Tuesday
Mar292011
Six Keys to Poor Preaching
Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 10:04AM I'm no expert in bad preaching, but I've done my share. I've observed that there are countless ways to preach well, but there are only a few key steps you need to master if you want to preach poorly. Anyone can do them.
- Skip on exegesis - Preaching preparation is half exegesis and half homiletics. If you want to save time, skip the exegesis and spend all your time on the homiletical side. Your schedule will thank you. (Nobody else will.)
- Forget the big idea - We've been taught that sermons should be bullets, not buckshots. It takes a lot of time and work to come up with the main burden of the text. If you want to preach poorly, then remember, clarity about the big idea of the text must be sacrificed.
- Come up with your own purpose for the sermon - Sure, there is such a thing as authorial intent. And yes, in theory, our sermon's purpose should match the text's purpose as much as possible. But if you stick to the purpose of the text, you're robbing yourself of the ability to come up with all kinds of clever messages that may not be strictly biblical - but do they ever preach! (They sell books too.)
- Prepare at the last minute - We've all tasted food that's simmered. And we've all tasted food that's been microwaved at the last minute. If you want to preach poorly, then don't allow yourself the luxury of simmering. All it takes is one or two good sermons for your people to lose their taste for microwaved sermons. We can't let that happen.
- Preach moralism - Spurgeon said, "Whenever I get hold of a text, I say to myself, ‘There is a road from here to Jesus Christ, and I mean to keep on His track till I get to Him.’” But really, have you seen some of these roads? If you want to preach poorly, it's far easier just to tell people they should be better and let them figure it out.
- Preach to everyone in general - Don't preach to the people in front of you. Preach to some generic audience. That way your sermons will be just as bad in your next church too.
This is the best advice I can give you on how to preach poorly. I'm open to learning from you. Is there anything I've missed?
Reader Comments (23)
Have a collection of stories and spiritual points that are dear to your heart, but don't relate tightly to the bullet. Don't worry too much if you don't have a place for them in the sermon. Preachers who have an illustration or a story they really love can always pound it into some corner of the sermon.Preach off a list. This will help you feel okay about having lousy transitions. It will also create the impression (at least for you and your wife) that you have a lot of content.Use all the allotted time even if you are done sooner than you planned. If you find that you are ending earlier, use a phrase like, "I want to go back to something I said earlier," or, "And, by the way, don't forget that we are in a spiritual war. . ."Point out that Americans are wrong in thinking they won the war of 1812.
I haven't preached much, maybe half a dozen times to the youth group and once to the entire congregation, but I can certainly appreciate this list of what not to do. Thanks!
Excellent post and excellent thoughts from Chris Brauns. Here are my contributions:1) Don't worry about prayer or about filling your spiritual reservoir. You've got talent, you know you do! Those people should hang on your every word. If they don't, it's just because they don't realize how blessed they are to have you as their preacher.2) you don't have to think through how you're going to explain sticky points of doctrine or practice. You're brilliant enough to figure it out on your feet. You could just avoid them altogether, but then your people wouldn't have the benefit of your insight, would they?3) Never say in five words what you can say in 25. And the bigger words the better. After all, they should know that you're the authority, right?
Another good post, Darryl. Keep them coming!
I'm so grateful that my pastor fails on every point!
Want to preach poorly? Preach without passion. Be academic, factual, accurate, exegetically correct - and unmoved. What comes from the heart goes to the heart. If the text doesn't grab you, then something is wrong - with you. Pray until your soul is stirred, and then preach.
Here's mine:If you find an important word in the text you're using, use a concordance to find other places that word is used. During your sermon, have everyone turn to at least 10 other places where the same word is used. You don't need to have a point. Just take them to a verse and say "Paul uses the same word here. That's the same word."Or better yet, don't start with a text you're preaching from. Just pick a word and look at as many uses of the word in the Bible in whatever time is allowed. Don't worry about context. Just find the word and then see if you can find something to say about what the verse teaches us about the word.
I once suffered through a well-known preacher who prattled on for 2 hours. Yep, you read that correctly, Two Whole Hours! At which point he remarked, "The Holy Spirit told me to stop half an hour ago." And then he continued on for another half hour.What is my point? If you want to preach poorly, say nothing at all worth hearing, but take two and a half hours to say it. Your congregation will think you are SO spiritual, and be back week after week to listen to you.Yeah. Right.
Here's one: Weak point? Shout louder!
Hi, this blog post runs along similar lines - you might like it:http://theurbanpastor.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/seven-things-that-make-a-sermon-rubbish/
Drive the text rather than the text driving you.
I've preached a bit, but I've discovered what I believe to be keys to poor preaching by thinking like a High School teacher when I'm listening to sermons. By these criteria, my own Pastor comes out as a good preacher, but several very big names come out as very poor.1) Use the language of your own Evangelical sub-culture, and especially the language you picked up as a seminarian. This will ensure that unbelievers don't understand a word that you say, and that other Evangelicals consistently misunderstand and misrepresent you. 2) Believe that the Church had a "Golden Age". This could be the age of the Puritans, or the Great Awakening, or Billy Sunday Revivals. Preach to re-create that age. 3) Fully believe that every biography that you have read of an Evangelical preacher is not a hagiography that does not attempt to understand that preacher as part of a particular historical context. Martin Lloyd Jones, for example, never made any mistakes. Ever. 4) Believe that the only way to preach is to break each chapter of the Bible into smaller units; then preach on these units one at a time. That's how the Apostles did it! 5) Romanticise preaching (a) : After all it's the highest calling that a man can recieve. That's what the Reformation was all about - classifying some work as sacred and some work as secular. 6) Romanticise preaching (b):Your words have super powers! Don't feel the need to explain terms like "righteousness", "sin" or "holiness". Popular culture doesn't obscure the meaning of these words. And if it does, don't worry. God will communicate their meaning to the congregation miraculously. 7) Remember. The Preacher is to be counsellor, apologist, shepherd, guide, philosopher, exegete, expositor, and many other things beside to a group of people drawn from every level of education and every kind of social background. So it stands to reason that the only person in your church who can preach effectively to everyone in your congregation is you!Graham Veale
A hint for poor preachers. Spend some time in a State High School. When you don't communicate, you'll hear about it. Very, very quickly.In fact, you may have to duck.Graham
Chris BraunsI thought the definition of a military victory was " inspires a national anthem"?Graham
Graham - - that's pretty good! And victory may look like burning the other guy's White House.Where Darryl is concerned, I always feel that I need to throw in the obligatory America / Canadian joke which leaves me either the War of 1812, something about Mounties, or hockey. I couldn't come up with anything in the latter two categories so I went with a vague reference to 1812.
1. Scholarism: Use big words that make the gospel non-understandable to Jr. High students so they can't be saved. Bore your hearers by informing them of ALL the scholarly details and debates about EVERY passage.2. Sectarianism: Proclaim men and a movement more than Christ and His Church.3. Implicitism: In the NT gospels and epistles, emphasize what you think is implicit more than what God stated explicitly.4. Micro-Visionism (Small Picture Preaching): Divide Christ's 15-minute Sermon on the Mount into 30 x 45-minute sermons. Divide Paul's 60-minute letter to the Romans into 150 x 45-minute sermons. Etc.P.S. Graham, good list!
Check out this post on the same topic by a British pastor- interesting to see the overlap:http://theurbanpastor.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/seven-things-that-make-a-sermon-rubbish/
Make sure you don't have an actual ending prepared. Let your hearers know you're about to finish up with this "one final point", and then keep jabbering for 20 more minutes. When you realize you have no suitable ending, a half-hearted altar call will do the trick.
How to preach poorly? Make it all about yourself. Talk about how awesome you are and how you amazingly live without any sin or shortfalls at all. Make sure people know that God has prepared you for this task, so they can just ignore what God says in His word, and just trust your opinion.
1. Preach your hobby horses and inject them into the text; 2. Copy another preacher's style; 3. Use the text to vent at your people; 4. Use the text to butter your people up; 5. Use the pulpit as a confessional to garner sympathy; 6. Inject your latest exegetical insight despite no reputable commentary backing up that insight.
Last Sunday our Pastor farted in the pulpit and paused but didn't even acknowledge he did it. Definitely a distraction! Everyone looked at each other. I was internally rolling in laughter inside for the rest of the message. I don't have a clue what he preached on...the wind of the Spirit?
two guidelines for poor preaching: 1/read the Scripture and then forget it during the sermon. 2/never let one paragraph lead into the next; each paragraph should make its own separate point!
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