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.

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.

 

The preacher’s rhetorical stance

What is your rhetorical stance when you get up to preach?

No, this is not a question about foot work. It is about the way we think about what we are doing when we preach.

Any act of communication can be thought of as involving four elements: the encoder of a message, the decoder of that message, the reality to which the message refers, and the signal that transmits the message. Scholar James Kinneavy wrote that we can think about the aim of any communication by thinking about which of these four elements gets the most emphasis.

Encoder-focused messages aim at self-expression. They are the screams of protest, the intense sharing of personal feelings, or the testimonials of the devoted. The primary concern is what the sender of the message wants to say. In the most extreme forms, they can lose almost all contact with decoders and reality beyond the person who created the message.

Decoder-focused messages aim at persuasion. We are bathed in these messages every day by advertisers, politicians, and everyone else who wants to convince us to do this or that. Many sermons surely fit in this category. Indeed, this strikes me as the presumed focus of sermonic communication.

Signal-focused messages aim for literary effects. Here we put the focus on the artistic elements of language or movement or visuals. Poetry is the prototypical form of signal-focused communication.

Reality-focused messages aim to accurately report on the subject of the message. Journalism and scientific communication are the exemplary forms of this kind of communication. I could also see some forms of expository preaching or preaching as proclamation about who God is as leaning toward this form of communication.

In the end, of course, most forms of communication touch on all four aspects. This cannot be avoided. All four are necessary elements of every act of communication. But it can help us think about our purpose in preaching if we consider our point of emphasis.

For instance, if the greatest emphasis of a sermon is supposed to be on the effect it has on the person who hears the spoken word, then we have to ask at everyone turn what effect we are trying to produce and how well are we producing that effect. We should be students of rhetoric and persuasion who seek to know as much as we can about those who hear our sermons and what is likely to move them.

Describing the sermon this way may strike some as too grace-less. It appears to make the effect of preaching all about technique and not at all about God’s gracious action.

Such reactions are, I think, what leads a Karl Barth to declare that preaching should be nothing more than a restatement of the things the Bible already says. He moves to the sermon as referential restatement of the Bible, leaving the effect of this preaching to God.

In the end, I find myself uncomfortable leaning to much toward the persuasive aim. I recoil at anything that feels like manipulation. This may be a fault in a preacher. But I am hoping that self-understanding will help me improve.

A new blog you should take time to read

One of the great joys of the General Conference has been the discovery of a blog by Maria Dixon.

She has been writing with great insight and wisdom about the communication issues and challenges of the conference. They are worth the read. I highly recommend her blog.

Here is a good starting point.

Each delegation, each conference, each country, and each member had a different need from this plan. For Jurisdictions like the Southeastern, it was having more say in a Church in which they seem to be footing the bills; For the Central Conference’s African Delegates it was about recognition of their growing churches and representation; For the Central Conference Europe and Asia, it was making sure that their voices would be heard and their needs addressed despite their small population. For some delegates it was the recognition that something had to be done to indicate that the church they loved was not simply going to atrophy while waiting for a CRISIS to force it into change. For many board members it was the need to protect the valuable work being done by their agencies. But for a majority of the delegates, after Saturday night’s debacle (really my favorite word this week), nobody wanted to see the bloodletting, personal, contentious, winner take all drama surface on the plenary floor today. They wanted information, a little tweaking, and they wanted to make this decision quickly (not always the best recipe for organizational change but in a democratic process–which by the way academically and practically speaking is not the best governance form for change). And that’s what Plan UMC gave them. From the rhetorical visuals that signaled inclusiveness (Ricky Henderson is a young UMC rock star); to the clear visual aids that were presented; to the carefully constructed language that offered measure reason, humility, concern for the church,  with every amendment offered a willingness to compromise, Plan UMC’s communication indicated that they indeed knew their central audience.

Drop by drop

The problems of communication are never new. And the analysis is the same, so far as I can tell, in every generation. Here’s a take from the one of the foremost communication scientists of the 1950s.

[I]f we think our audience may have a hard time understanding the message, we can deliberately introduce more redundancy; we can repeat (just as the radio operator on a ship may send an “SOS” over and over again to make sure it is heard and decoded), or we can give examples and analogies. In other words, we always have to choose between transmitting more information in a given time, or transmitting less and repeating more in the hope of being better understood. And as you know, it is often a delicate choice, because too slow a rate will bore an audience, whereas too fast a rate may confuse them. (Wilbur Schramm, “How Communication Works,” in The Process and Effects of Mass Communication)

His language is different, but his point is exactly the same as every contemporary book on preaching. The audience — or congregation — can only process so much and so fast. The wise communicator — or preacher — takes the capacity of the hearer into account as he or she determines what to say and what to leave unsaid.

Or here Schramm is on another point that you could hear from the mouths of expert homileticians:

[A] message is much more likely to succeed if it fits the patterns of understandings, attitudes, values, and goals that a receiver has; or at least if it starts with this pattern and tires to reshape it slightly. … Advertising men and propagandists say it more bluntly: they say that a communicator must “start where the audience is.”

Schramm compares the settled ideas and personality of a person to a stalagmite that has been formed over a long period by the gradual building up by drop after drop.

When we introduce on drop of communication into a person where millions of drops have already fallen and left their residue, we can hardly expect to reshape the personality fundamentally by that one drop. If we are communicating to a child, it is easier, because the situation is not so firmly fixed. If we are communicating in an area where ideas and values are not yet determined — if our drop of communication falls where not many have fallen before — then we may be able to see a change as a result of our communication.

How many a pastor who has tried to pry a recalcitrant congregation out of its consumerism or love of money or nationalism or misidentification of God with the Democrats or the Republicans would not appreciate the comparison of people of strong and settled opinions with stalagmites?

We can see why preaching often bears so much more fruit among those whose foundations have been rocked and whose ideas have been shattered by life.

We see why patience is a pastoral virtue.

I suspect I have written in this post is “new” to you, but I find contemplating this art and science of communication gives me deeper appreciation for what I do on Sunday morning. Hopefully, it helps me prepare for that task as well.