Put An Edge On It, Pastor

A preacher stands to his feet and walks to the pulpit. It’s the biggest moment of the week for him. This could be a life-altering experience for a lot of people, if he does it well and does not get in God’s way.

Everything–his study and praying and working throughout the week–now comes down to what he is about to do. Over the next 30 minutes, more or less, he will be prescribing remedies for what he has diagnosed in the church and community the last six days.

Pray he doesn’t drop the ball.

There are so many ways he can mess up. He can lie (by delivering someone else’s sermon and calling it his), he can almost-lie (by exaggerating and playing loose with the truth), he can offend needlessly (by getting more personal than was necessary), and he can bore the congregation to tears (by boring the congregation to tears!).

All of these are wrong and terrible, but the greatest of these may be the last: to bore the people who look toward the pulpit expecting a word from God.

Search the Bible. Do you find one boring sermon? Wherever Jesus preached, members of His audience wanted to stone him or worship him. When Paul preached, everyone chose up sides; no one was neutral, although some said, “We’d like to hear more on this subject.”

How exactly would one go about taking the greatest message in the history of this small planet and making it boring?

It’s hard to do, but some manage to pull it off.


Here is my short list on how we preachers can make the message of God dull–

1) We spend little time in studying the Word during the week, so that the sermon becomes saturated with “I think” and “something I’ve been thinking about” and “you know, my wife said to me….”

2) We spend little time praying for our people so that the sermon does not touch them in any place where they are needy or hurting.

3) We spend little time ministering to our people so we’ve forgotten where they are and how God’s Word touches them where they are living.

4) We give sermon preparation too little thought and far less prayerful study than it requires, so our points end up shallow and not well thought through.

5) We don’t love God enough, love the Word enough, or love the people enough.

6) We do things the same way all the time. We sing a hymn here, have the offering there, preach a 22 minute sermon next, and so on. Groan.

7) We never vary our delivery. The congregation learns what to expect and when, and shifts their minds into neutral until we approach the conclusion. My preaching professor, Dr. James Taylor, used to say, “The poorest preaching is the kind you do most often. Change it up from time to time!”

How many other ways are there to dullen (is that a word?) the greatest message in the world? As many as there are people. There is no end to it.

Pastor, you know that glazed over look on the faces of your congregation about halfway through the sermon? You know exactly what’s going on inside their heads. Mentally, they have left the building and are playing golf or planning their Sunday afternoon or worrying about something. You have lost them at least temporarily (and maybe permanently).

I have a suggestion. No, it’s more than that–a plea, an urgent appeal on behalf of the people who believe in you and look to you for a word from God. Consider this an SOS, a distress call from a hurting people in need of rescue.

Put an edge on that sermon, pastor. Sharpen it. You’ve been cutting with a dull axe. There’s more heat than light, more noise than production. You are killing your people with pious platitudes and mindless filler, with trite sayings and vain repetitions and stories they’ve heard more than they can count. You are filling the hour but they’re leaving church with empty bellies, spiritually.

The best way to know if you are boring your people is to consider whether you yourself are bored.

If it’s boring you, put it down in big letters: you’re killing them.

Here are my top ten ways (there must be hundreds!) to put an edge on your sermon, to give it a sharpness that both cuts and heals, that slices through their distracted minds and rivets their attention and drives home your message and ministers to their hearts.

1) Do something unexpected. You and the worship leader have planned this. At a key point in the message, he/she breaks out in song–right there on the front row where she’s sitting! Across the congregation, two other people join in, singing harmony. At the pulpit, you stand silently, not moving a muscle. When they finish, you move seamlessly into the next point.

Let your people learn from experience that our pastor is unpredictable. There is no telling what he will do next!

2) Preach something out of the ordinary.

Ask your staff (or lay leadership), “What kind of sermon have you not heard from me in a long time?” When I did that once, the minister of education said, “Pastor, our people would love to know how God healed your home. They know that a few years ago, you and Margaret were discussing divorce, and that God healed your marriage. But they’ve never heard the story.” The night we told that story–the first of March, 1981, as I recall–the house was packed out. Some members still remember it.

3) Take a risk. You were wondering whether to tell that story, use that illustration, or make that point, and you hesitated because it might offend the sensibilities of a few in the congregation? Then, tell it. Do it. Don’t be so timid. God has not given you the spirit of fear. If God wants you to do this or tell this or preach this, don’t let your shyness or timidity or fear stop you.

4) Get advice. Prepare a sermon well in advance, then send it–tape, CD, printed copy, youtube video, something!–to two or three preachers or a seminary professor you admire. Tell them you want their suggestions on how to liven it up. Emphasize that you’re not seeking compliments and if all they say is “how wonderful it is,” you will be disappointed.

You don’t have to take all their counsel, but some of it will be good.

5) Ask your wife. Ninety-percent of the time, this woman who has heard almost every sermon you have ever preached will be sharply attuned to when they are working and when they move into well-worn ruts and plow no new ground (sorry for the mixed metaphor!).

6) Involve a selected group from the staff or congregation in sermon planning. Now, this has to be done weeks before a sermon is preached, otherwise it will not work. Each person is told the sermon text enough in advance to give them time to reflect on it. Have someone take notes and type them up later.

This is primarily a brainstorming session. A confident and positive pastor can draw participants out and get great input for his sermons. The insecure and fearful pastor will not do this and even if he tried, no one would dare suggest something bold for fear of offending him.

Bear in mind, these people do not plan your sermon. You take their input, their suggestions, and their wisdom back to the study and keep it in mind as you pray and think and dig into the Word. (One final thing: The first few times you try this, you should expect their input to be of questionable help. But by the tenth time they will have seen that you’re serious about this and this is when it begins to get good!)

7) Listen to other people’s sermons. If you cannot visit them at their church–always the best way to do this–go to their website and take your pick of sermons.

Do not limit this to those champion preachers we all hear so much about. We can learn from anyone. Even a really lousy message will drive home some points you might have missed had the sermon been of world-class caliber.

8) Pray about your preaching style and delivery. No one wants you to succeed more than your Lord Himself.

9) Read outside your comfort zone. Go to the public library and spend two hours perusing the magazine section. You will find publications you never heard of dealing with problems you never knew existed for people you rarely think of.

To deliver fresh material to your people, you need fresh input.

10) Take your laptop and go to the mall. Sit in the food court at its busiest time. Now, work on the sermon. Keep asking yourself whether that young family with the crying baby would find it interesting. Look at the teenagers across the way in a world of their own. Would they get anything from your sermon?

Go to the ICU waiting room and the hospital and do the same thing. Have lunch at a greasy spoon eatery near a huge plant when the place is overrun by workers. Visit the playground during a children’s soccer game and look at your message in light of the young families crowding the sidelines. Sit in a nursing home.

Don’t be afraid to offend someone because you stepped on their sensibilities in order to reach the turned-off and distracted group who are along the back wall in the balcony.

“I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom….”

Paul is talking. What he is about to say is of the highest import, evidently. What’s coming next?

“Preach the Word! Be ready in season and out of season! Reprove! Rebuke! Exhort! With great patience and instruction.” (II Timothy 4:1-2. They didn’t have exclamation marks when this was written, but if they had, Paul would have used them.)

But whatever you do, pastor, do not lull them to sleep. Do anything but that. Offend them. Frighten them. Warn them. Teach them. Show them.

Just don’t bore them.

3 thoughts on “Put An Edge On It, Pastor

  1. Hey Doctor….why didn’t you tell me this forty-five years ago? I succeeded in some of this without knowing what I was doing. Methinks that many preachers do not want to get out of the comfort zone…when the only one they are comforting are themselves and that magnificient sermon they preached. Then, on the Monday Pastors Meeting, they can brag about the nickels and noses that came to their church!!!

  2. Joe:

    Thanks for all of the hints and insights you give me. Please allow me to share a couple of mine.

    We learned the spiritual history of the Hokey Pokey and had whole congregation up doing it one Sunday. Had a uniformed police officer stand in front of the door and direct people to our shelter house. We asked the question that if the building went away do we still have a church?

    I think we have learned to K.I.S.S. Before going to the back side of the pulpit I did quite a bit of public/motivational speaking. I learned that if you want me to speak for about 25-30 minutes that will take me about five to six hours to prepare. If you want me to talk for about an hour it will take me about two hours to prepare. If you want me to talk for two hours, I’m ready now.

  3. I’ve heard as many or more good messages at Associational meetings than I have at state or national conventions. In fact I occasionally preach my convention sermon” to whatever congregation is before me. The outline is:

    1- the world is in a terrible fix (current news)

    2 – we have the answer (gospel, Jesus, Bible, etc.)

    3 – we’re goofing off and letting the world be lost. (I original said world go to hell, but changed it after my content was objectonable,

    thinking maybe the phrase was in the censor program.)

    4 – arise, Christians, and redeem the world. Somewhere between 50-90% of the average convention/conference comes from that outline, in that order. It’s a good outline – I preach it now and then

    – but most of the time?

    The best “preaching” at most conventions and the least attended is the Bible study. The guy is a devoted scholar and expounds the Word faithfully. We probably ought to have more of this and less of the other!

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