Preaching that engages everyone

It could be said that, at present, we tend to hear two distinct types of sermons preached in churches.

1) The first happens most weeks, and, in its style, content, language and application, it assumes that almost everyone present is a Christian. Occasionally the preacher may tag on a line of application at the end, prefaced with, “…and if you’re not a Christian here…” (…but whether any such people are still listening by that point is questionable?!)…

2) The second type of sermon is delivered during the occasional ‘Guest Service’ at certain times of year (Christmas and Easter); or during occasional special services (baptisms, weddings and funerals etc); or during a specific evangelistic outreach event. In this type of sermon the preacher speaks in such a way that seems to assume that almost everyone present is not a Christian. Often, the majority of the congregation (who are already believers) has ‘switched off’, uninterested, presuming the sermon is not for them. I see in this approach at least a couple of mistakes:

Firstly, while I am not against Guest Services per se, (and, indeed, I speak at many of them), we can’t always predict when our friends are going to want to come to church or be available for our Guest Service’s chosen date. Wouldn’t it be better in terms of access if we felt they could come along any week, not just on certain occasions?

Secondly, we often assume that the best form of follow-up to a Guest Service is partaking in an evangelistic course like Alpha or Christianity Explored. While such courses do have great value, wouldn’t it also be good if people felt they could just keep coming along to church? Once people have taken the step of attending once, the easiest thing might possibly be to keep coming along. Some people might actually find coming to church (where they don’t have to speak and can just listen) less intimidating than going to a discussion group.

At this point some may object and point out the the gathering of the local church is primarily to build up believers - not to do evangelism. However, it seems fairly clear from the Bible that we are to expect unbelievers to be present in our gathering and we should be sensitive and hospitable to them. (See 1 Cor 10:32-11:1; 13:13-14:1; 14:23-25).

Is there a way that we can preach every week to engage everyone? I think there is.

However, before I give some suggestions as to how this can be achieved, it may be worth anticipating two objections to such a way of preaching:

1)

-‘…but no non-Christians come to our church anyway!’

This may well be true, but it doesn’t have to remain the case. Tim Keller helpfully put it this way: “If we preach as if there are non-Christians in our audience, then, even if there aren’t, there soon will be. But if we preach as if there aren’t non-Christians in our audience, then even if there are, there soon won’t be!”

Waiting for the make-up of our audience to change before our preaching style changes is to put the metaphorical cart before the horse. If we want Christian people to bring their friends to church, then simply exhorting them to do so will have little impact. What will be far more effective is making sure that church is somewhere that they would want to bring their friends!

Over last summer, as the UK emerged from lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, our church commenced a Sunday evening service called “Church At The Barn”. For four months we ran the service every week, working hard to make both the format of the service and the style and content of the sermon such that those with no previous church connection at all would feel welcome and included.

By the end of the summer one of the church leaders commented that there had been more new people coming to church that summer than at any other time in recent years. However, what was interesting was that it actually took a number of weeks after the start of the venture for new people to be seen attending. This was partly due to the fact that it takes time to build confidence among existing Christians that church is something they can happily invite their friends to. Such confidence can take months to build ... but can equally be lost in a week. People want to know that the service wasn’t just good this week… but that it’ll be consistently so, and that they won’t feel embarrassed when their friend does decide to come along!

2)

‘…but Christians need to get fed too!’

This objection is often based on a couple of false assumptions. Fundamentally, it assumes that we can either a)edify Christians or b)evangelise unbelievers; yet I believe we can do both in one sermon. Secondly, it assumes that the deep and practical needs of Christians and non-Christians are mutually exclusive – when, actually, what we ALL need is… the gospel! The gospel is not only the draw that kindly leads us to faith… but it is also the motivation for the way we are now to live, as new creations.

Indeed, there are two good reasons why I feel we can attempt to do both:

Firstly, those who are not yet believers don’t just want to know how to become a Christian. They also want to know what it’s like to be a Christian. (This is one of the reasons for the success of the Alpha course, as it not only explains the heart of the gospel but provides a window into what the Christian life might look like, in the context of experiencing both hospitality and community.)

Secondly, when Christians hear us preachers articulating the Bible in a way that is understandable and persuasive to those who are not yet believers, and hear how we might anticipate and answer their objections and questions, it can help train them to do the same, through the rest of their week, with those they seek to spend time with.

So… how do we preach in a way that engages everyone?  Here are eight suggestions that you may find helpful:

1)    Grab people’s attention.

Often in our preaching we can assume that everyone is interested in what we are about to say. We ourselves might have spent all week thinking about and chewing over the chosen Bible passage, but many people in our audience may have even already forgotten what the text, which may have been read earlier in the service, was about. We need to work hard, especially at the beginning of our sermons, to engage people and give them a reason to listen.

Simply saying, “Isn’t it so exciting that we get to look at Deuteronomy chapter 6?!” is not going to help. Many congregants may not be very excited about that prospect at all. (It is worth noting that, in my experience, I have found that it is often those who have been in church for years who need persuading to engage at this point, not just those who have never been to church).

The key here might be to start with application. Often in our preaching we feel that this element should come at the end. However, if we wait till the end of our sermon to give any indication of the practical application of what we have just said, then many people will likely have already quietly ‘turned off’. Why not start by at least hinting at how the sermon will connect to people’s lived experience? Is there a common question that it will help answer? Or an issue of contemporary relevance that it will speak to? Or maybe a basic human desire that it will address?

Once we have engaged people and given them a reason to listen, they are more likely to stay with us, as we then unpack the text of scripture, allowing God to speak through us.

2)    Assume nothing.

In the popular TV show ‘Clarkson’s Farm’, one of the characters, a tractor driver by the name of Caleb, is often confused by his boss’s biblical analogies. During the weeks of continuous heavy rain, Jeremy Clarkson talked about it being a “flood of biblical proportions”, only for Caleb to look blankly at him – clearly having never heard the story of Noah and the flood. (Well, why would he?)

A recent survey showed that, when asked, people are far more likely to be able to name the four houses of Hogwarts, in the fictional world of Harry Potter, than they are to be able to name the four gospels. In a society which is increasingly Biblically illiterate we need to work hard at not alienating people, by not assuming prior knowledge of anything to do with the Christian faith. It is also easy to speak of Biblical stories or characters as if everyone knows about what and who they are. However, if we do that, then what we communicate unwittingly, to many people present, is that we are not speaking to them. They could be excused for switching off.

3)    Keep it short.

Many people ask what the optimum time for a sermon is. In a sense, there is no right answer. (If a five-minute sermon is boring then that is already five minutes too long). If you can engage your whole audience for half an hour… then, fine (provided that this length is in keeping with other parts of the worship service). It is not so much how long the sermon is… but how long it feels …

However, it’s important as a preacher to remember that many people have a much shorter attention span than people may have typically had twenty years ago. We regularly assume that individuals can take in more than they actually do. Just because people haven’t fallen physically asleep it doesn’t mean that they are still listening.

The average TED Talk is 15-20 minutes long, and, as a guide, I would suggest that this is probably worth sticking to. At ‘Church At The Barn’ we tried to keep every sermon under 15 minutes – quite a challenge for those of us more inclined to speak for half an hour… or more.

How can we preach shorter sermons? One answer is to preach on shorter Bible passages. During our summer experiment we preached through Haggai and Malachi – four months to preach through six short chapters! So often, the passages we have traditionally been expected to preach on are so long that there is no way we can do them justice in the time available. (Another problem with preaching on big chunks of scripture is that we often end up preaching more about how the passage is structured than what it actually says.)

We also need to learn to be ruthless and take out content that doesn’t serve the main purpose of our sermon. Also, to resist the temptation to say everything we now know about this passage. Just as the vast majority of the substance of an iceberg remains hidden beneath the surface, so should the vast majority of our preparation be.

Because, obviously, we can’t say everything there is to say about a particular passage, it can be helpful to point people to resources where they can go deeper and find out more about something, if they so desire. A book / online talk / midweek Bible study / after-service Q and A, etc.

4)    Try to find Biblical ideas and metaphors which connect.

We can often assume that if a Bible word is familiar to our audience, then we don’t need to explain it. However, words and concepts can mean different things in different cultures.

When I started out as an evangelist, I often adopted the gospel outline, ‘Two Ways to Live’, as a way of explaining the Christian message. It seemed so simple – God is King, Sin is rebellion… and so on. What’s hard about that? I assumed that everyone knew what the words ‘king’ and ‘rebellion’ meant.

However, even if people do understand a word, it doesn’t mean they understand the concept that lies behind it. Our idea of a monarchy today in the UK is vastly different to what it would have meant to people living 3000 years ago, in the Middle East.

Hence, over time, I realised that talking about sin as rebellion against authority rarely connected with my audience in the West. So, I had a choice – I could work harder to explain the concept, so that it was understandable, and persuaded my hearers; or I could focus on other metaphors that connected more easily with them, at this cultural moment in time. After all, ‘rebellion’ is only one way the Bible describes sin… and to say that the title ‘King’ is the sum total or even the primary way that God is described in the Bible is wrong.

5)    Anticipate the questions which people might ask.

The danger, especially for Christians working in full-time ministry, is that we can spend most of our time talking with people who are also believers. Because of this we are very good at anticipating the kinds of questions that believers ask when they come to any given part of the Bible. However, the kinds of questions that other individuals may ask of the text can be very different. A believer may readily accept claims of the miraculous, and not question certain moral commands, but an interested reader or enquirer probably won’t. We therefore need to work hard at anticipating the kinds of questions which different people may have of the text that we are speaking on. This doesn’t mean that we are obliged to give a full-orbed apologetic for the reliability of scripture every time we speak, but it does mean we at least show that we appreciate the question, even if it is simply to refer people to other resources / opportunities to delve into those question-prone areas more deeply. However, there may well often be the scope to say something more in response at the time...

I recently read Lydia McGrew’s excellent book ‘Hidden in Plain View’.  It looks at how the undesigned coincidences in the gospels and Acts show their reliability. Recently when preaching on Mark’s gospel I found it helpful to address some of these as we got to certain passages – the calming of the storm (Mark 4:35-41) and the feeding of the five thousand (Mark 6:30-44). It certainly wasn’t a full defence of the reliability of the texts, but it was a short aside to whet people’s appetite to look into this in more depth, and at least raise the possibility that this could be a reliable and consequential historical account.

One of the ways to learn to do this best can is by spending time not just preaching to people who are not yet believers, but by chatting with them one to one, and studying the bible together openly. As we learn to communicate better with individuals we will become better at doing the same publicly. Before starting Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, Tim Keller spent a good deal of time engaging with New Yorkers on a personal level, so that he could better understand the questions and objections to Christianity that they held, and consider how to address these, Biblically.

6. Be careful how we address people.

It is very easy to speak about our hearers as those who are or aren’t Christians. Of course, this is true… but using this language as we speak can actually be quite unhelpful. Saying ‘If you’re not a Christian here this morning…’, (or similar) can alienate the very people we are trying to speak to. More than that, many unbelievers may already regard themselves as ‘Christian’. Bear in mind that ‘Christian’ is only one term used in the Bible to describe those who have come to experience a new life in Christ.

Perhaps more helpfully we can use the language of the text we are speaking on to help us here. For example, if we are speaking about the forgiveness of God, we could say something like: ‘Maybe you have already come to experience the forgiveness of God…’, and then, ‘… but maybe you’re not sure that you have yet…’.

7. Be careful which illustrations you use and which people you quote.

I have heard so many sermons where the preacher quotes people like Charles Spurgeon, George Whitfield, Tim Keller or Becky Pippert, with no word of explanation. The fact is that even many regular church-goers may have no clue who these people are, and new people almost certainly won’t have any idea. You don’t have to scrap the quote, but just also explain who the person is… ‘…the 19th Century Christian preacher’, ‘…the New York pastor’, ‘…the well-known Christian author and speaker’, etc.

Similarly, when we use books, films and TV programmes as illustrations, we do well to bear in mind that many people won’t even have read or watched the illustrations we refer to, so some explanation may be needed. If the point can’t be made without a long retelling of the story… or a plot spoiler… then - maybe - don’t bother!?

8. Get feedback.

After preaching, we preachers can find ourselves quite vulnerable, emotionally. What we long for is encouragement, and it is wonderful when we receive it… but at some point, probably not straight away (unless you are about to immediately preach the same sermon again and the suggestion can be easily implemented), it is helpful to have constructive criticism.

As a preacher I want to improve, but if people only ever say my sermons are great then I may not know how to. So it is good to seek out those whose judgement we trust, and get feedback; both on what went well, and ways that we could maybe do better. It might be good to get a range of feedback – especially from people who are different from us in some way – they may see things that we haven’t been able to.

Here is a radical idea: – don’t just ask Christians what they think! Ask those who aren’t yet believers, and even those who are openly sceptical or unfamiliar with Christianity and church.

I remember speaking at a mission event, and, after the talk, all the Christians raved about how clear and persuasive I had been. This was kind, but I knew there was a number of their guests at the event, and, as far I knew, none of them had professed faith, or even signed up for the follow-up course. While the talk had sounded clear and persuasive to my Christian friends… it apparently hadn’t been so for others in the room – and these were the very people the talk was prepared to address!... So, now, at similar events, I love chatting with people who are not yet believers after the talk, and I ask them what they honestly thought of it. (If they’re not British there is often a higher chance they will indeed tell me honestly!). This can be mutually helpful.

Conclusion

The Australian evangelist, John Chapman, used to quip about preaching that “the first fifty years are the hardest!”. When he reached an age where he had been ministering for longer than that, he changed it to say that it was actually the first seventy! Preaching is hard work; we may never preach a ‘perfect’ sermon, and, wonderfully, God can use imperfect sermons… but this should never be an excuse for not trying to get better at communicating God’s word. While my experience says that God can use bad sermons, it also tells me that he more typically works through good ones! So, let’s work as hard as we can to preach in a way that engages everyone…and glorifies him.