preach

My grandpa used to say that a driver’s job is getting passengers to their destination as comfortably as possible. You won't be surprised to learn he was not a taxi driver. There’s a big difference between riding with someone who knows where they’re going and someone driving like a tourist. The first scenario is a pleasant riding experience, but the second might have your body cascading throughout the vehicle as your driver makes abrupt stops and turns.

Andy Stanley compares communication with truck driving to illustrate the difference between a preacher who uses an outline and a preacher who uses a road map.* Outlines help speakers organize their thoughts, but each thought is a different idea related to the same topic. The “three points and an application” approach to preaching relies heavily on an outline. Stanley offers this outline as an example: “God wants a man to (1) love his wife (2) lead his wife (3) learn from his wife… but never ever… (4) leave his wife.” Each point is related to the topic, but unrelated to each other. The problem with this approach is that listeners don’t know what’s coming next and they miss the how one statement is connected to another.

A road map is different—it leads a preacher from their starting point to one clear destination. This method offers a simple way to introduce, support, and apply a teaching point. Essentially, the map provides speakers with the best route to their endpoint. Here’s how it works:

ME (orientation) - begin with a dilemma or problem that you are facing. 
Key question: What am I talking about? (Remember to focus on one topic that will lead to one point.)

WE (identification) - develop common ground with your audience around the same or similar dilemma.
Key question: How does this dilemma relate to each person who will be listening?

GOD (illumination) - respond to the dilemma by transitioning to the biblical text and uncovering your main point (read about how to develop a main paint here).
Key questions: How does this text relate to the dilemma? How does the main point of this passage provide a helpful alternative?

YOU (application) - challenge your audience to act on what they’ve just heard.
Key question: what step do I want my audience to take?

In my last blog, I explained the three approaches of communicating the Bible that Andy Stanley outlines in his book, Communicating for a Change. Instead of teaching the Bible to people or teaching people the Bible, Stanley is an advocate of teaching people how to live a life that reflects the values, principles, and truths of the Bible.

This objective will change how you develop your message because your goal is no longer transferring information but helping people reach a destination (Stanley compares a speaker and their audience with a truck driver taking passengers on a ride). The journey is valuable, but its main purpose to guide listeners to the final destination that a speaker has in mind. The fastest (and often easiest) way to get from one point to another is a straight line. So instead of crafting multiple points and driving people through a series of S-curves, Stanley urges speakers to pick one point and stick with it.

All of us have sat and listened to speakers who crammed too many messages into a single talk. It’s hard to follow in the moment and it’s nearly impossible to remember days later. But what’s worse is that messages like these rarely change our lives.

The messages that have stuck with me the longest are ones that were simple and action-oriented. The point was clear and the application was specific. If you don’t have a central point that you can repeat multiple times, you won’t have a message that will stick with your listeners. Your point doesn’t need to rhyme, but it should be short and memorable. Here are some examples that I've used in past sermons:

• A hardened heart is slow to listen.
• Giants aren’t always what they seem.
• What God has joined together should stay together.
• No excuse is a valid excuse for disobeying. 

It takes me a while to craft a finely-tuned point, but this short phrase is what ultimately defines my roadmap. I typically don’t establish my point until I’m at least halfway through my preparation. This means that I already have several pages of scripted content and ideas that I’m sifting through. My point helps me determine what to keep and what to delete. It can be frustrating to cut good content that I’ve already spent hours developing, but in the end, I believe this makes my message stronger.

The ability to access information has never been so easy. Most of us have the ability to find facts, opinions, and theories about virtually any topic within minutes, if not seconds. And yet, most churches schedule their times of worship around a centralized teaching time—a moment when a speaker delivers a message from God’s Word.

With so much emphasis placed on the teaching time, it’s imperative that teachers understand their primary objective and that it fits the expectations of the teaching time. When you’re given the opportunity to teach, do you think about your communication goal? What would you like to see happen in the lives of the people who are listening?

Some communicators feel that their primary objective is to teach the Bible to people. If you’ve told yourself that you want to help people gain a better understanding of the Bible, there’s a good chance you’ve made this objective your goal. Practically speaking, most of your preparation time is spent studying the text so that you can explain each verse to the people you’ll be speaking to. You measure success on whether or not you've covered the material.

Other teachers place a greater emphasis on the audience: they want to teach people the Bible. This approach requires creativity because your job is to ensure that people understand the content and will be able to remember it. If you invest time into developing alliterations and illustrations, you likely subscribe to this teaching goal.

In Andy Stanley’s book called Communicating for a Change^* (a book that radically shaped my approach to preaching), he argues that the first two methods are concerned with information transfer. The goal of each method is to help people understand and remember the teachings of the Bible. The challenge with this goal is that Bible knowledge is not the same as spiritual maturity. Your faithful treatment of the text and creative delivery style might help people recall what’s in the Bible, but if it doesn’t change their heart, what difference does it make? 

Stanley’s approach is to teach people how to live a life that reflects the values, principles, and truths of the Bible. In other words, his goal is for people to make a change in their lives instead of just thinking about something. Covering every part of the text is not most important. The most important part for him is focusing his entire message on a single point that has an immediate and measurable application.