How to preach good (the diet)

An occasional essay

Photo by Corey Young on Unsplash

This started life as the introduction to a book on preaching that I thought I might write.  I wrote this under lock-down but haven’t written any of the chapters I’m cheerfully promoting.  If enough people out there like it, maybe I’ll write some more.

I guess it’s down to us – you and me.  We need to do something about preaching, and since you’ve spent money on this book, I guess you’re interested. Of course, it may not have been your money, or you may be sneaking a preview in a socially distanced bookshop with no-one keeping an eye on you, but I expect better things of you.

I don’t think you’re a preacher, because preachers don’t want to preach good: they want to preach well. They wouldn’t read a book that can’t tell an ad-whatever-it-is from an ad-whatever-it-isn’t. That’s my trick to get to you: I want to fool you into doing something good – really good – for yourself and maybe for your preacher.

You see, I’ve read a lot of preachers recently. It’s a long story, so I may try to sneak it in later, but the bottom line is that many are desperately disappointing.  Their books cost more and say less and they keep explaining how important sermons are, how long they take to prepare, and how to fill them with things people don’t want to hear. They wouldn’t write about preaching good, they would write about How to listen up!

So, I bet you’re not one of them. But you are still reading, so maybe you’d like to hear better preaching or maybe you feel you could do better, yourself. And you can!

This book is about becoming a preacher, or a better preacher, which is how the diet got into the title.  Actually, it’s not: I put in the d-word for completely different reasons but let’s try an explanation that might work for someone paying good money, or socially distancing in a Christian bookstore, to read about preaching.  Good preaching really is about more than bread alone.  It’s about tastes and habits, about what you come to love.  It’s about that fruit in Galatians and that manna that arrived every day, just enough each day. Does that grab you?

OK, here’s the truth.  Years ago, I got free tickets for business seminars. One guru, Marshall Goldsmith, had written a bestseller: What got you here won’t get you there. He’d found his niche coaching managers whose habits had limited their careers so that they could only earn a few million a year.  Their bosses wanted more and paid Marshall to sort them out. His book is better than this – especially if you’re struggling to pay at the counter – and describes how little weaknesses that don’t matter when we start out eventually prevent us from going further, and how we need to find our next breakthrough.  It covers similar territory to Hosea’s fallow ground, but he uses stories of salvaged careers instead the of tragic backdrop of a shipwrecked marriage. (As an aside, I won’t provide Bible references: good preachers find their way around and the references are just a couple of clicks away on your ‘phone, anyway).

(Another aside: this is not the way to preach, certainly not according to the experts, so I’d better turn this story around quickly.) He was browsing through the bestseller lists and realised that diet books were ten times as popular as business books. He told us that had he known this, he would have called his book, The what got you here won’t get you there diet.  Since I hadn’t started, I realised I could add the d-word right away, so I did.

If that means that you’re in a health food shop or a supermarket while you sneak a preview, I’m sorry.

Maybe now is a good time to apologise to any preachers who may take it personally. It’s not about them. Also, those whose books I’ve read and whom I’ve e-mailed about their preaching not being quite the cornerstone they thought, or how it could take less time and still make their congregations happier.  Those e-mails weren’t a good idea (other offences may be taken into account). I’m sorry, but it isn’t about them, either.

It's not about you, it’s about me: isn’t that how the most embarrassing apologies go? However, this really is about me and I hope it’s about you, too. I’m tired of superficial preaching – in books, in pulpits, on-line or on TV. I’m tired of boring preaching, too.  I want to believe that preachers have had fun in God’s word at least once that week. I want to believe that God has excited or moved them and that they want to share that encounter with me. I don’t want to hope it will be good for me if I can’t see it was good for them.

I want preaching that calls me off the beach and into the deep.  I want preaching that teaches me to surf the chaos around me; I want preachers who love surfing, too. I want to find buried treasure, I want to be a shrewd steward, I want to love God the way God loves me.

How about you?

Good!

Where do we start?

Jesus preached to the most democratic and choosy audience in the world: the crowd. People stayed the day and late into the afternoon just because they wanted to; they packed in so closely that he had to push off from the shore to be heard.  This is not what we are used to, so what can we learn from Jesus about bringing God’s word to the world around? There must be a pattern here – let’s find it!

What can we say about turning your preachers into better preachers or becoming a better preacher yourself? The second part is much easier than the first, since changing others is hard, especially when your main aim is so selfish in wanting to waste less of your own time. So, let’s just drop the bit about helping your preacher preach better.  If we get more people talking about good preaching, maybe your preacher will catch on, too.

The bit about becoming a better preacher I can help with, so we’ll explore five P’s – passion, prayer, prophecy, preparation and presentation, which includes finding your own voice. You might be having doubts now, as I am myself, about whether something this vague can fairly be called a How to book.

The trouble is, How to books sell much better than those that explain, Why you shouldn’t have started from here. This fatal flaw may be overcome by ignoring it, as some of the best How to books do. If you sit down, spanner in hand, with Adrian Newey’s How to build a car (I’d accidentally written, ‘how to build a carb,’ so the diet force is still strong), you have sad times ahead. As a manual it is a flop, for he freely confesses that he has failed to master even the basics of computer aided design.

What he does is to share his passion about keeping a car on curvy roads when driven by a maniac at insane speeds, pursued by, and pursing, fellow maniacs. He invites you to share the experiences that make most sense to him as he looks back. There is technical content when he talks about cars with upside down wings that are constantly being driven into the ground. But Where I learned to stick cars to the road and how I chased that dream is not so snappy as a title.

It's the same with Peter Crouch’s How to be a footballer – desperately deficient as a training guide! You might wonder if he has any experience at all with raw talent until you realise that it’s not that kind of book.  He is eloquent in elation (scoring headers) and dejection (being sent off) but says little about what it takes to achieve either.

This isn’t a How to book, then, in the strictest sense, but it copies the best How to books out there, except it’s not as funny or insightful or written by anyone famous.

5Ps: passion, prayer, prophecy, preparation and presentation

Most people want a formula, so here are five Ps. Other writers will emphasise other principles, but you just need a set that work for you.

Most of our preaching is devoid of passion, driven more by fear of getting it wrong or ambition to make an impact. Where is the passion, the sheer infectious love of something that lights up the listener? Of course, anger is a passion, but it can drive us anywhere, and, in our world of virtue signalling, we’ll need to talk about synthetic passions, too, that cost us little and give back even less. Chapter 1 would be about passion had I actually written it.

Long ago when my hair was longer than my wrinkles, our holiday group pitched up at a village church, overwhelming the congregation. The speaker was clearly filling in, with desperation and denial deeply etched into his talk. Yet he taught me about passion for he was quietly crazy about his garden and his family. The joy of growing and the warmth of relationship shot through that Sunday morning, and it is hard for me to think about God as gardener or Father without recalling that reluctant preacher.

The trouble is, there is no recipe for passion.  Had our hapless stand-in found himself in front of a review panel he would have been panned for lack of structure. But he had something else. Passion is not about your talk – it’s about you. Over Christmas, my wife and I watched a documentary on Joan Collins and at one point there was a shot of her boarding (or leaving) an airliner in the ‘50s.  I blurted out, ‘I think that’s a Constellation,’ to which my wife replied, ‘That’s my boy!’ All too easily distracted.

There is no tidy framework for prayer either and my prayer life is a bit like my life of passion – lacking focus (although lockdown is helping). To get better at anything, we need to want to get better and have a method for improvement.  Passion and prayer are the midwives that bring better sermons to birth. Passion drives us through disappointment and failure, while prayer opens a channel for guidance. Many preachers seem to make little use of James’ advice to ask when they need help (or else they don’t know they need help). If we have a problem with preaching, we also have a problem with prayer: chapter 2 (again, aspirational).

What we call the gospel is a tricky set of ideas, even for the first disciples. With the Holy Spirit’s help, they preached coherently and wrote down the basics clearly, but not simply. Most preachers seem to struggle with the basics and are forced into spectacular leaps or lapses beyond that.

But our problem is not just with novices.  When was the last time you heard anything on the parables that made credible connections between the world Jesus came from and the world you live in now? When did you last come across anything that didn’t treat Jonah like a fractious imbecile, or his God like an arbitrary despot? Back to James and asking for wisdom: where the preaching is poor, we have to ask about prayer.

Passion… Prayer… What about the prophetic? You may have thought the plan was looking good but are having doubts, now that I’ve mentioned this p-word. Let me get in an early apology to those who identify as prophets, since they will be offended that I think our prophets, like our preachers, could do better. But it’s not about them.

Prophecy is back in vogue, which is a blessing and a bit of a problem. It’s a blessing because good preaching brings God’s word to God’s people, and sensing what God wants to say is central to any prophetic gift.  The up-front prophets I’ve met or read are courageous and insightful, if brash and overconfident at times. I also find them reluctant to acknowledge any downside in their resurgence, and I struggle with their elaborate frameworks of what prophecy is and isn’t, since the frameworks seem to exclude those who exercise similar gifts but in different ways.

During a recent clear out, I found a letter we received from an old boy at our previous church who is now having a lot of fun in glory. As I reread it, I realised how many key issues of the past 18 years he had put his finger on.  His daily prayers started before daybreak, and I suspect his intercessions are still being answered, but he fulfilled no formal role in our fellowship. We might talk about prophets who fit and those who don’t in chapter 3 (this item is currently out of stock).

Then, more practically, there is preparation (possibly chapter 4). My take is that most preachers prepare for too long in the week leading up to a sermon and too little before that. While I’m venting about how much pastoral care is sacrificed to preparation, perhaps I should add that I’m against scripts: if you plan to read from the pulpit, find a better reader or read a better sermon.  If you want to preach, learn to speak freely and directly to whoever will listen. You can!

So why do so many preaching books focus on how much time preparation takes? Returning to Jesus’ example, it is clear that a lifetime of preparation – not least in memorising Scripture and, as a child prodigy, in discussion with the scholars of the day – went into a few years of ministry but there is little evidence of what most preachers advocate: no reading other preachers or secluded hours of scribbling. How did that work?

Critical to any communication is listening: what are people saying and what is God saying? There is good evidence that Jesus did both and that out of the mix came startling teaching that made people stop and listen. This prophetic leap makes the compelling connection between what is going sadly wrong and what it will take to make it right. You can’t always plan that, which is why is helps to spread that background reflection and prayer over as long as you possibly can.

But once it all clicks, you can speak. That piece – the presentation – is all about having something to say and ensuring that the way you do so, makes it stick. I’ve seen slick and effective preaching with a smooth slide pack.  I’ve watched business gurus, with their sleeves studiously rolled up, putting up handwritten notes for spellbound audiences, and that has worked, too. And I’ve listened to stuff that no graphics could ever rescue. Without content, the preacher is dumb.

Many preachers I listen to still lack a voice of their own. I’m not talking about those who effect an accent or mimic their favourite speaker, I’m talking about being easy in your own skin.  For some it will be telling stories, for others it will be diving deep into the text for fascinating finds. Some will be funny, others will be loud, some will be measured.

Whenever the person in the pulpit is not the same person you normally chat to, you may ask if they have found their voice as a preacher. There are thoughtful, insightful people, who go all flippant on a platform; there are cheerful people who try out the most embarrassing joking from the front; there are shirt-sleeved philosophers who settle for the tritest of explanations when it comes to a homily. What is going on?

Part of this is down to congregations and what we expect.  An African friend told me that whenever he spoke in white churches, people would give him tips on how to preach, afterwards. He was quite frustrated because he did plenty of preaching before he arrived in the UK but somehow that wasn’t appropriate anymore.

But it’s also about learning to be content with what you are. One church where we worshipped was strong on lay leadership, teaching and preaching. There was a quiet chap who came into his own late in life with funerals: everyone (or everyone’s surviving spouse) wanted him to take their funeral.  Despite his dry (sometimes wicked) sense of humour, his serious appearance and soft delivery won them over when it came to memorials or cemeteries, and he became the crème de la crem.

Working out your style and being comfortable with it is key to attractive preaching – especially, if like me, you believe in team ministry, where preaching and teaching are well organised and liberally shared. That’s chapter 5, if I write it.

And then we can wrap it all up – chapter 6 – again, if anyone likes this enough to ask for more.

OK? Let’s go!

Well, maybe not: first a few words about this book. I know you shouldn’t do this in sermon – reach a snappy end-point and then dive back into details – but I thought you might like to know how to get the most out of this book, without having to read all of it.

It may be that what I’ve written above is all you need to read. Maybe you can close the book now, smile at those queuing patiently behind you, or return the book to its shelf and socially distance somewhere that will cause less commercial discomfort to those running the Christian bookstore you are about to leave.

The message is simple: passion, prayer, prophecy, preparation and presentation are keys that can unlock your path to better preaching, as is understanding yourself. Sometimes these ideas will unlock a cabinet stuffed with things you need to know, sometimes they open doors to better places to learn. You might see this introduction as a keyring.

If a set of keys is all you need, off you go to start trying locks all over the place. I’m sure you’ll have fun. The main messages will have cost you just over 3,000 words of reading time. Bye!

If you like something a little more methodical, and if there is any interest, I’ll try to keep each of the main chapters – on passion, prayer, prophecy, preparation, and presentation – to around 5,000 words, each. If that gives you enough to set out on your journey, it will have cost you maybe 30,000 words of reading time. If you want more, maybe we’ll sit down and write the rest together. That will cost you a lot of time…

So, thank you for reading.  I don’t know if we’ll meet in the next chapter. If we do, I hope you’ll get some good ideas about better preaching and some helpful insights about your natural style.

Most of all, I hope you have fun in God’s word and get to a place where you are more fulfilled in sharing it with others.

Enjoy…