Preacher's prescription: Mix it up
'Most preaching is boring." There. He said it.
In front of 30 pastors, Jeffrey Arthurs acknowledged a time-honored complaint usually expressed in glassy stares, yawns, and the occasional snore. His listeners took no offense. Sitting in a classroom at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, they were among more than 400 preachers from around the country who trekked recently to the South Hamilton campus's biennial preaching conference.
The point was to improve the clergy's power with words to preach the Word. At one of several workshops, Arthurs, a former pastor and current associate professor of preaching at Gordon-Conwell, gave some simple advice: Variety is not just the spice of life but of good homiletics.
And he has a variety of tactics to suggest, starting with visual communication, and not just the movie-screen extravaganzas beloved by some megachurches. Simple hand gestures and pacing back and forth boost the impact of a narrative, Arthurs said. Flip-charts and simple props such as candles are useful reinforcements as well.
Although he's not opposed to well-done, high-tech visual aids, Arthurs offered a caveat: Use with care; technological glitches can sink the best-laid plans of preachers.
In an era in which "interactive" has become the buzz adjective describing just about everything, Arthurs also suggested dialogue - preachers interacting with their flocks by asking questions during sermon. "Our Lord was a dialogic communicator," he said, his Biblical teachings brimming with questions aimed at spurring listeners' attention and thought.
Caveat two: Throwing Scripture up for discussion in a service may invite a question as to whether the passage under consideration is true. "And by the way, people are asking that a lot more than we give credit for," Arthurs said.
Sprinkling homilies with storytelling and arts - dance, poetry, drawings - round out the quiver of arrows that Arthurs says modern preachers can aim at their flocks' attention span.
For traditionalists wary of dumbing down sermons with show biz, Arthurs has a ready reply: Scripture and Jesus did this.
The Bible is "a cornucopia of [literary] forms," he said. And "Christ took things people saw at the moment to teach," sometimes relying on props, even human ones. Remember Jesus setting a child in front of his disciples, to illustrate the behavior that would get them to heaven?
Toss in modern research showing that people learn things in different ways with the fact that "we live in a visually dominated age" of video, television, and film, Arthurs said, and the one-size-fits-all approach of sermon-as-lecture is bound to miss some listeners. "Most of our sermons basically sound the same," he said. "[We] run every text through the same sausage grinder."
For pastors whose congregations aren't ready for their spiritual leader to diverge off the path of traditional sermonizing, Arthurs suggested they test-drive different approaches in venues aside from Sunday worship, such as church retreats.
Yet judging from the comments of some of his students, working pastors are well aware of the benefits of experimenting.
The Rev. Jim Klink said he planned to use Google Earth, the virtual global map, in an upcoming sermon at Swansea's Bethany Gospel Chapel to help his congregation grasp that the Biblical city of Nineveh lay near a place well-known from modern newscasts - Mosul, a key battleground in the current Iraq war.
Ministry carries many duties, from counseling the suffering to managing budgets, but the Sunday sermon affords the most regular public opportunity for clergy to put their fingerprints on their church.
Addressing the conferees the day after Sarah Palin accepted the Republican vice presidential nomination, Dr. Crawford Loritts, senior pastor at Fellowship Bible Church in Roswell, Ga., said, "You know she didn't write all that." And collaboration in speech-writing is fine, he said.
By contrast, Loritts said, although he listens to his pastoral team's suggestions for his weekly missive, when it comes time to write, it is strictly his message.
At a conference devoted to the power of words, one speaker closed her presentation in silence.
Proclaiming "a reverence for what words cannot do," Ruth Haley Barton, president of The Transforming Center in Wheaton, Ill., asked the audience just to sit quietly with God. "Talking about the moon," she said, "is not the same thing as sitting in the light of the moon."
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