t want to leave out things that are true and useful. Or interesting things that I’ve been struck by. Any help?
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26 comments:
marc
I'm in flux on lots of stuff associated withpreaching at the moment, but a couple of random thoughts, in the hope of generating more coherent responses:
Having a central thrust to a sermon is, I think, helpful - one thing you seek to drive home, but I don't think that precludes digressions and asides. These needn't distract from the major thrust, particularly if you're crystal clear in your own mind what that thrust is.
(2) I'm not convinced by the idea that each passage/unit has one big idea (and one only). But even if it did, does it follow that the central thrust of your sermon has to follow the 'big idea' of the passage? Couldn't you preach happily on one of the subthemes? Just because you're in the middle of a sermon series on a particular book, I don't see any reason why each sermon has to follow the contour's of the book's 'melodic line'. Each sermon is situation-specific, and is a message from God, through his Word, for this congregation at this particular moment in history. So, why not make an aside/minor detail the major point of the passage if it'll help these particular people this week?
oops. sorry for the stray apostrophe in 'contours'
Thanks, Matthew. Yes, I think I agree.
It would be good wouldn't it if our sermons could be more like father talking with his family than theologian giving a lecturer or a politician / entertainer performing. Maybe such an approach would go with suiting the needs of the people more and take away some of the pressure to get the one right point.
I guess it's weighing up the advantages in attempting to show the full richness of a passage, against the advantage of excellent homiletics.
The most memorable sermon for me was a one pointer. Like Matthew said, having one major point doesn't stop other stuff from coming out. From conversations I've had with ordinary people, they've very often taken away off-hand comments and have been helped by them. Sometimes your overall worldview and way of approaching the text will leap out and surprise (and help?) people more than pointing out the obvious. I suppose God ordains these things to work out in the end.
Jesus' sermons were often one pointers with lots of variety and asides... I think.
Just subscribing to comments thread...
Marc
Yes, yes, yes! We have a delightful Hindu family from Mauritius who come along to our evening service from time to time. He always teases me about being like Tony Blair, giving a speech. I'm always disconcerted...
I once sat to preach (I was too ill to stand!), and it was great - felt much more intimate/familial. I'm really with you - there's a real danger that the metaphor/symbolism underlying our preaching is a lecture or a political speech, rather than a father addressing the family round the meal table.
I'm wondering to what extent our sermon in the covenant renewal service is different from any other applied exposition of Scripture we might give in other settings. And whether that makes a discernible difference in what we're trying to do, and the way we seek to do it...
I think you are more or less right. Although coherence and a central theme is very helpful in most presentations, it is not the end all and be all of preaching, in my opinion. I think Christian preaching has been much more influenced by Greek thought and rhetoric as opposed to our Hebrew heritage. It gets even more complicated when the Enlightenment rolls around. Hans Frei talks about this in his book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.
Thanks for your comments.
Paul, yes, but is it a choice between excellent homoletics and full richness? Surely excellent sermons should / might include the fullness? Or is less (often) more? Not sure.
Matthew, I think the Lord's Day Covenant Renewal Service is important and changes the sermon, gives it a context: we are God's forgiven people, trusting in him, he is training us for his service. And (at least some of) the applications are clear: eat in faith with thanksgiving.
James, Frei sounds an interesting bloke. I'd like to read / hear more of him.
Sarah (my wife) and I were discussing preaching and teaching in terms of what people are increasingly used to. We talk in terms of 20 minute concentration spans but actually in a classroom you wont have more than 10 minutes monalogue -probably much less. However you have an hour of teaching. So only University students and politicians are used to listening to 20 minutes. So if 20 minutes you might as well go the full whack and do a 50 minute oration.
I think it is useful to build in much more dialogue based teaching -as per your Father/Son scenario. Ask the congregation questions, get them to ask questions about the passage...
My personal experience -pople who have grown up in Evangelical churches don't like it at first -they miss the big bang performance -going out on a high at the end of the meeting. But the clinch is that I've seen people really getting to grips with what a passage says and remember and be working on it a week later and beyond.
I agree with Matthew by the way that you don't have to preach the main point. Is it worth acknowledging the main point before saying "but Jesus also raises some other relevant things and I would like to speak about ...this morning."
I think the best Oak Hill chapel sermons have been the ones where instead of someone attempting to cram their 35 minute detailed exposition into 10 minutes, someone has said "This thing struck me in the passage so I'm going to talk about that for the enxt ten minutes..."
Thanks, Dave.
FWIW, when I was at University the 50 min monologue was the almost universal lecturing style. I think break in to groups / have a chat can be a dreadful waste of time. The blind leading the blind. TEACH if you know something important and have some skills. That is what you are paid to do.
I'm all for dialogue, Q&A and interactive Bible Study but I'm not sure that the Lord's Day Service of Covenant Renewal is the place for it. Questions of clarification maybe, but God preaches to us. He doesn't invite a discussion. It seems Jesus and the Apostles certainly went in for monologues, though admittedly not universally so.
I agree with you about the usefulness of preaching what has most affected / helped you. It aids integrity and sincerity too and you tend to preach it better. Good bit of honesty but not too much naval gazing always helpful in the pulpit - I mean from the Cathedra / throne.
And you are certainly right that we mustn't cram too much into the time. I am sometimes conscious of hurrying so as not to go on too long or squeezing things so as not to be boring whereas I think a calmer more relexed style would make for easier listening. Sometimes we just need to lighten up and preach with more confidence and freedom.
On Sunday, dv, I'm preaching to a congregation I don't know from the BCP lectionary. Do I go for one main point from all three readings, one main point from each, one main point from one of them, a few points from one or a few points from a few? Or something else?
Its not helped by the fact that I don't know what 1 Kings 19:19-21 is on about really nor whether or not they will use Ps 84 (the second half). What is the main point of 1 Pt 3:8-15a?
At the moment I think a few points from the Gospel story (Lk 5:1-11) is most likely.
Marc,
Jesus certainly did use dialogue -"Who do you say that I am" -and entered into questions with the disciples.
"Will you restore the kingdom now?" etc
Although guessing the structure of every talk from its Bible summary may be pushing it.
The question and answer style was certainly not unknown to the time frame in history
There are two ways of looking at dialogue
1. A conversation between equals -group chats -blind leading the blind -a complete waste of time as you say or
2. The use of a historical proven teaching method -where your questions guide people to the right answers, where the teacher challenges, clarifies, corrects. Also a good way of checking understanding as you go along.
I don't have a problem with using that method when we gather round the table. It seems that we mistake being tied to a style of teaching for primacy of the word. Perhaps indeed we might capture something of the son asking the father questions at the Passover meal?
However if its a big problem then use other meeting times to vary teaching style. Indeed the two churches where I've been involved in more interactive teaching have tended to use a Sunday evening for it.
There ae lots of ways of doing it.
1. Throwing the odd question out and breaking away from the idea that they are just rhetorical
2. Structuring the whole talk around question and answer -I might do that this coming Sunday on Genesis 1 -ask people what phrases stand out, get them to think what they mean -confirm, encourage, draw together into an application and move on.
3. Group discussion followed by a feedback session -to do it well you really need to have time to train up the table leaders before hand
4. Two Sundays ago I spoke on "If God is real why doesn't he prove it." I spent 5 minutes talking through Mark 2 as a worked example of how you might answer the question with a friend. I then gave people time to
a. Practise using the passage -following what I had done
b. Think of any other helpful Bibl passages.
c. Discuss how they would then move the conversation on
We then got back together as a whole church with some feedback before the other person speaking (yes two speakers sharing a topic) pulled the whole thing together
Marc,
Drawing together what everyone's been saying, WE DISTINGUISH (!), the sermon having one main point, from always having to preach the 'big idea' of the passage in hand.
I think the former is very helpful to most congregations, the latter is less important (PT heresy!)
I'm also not convinced about Dave's 20-minute point. It depends on how eager people are to hear God speak. We had a chap at one church I was at, who said 10 minutes was too long, but happily listened to hour-long Open University maths lectures! Equally, when in Dagenham, I was amazed by a minimally-literate congregation sitting with full attention and joy through 45-minute monologues.
Neil,
It's not that 20 minutes is the magic number -indeed I would say its not. Nor is it about how literate people are. Potentially less literate people might sit through a longer oral event than more literate people.
We might want to make some distinctions there between
1. A congregation that is used to sitting in 45 minute sermons against people that come from outside of that culture.
2. The ability of some people to talk engagingly for 45 minutes against the ability of many people to teach God's word effectively who you wouldn't want to talm for 45 minutes -I reckon the vast majority of people who have a Bible teaching gift fall into the latter category but the vast majority think they fall into the former!
More importantly the ability to sit attentively -even accepting that appearance is the same as being (Let's face it what most University students have learnt is not how to stay attentive for 50 minutes but how to appear attentive and tune in and out for the pertinant points)
is one thing but what I am talking about is what really happens in terms of hearing, processing, learning and applying.
Where am I coming from here? I'm coming from
1. Having been involved in different methods of communicating within church life to all age groups.
2. Having responsibility for training people including graduates, apprentices, senior managers etc as part of my career for ten years.
3. Talking to people in the teaching profession
4. Getting feedback from the people I've taught
5. Observing the impact of different teaching styles over a period of time.
Of course different people and congregations will nd up in different situations at different times -but lets make those decision by carefully trying and observing.
Marc - that'd be great. And it's not that both is impossible (which is what the ramble at the end of my comment was about) - but the combination is difficult to find.
In response to Dave; I agree with what he's saying in general, but is the sermon in a covenant renewal worship service equivalent to classroom/office based teaching? There are similarities obviously, but some essential differences too (as have been pointed out).
Disclaimer: I know you guys all know way more than me about this stuff, I'm but a mere potential Oakhill student. But this is interesting.
Paul,
Are you coming up to Oak Hill this year? -That's great -we'll look out for you.
Is the sermon in the "...service" different to a classroom/office based situation?
Yes and no..
Yes -we are dealing with a different content -God's inspired word. Yes we are dealing with different hearers -the people of God.
No -we are dealing with words communicated to humans. Think -to what extent do you follow the same and different rules for reading the Bible to reading ...a novel...a text book ...
So when God uses preachers to teach us from his word there is something incredibly unique -but there is also something incredibly normal about it.
Incidently -you wont learn the stuff I'm saying here at Bible College -this comes from my experience leading up to coming to Oak Hill.
I think 17-point sermons may be the way forward.
Seriously, I really appreciated many of the Puritan sermons we read with their endless classifications and uses. Clear, thorough and challenging/heart-warming/encouraging etc.
Part of our problem is that we think we always need to rush through a bible book and give people the big picture. Sometimes it's good to preach on a single verse or short passage for several weeks and uncover more and more of its riches to your congregation. That would let you preach lots of the 'here's an interesting thing I noticed' bits but also give you a structure to fit them into which would aid concentration and memory.
Dave - afraid not. I know quite a few who've been through those walls recently, and are there at the moment (eg. I know the Barr-Hamiltons and the Silks) but I'm not coming yet. I'm at early stages of CofE ordination process myself.
Ros - interesting. Mr Edwards' sermons are nice to read since they're so neatly divided you can digest in chunks. I've not really heard him live though (shocking, I know), I guess that's a slightly different experience. I got my small group to listen to Sinners in the hands... preached by Mark Dever though. That was fun.
Do you think Calvin is a good example? ie. start wherever you left off last time, keep going til you run out of time?
Calvin is obviously a good example for almost everything BUT...
He was preaching eight times a week in Geneva, not once. So it was a lot easier for him to do the stop/start thing and assume everyone was following.
The Reformers are remarkable in their preaching and quite different from we who claim to be their successors.
For example, I believe when Zwingli started his ministry he preached from Mt 1:1 and kept going through the NT untill he died.
I'm not advocating that: it seems strange to me to spend 4 years in the gospels and then 6 in Paul and so on. More balanced diet would be good. But it does make you think.
Perhaps our people can cope with more than 8 sermons on passage length sections in any one series?
The recent practice of some churches (eg. The Bible Talks?) to focus on one book for a year in some way seems quite a good one to me. You'd cover the Bible in depth in a lifetime!
The advantage to going quickly through books is that people get through the whole Bible quicker. That's all well and good, but preachers seem to be a lot quicker to repeat a series on Colossians than tackle Zephaniah. And so people look at me strangely* when I say Zephaniah's my favourite book of the Bible and say it's hugely relevant in today's world.
*they look at me strangely anyway.
As I think I've said before, I also like the idea of not publishing your sermon series (passages and headings etc.) in advance and I think that helps with this whole business.
For one thing, you might not know what units you want to take or your titles until you've done quite a lot of study.
Also, it allows you to consider things from a number of different angles and perspectives. If you think the main thrust is insufficiently clear one week, you can always have another go next week! That way you can fit your sermons to the material rather than your material to the sermon (I feel I need to speak for around 22 mins, say, so I cram it in or stretch it out).
I think feeling free to change the length of your sermon is good to. Here at Eastbourne I've preached in ordinary main services from between 15 and 32 mins. No point in going on if you've said it and no need to stop if they could cope with come more.
In a couple of months, I'm planning to preach on the Lord's Prayer and I don't know if I want 2 or more sermons on it.
Maybe a lectionary would be easier in a way! At least you wouldn't need to worry so much about what to preach on. It's be a choice of any combination of 4 passages each week rather than the whole Bible!
Marc
Re preaching in covt renewal worship; yes, i've had similar thoughts on that, but wonder if there's more (though I'm not sure what!)
On not publishing preaching programmes, I think that's also v wise. I preached 3 on the Lord's Prayer last year and found it wasn't really enough; I'm going to preach 4 on it this year; I think one could easily preach 10 or 12 (Luther said it summarises the whole Bible!). And sometimes I think you only discover this part way through a series! So, what to do if you've published your preaching programme, but discover you can't say everything all at once on a particular passage, but there are 3 main things you want people to grasp? So, I'm with you!
And, interesting thoughts on sermon length - do you have an upper/lower limit?
I also agree with your comments re lengths of series. When Annabel was in the US, one of the pastors of her Church preached through Jeremiah (roughly a chapter per week) the other was concluding a series on the Psalter (!). again, I tend to think that variety is good.
Matthew,
Yes.
No, I don't really have an upper and lower limit. I've just bought myself a new stop watch and I'd look at my watch too.
I tend to think the service should be about an hour, but up to 1 1/2 might just be okay if it were communion.
I wouldn't go much shorter than 15 mins in a main service, I think. Tony Baker commented that day that it had been only 15 mins! And I think I'd be nervous of going much over half an hour: I'd want to sense people were with me and interested.
I think my boss would say about 25 mins would normally be about right. I don't time his sermons and he's never criticised the length of mine, I don't think.
Having sermons on the web makes it easier to see how long they were!
Paul, yes, I agree. I do think we need the big picture often and there's great value in a Bible Overview from time to time in some way.
I'm a bit nervous about meeting Zephaniah in case he asks me what I made of his book! Eph, Rm, Jn, Mk, Gen 1-11, a few Pss would be my well worn passages.
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