Preaching effects

In the class I teach at Indiana University,  use a classic piece on communication early in the semester to set up conversations with the students about the processes and parts of communication.

Part of the chapter is a four-part explication of what has to happen for communication to have a chance to have the effect you desire.

• You must gain the audience’s attention.
• You must use a set of “signs” that the audience can understand and that the audience interprets in the same way you do.
• You must evoke a need within the audience.
• You must give the audience a way to act or respond that is possible for the audience.

In both the chapter and the class conversation we talked about the fact that communication almost never has the effect we intend if we do not start from where our audience is. You need to start within the beliefs and values the audience already holds and  then try to move them toward the goal.

None of this is new or revolutionary, which is why I use it with sophomores.

But it does get me thinking about the sermon as an act of communication. I hear common sermon advice in here. Andy Stanley wrote a whole book that pretty much covers these same points. Rick Warren writes about the need for to evoke a felt need. Paul in Athens famously followed the bulk of this advice when he preached. Even John Wesley shows in his journals how much he thinks about where his audience is as he determines what to preach.

And yet, I am also mindful of how many voices — especially post-liberals and neo-Barthians — counsel treating the sermon as an impossibility. Will Willimon writes often about the fact that it requires a miracle for us to hear the sermon rightly.

So, I wonder about the balance between technique and Spirit in preaching — and communication in general.

When the bridge is out

You see a man driving down a road. You know that up ahead of him the bridge is out. Visibility is poor tonight, though, and he seems to be in a hurry. He may not spot the broken bridge until it is too late. What do you do? Of course you flag him down or try to get him to stop.

Much of the world, we believe in the church, is heading toward a broken bridge. And yet, many of us leave it to these night drivers to notice on their own and stop before it is too late. I suppose we comfort ourselves with the belief that our heavenly flagman will step in before the final drop. We tell ourselves that no one can hear our warnings before they are ready to hear. Oddly, we do not do the same with steel and concrete bridges.

Wesleyan soteriology teaches that people are spiritually dozing at the wheel. By the preventing grace of God, those who would otherwise be dead and blind have been stirred to the first awareness of God, but most people fight off this awareness. They drown out the still small voice of God that we call conscience and race on bleary-eyed down the road.

My experience with sleepy people is that they do not like to be jolted awake. Indeed, they are often quite angry about it. So, I hesitate to stir sleepers.

But what about that bridge?

There is a fall coming.

Is it love

To let

them

drop?

An experiment at nonviolent communication

Asbury seminary president Timothy Tennent writes about why evangelicals spend so much time and energy talking about homosexual sex.

In one sense, you won’t read anything new here. But I do find the post and the comments thread an interesting case study in the way we talk past each other. For all the times we use terms like “Christian conferencing” and take classes on nonviolent communication and speak of hearing the other person before speaking, we do not practice that very well, at least not on the Internet. This is probably due as much to the nature of the medium as it is to our intentions. The Internet is not nearly as interactive or “social” as we claim it is.

What we tend to do in “conversations” about hard issues is lob arguments at each other. Often, these arguments include all manner of statements about the thoughts, motivations, and emotions of other people. Almost always as they go back and forth they lose all contact with the point the other person was trying to express or discuss. We seek to get our point across rather than listen to the other side. We don’t want to let anything with which we disagree go unchallenged. Or at least I know that is what I do when in a difficult conversation.

So, I want to try an exercise in listening on my blog. I’m going to try to write what I hear Tennent writing in his post. My goal here is not to offer my reactions or analysis, but to say accurately, without using a lot of direct quotation, what he would recognize as the point he is trying to make. I invite you to help me listen better by pointing out where and how my summary might miss important things.

Here is what I hear him writing:

Evangelical Christians feel the need to spend so much time and energy talking about and organizing actions with regard to homosexuality because they feel that harm is done to the church when something sinful is treated as if it were holy.

I’m not sure this is a fair statement of what he wrote. In a real conversation, I could ask him. (I have posted a version of this on his blog to try to do just that.) Before I react or respond, I would want to be certain I am hearing him as he intends to be heard.

What do you think? Is this close to what he is trying to say?

Making faith concrete

One of the great blessings of my full-time job teaching writing courses at Indiana University is that I get to re-read Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath every semester. It always reminds me of important things I have forgotten or let slide.

Here is a snippet from the chapter of the book on the power of being concrete:

What makes something “concrete”? If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete. A V8 engine is concrete. “High performance” is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things. … Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. If you’ve got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren’t certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language.

When I read these words, I find church-related communication problems leaping to my mind. In the church, we specialize in abstract language. We have little choice in many cases because we are talking about invisible things. Learning how to make something abstract concrete is among the greatest challenges in teaching and preaching.

This is why Jesus taught so often in stories. When asked what he meant by the word “neighbor,” he did not pull out a dictionary. He told a story. Stories are always concrete.

The reverse of this insight is also helpful to us. Since concrete things are memorable, it is those things that come to define the meaning of abstract concepts for us. For instance, what does it mean to participate in the vital congregations initiative of the United Methodist Church? For most of us, it means collecting data and entering it on a web site every week. The concrete experience of church is bureaucracy.

You might not find my musing very interesting, but I can assure you that the book that sparks them is worth your time. It is worth your time. You’ll enjoy reading it, too.

What is holy conversation?

What do you apprehend to be more valuable than good sense, good nature, and good manners? All these are contained, and that in the highest degree, in what I mean by Christianity. Good sense (so called) is but a poor, dim shadow of what Christians call faith. Good nature is only a faint, distant resemblance of Christian charity. And good manners, if of the most finished kind that nature, assisted by art, can attain to, is but a dead picture of that holiness of conversation which is the image of God visibly expressed.

— John Wesley, “An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion”

In a seminary class, we’ve been reading a book about non-violent communication. I’m sure that is why the quote above caught me eye. Wesley refers to holiness of conversation as the image of God visibly expressed. All our talk with and to each other should reflect God’s image.

As reasonable as this sounds, though, I do wonder what it means exactly. If I take Scripture as an example, I do not have to go far to find examples of communication that are not warm and fuzzy. The Marshall Rosenberg book linked above describes non-violent communication as avoiding all evaluation and judgment. It says that when we make a request we should not demand compliance.

Clearly, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit did not attend a workshop on Rosenberg’s principles. The apostle Paul and the prophets missed the seminar.

So, I wonder what Wesley meant by holy conversation. What does it mean to say the image of God is made visible in our talk with each other?

Dick: We need to play by better rules

Dan Dick writes about being misquoted and treated poorly by critics. His final paragraph has an excellent exhortation for all of us:

As Christians, I believe we need to play by a better set of rules than the rest of the world.  Twisting words, ascribing intention, lying and trying to make those we disagree with look bad are all rules of the secular game — but we can do better.  Critics of contemporary Christianity accused us of being obtuse, and when we work so hard within the fold to attack and discredit each other, we merely fuel the fire.  There is a lot of room for us to learn to speak the truth in love.

I say, Amen.

 

You can’t tell the story too much

My wife and I spent a couple hours today going around Bloomington gathering up materials from local businesses and organizations to put into “welcome bags” for incoming college students.

As part of our rounds, we went to a bagel and bread restaurant about a block from the church. We explained to the manager what we were doing and that since we have college students worshiping downtown, especially in the off-campus worship service in a renovated movie theater, it might give their company some good exposure to include some coupons in the bag.

Her response caught us both off guard. She had no idea we had a worship service in the theater on Sunday mornings. A block from her store. For the last 8 years.

We answered her questions and told her about the great music and worship.

It reminded Lisa and I that you cannot assume people know what you are doing. Even though we thought the worship service was high visibility and certainly on the radar of people who were within a block of the worship site, this woman had no idea.

It was a great reminder that you can’t tell the story too much.

Facing Pharaoh’s magicians

I’ve been reading through the Bible four chapters at a time since July 1. Although I am no longer going to attempt to write about it every day, I have been wading into Exodus the last few days, and it has stirred up some thoughts about the church and the world that I wanted to put out there for response and reactions.

In the confrontation with Pharaoh and the ten plagues, the text reports multiple times that Pharaoh’s magicians were able to replicate the “wonders” of God, which played some role in Pharaoh’s hard heartedness. He saw his people doing the same tricks as Moses and Aaron, and it took the fear of God out of him.

I am an English major, and so unlike John Wesley I often move quickly to allegorical or metaphorical readings of Scripture. The “plain reading” as Wesley would call it is not nearly as interesting. So, for instance, I am not really interested in whether Egyptians magicians could actually turn water into blood the way God did.

But I am alert to ways the stories serve as metaphors for our condition and spiritual life.

And so I wonder if part of the challenge the church encounters this day is that Pharaoh’s magicians are so good at replicating so many of the wonders of God. Is this, in part, why Jesus downplayed the important of signs and wonders in his ministry? Wonders could be explained away. Some of them could be duplicated. With time and critical scholarship they could be discounted. The magicians are very crafty when it comes to debunking the miracles of God.

And so, after the apostolic age, the power of God was not seen nearly so much in miracles (although I am inclined to agree with John Wesley that every new birth of a dead soul is a miracle), but in humble witness and testimony of believers one to another. It was not by spectacle that the church spread, but by something more ordinary.

Of course, the urge to spectacle never departs the church. We always have those who want to be like Moses and raise our staff to summon frogs and flies and hail.

But these are exceptions, and perhaps even aberrations. When the church relies too much on spectacle, it may be a sign of weakness or a loss of Christ. It is may be a sign of seeking to go back to Egypt.

These thoughts of mine are not well worked out. They began in margin notes as I have been reading Exodus the last few days. They likely say as much about my mood and mind as they do about Exodus, so, I share them with the warning that they may be little more than that.