Preaching to Be Heard

Delivering Sermons That Command Attention

Lucas O'Neill

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781683592372
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

"If a sermon is preached in a church and no one is listening, does it make a difference?" There are many expository preachers who forego dynamic delivery and many dynamic preachers who lose sight of faithfully communicating the biblical text. Too often preachers feel they have to choose one or the other. But dynamic delivery and faithful exposition are not mutually exclusive. In Preaching to Be Heard, Lucas O'Neill shows pastors that presenting engaging sermons that are biblically focused is not an impossibility. In fact, the key to commanding attention lies in the text itself. Rather than relying on tricks or gimmicks, his approach to sermon writing focuses on maintaining tension throughout while sticking close to the biblical text. Using practical examples and a step-by-step method, O'Neill shows pastors how relying on the inherent anticipation within Scripture can lead to sermons that are powerful--and heard.

CHAPTER 1

Preaching That Commands Attention

I first felt the pressure to preach sermons that “work” when I served at an inner-city mission ministering to at-risk teens in Chicago. Virtually every one of them struggled with fatherlessness, sexual abuse, and the pressures that come with rampant violence in their neighborhood. One thing about these kids—they had no poker faces. They lacked the decorum to look tuned in when they were not. They might talk to each other, stare at the ceiling, fall asleep—any number of clear signs that they were disengaged. The moment my preaching did not hold them, I could see it on their faces. From that time into the earliest days of my current pastorate, I sought to add to my sermon whatever I thought was needed to command attention.

I adopted an almost gimmicky approach. I didn’t abandon expository preaching—I still preached the point of the passage and stayed with that passage throughout the sermon. But I thought I needed more than that. In essence, I was saying, “You’re right, guys, the Bible is kind of boring. But I’ll be such a dynamic speaker that you will learn to put up with the Scripture portions of my message and still be engaged. You’ll walk away saying, ‘That was good. That guy is good.’ ” Sadly, that is sometimes the feedback I received. That I was good. They enjoyed me. I learned how to get them to listen, so I assumed I was doing well, but I wasn’t. It took some time before I realized what the problem was.

My problem wasn’t that I wanted the attention of my listeners. It is right for a preacher to want to be heard. Of Jonathan Edwards’s preaching, John Piper explains that he “could no more imagine speaking in a cold or casual or indifferent or flippant manner about the great things of God than he could imagine a father discussing coolly the collapse of a flaming house upon his children.”8 It is no badge of honor to preach boring sermons. Scripture is white-hot with the intent to rescue, to transform, and to change—how can we preach any portion of it in a cold, dutiful way? But if we begin with the desire to be heard, then we may clutter the sermon with elements that are meant to attract attention but actually serve to detract from the message. My problem wasn’t that I wanted to command attention. My problem was the way I went about securing it.

THE TROUBLE WITH WINNING ATTENTION

Like me, you may have tried desperately to win attention in the wrong way. As I prepared sermons, I began to plug my outline full of attention-winning devices. I would literally lose sleep over this: “If I am not entertaining every few minutes or so, then I will lose them, and if I lose them they won’t know this text.” This was not a conscious thought, but it was the idea that was driving me. My number one desire was for my listeners to understand God’s word, but I also wanted them to listen! Both desires were noble, but my strategy for gaining attention was tiring and, ultimately, not as effective as it could have been. I could spend hours burning most of my creative gas coming up with one home-run analogy only to win their attention for a moment. I needed something better, and so did they.

Most of us have our favorite attention-grabbing devices that we tend to gravitate to over and over. We might wander up and down the aisles because we believe movement is key to engagement. We might use props, images, personal experiences, funny stories—anything to keep the audience from getting bored. This is why I spent so many late nights toiling over my next analogy—illustrations where I would draw a parallel between a life experience and a point from Scripture. This was my device of first choice. Over time, some came to expect these fresh analogies in every sermon. It became a “thing” in my preaching. Sometimes after church I would receive a compliment on how engaging the illustrations were. I remember feeling partly glad that my preaching was appreciated. I also remember feeling slightly conflicted. Was the passage the highlight of the sermon or was my analogy? Have they come to merely expect analogies from me? My attempts at gaining attention were becoming a distraction, not only for them, but for me as well.

Not only can we become slaves to rhetorical devices but we can become blind to their real effect. Winning attention is really not difficult, but clearly some methods are better than others. If I shake the pulpit angrily, most people will snap to attention. But what have I compromised? If I toss bits of candy into the audience, few would remain inattentive. But what am I communicating? These may seem like extreme examples, but it is common for speakers to gain attention through tactics that are irrelevant to the message. The trouble is not gaining attention; it is getting the audience to place their attention on your message that is the challenge. Thus, for the preacher, the goal is not to win attention but to focus it on the import of the scriptural text. Someone may approach us afterward to encourage us by saying, “That was great! You had my attention the entire time.” We must not be content with such compliments. If we ask what the passage was about and they only have a foggy sense of it, we have failed in our goal as preachers.

Another reason some methods are better than others is because many of the commonly used techniques are only momentary in effect. The typical examples used in communication textbooks do not gain attention that persists. We are taught to insert a humorous anecdote here or some startling statistics there. Maybe a bizarre fact or an intriguing quote. Some encourage variation in pitch, pace, and tone. All of these are good because they offer on-ramps for the listener’s attention to your message—they are not necessarily gimmicky. But they usually do not prompt listeners to adhere very long in their attentiveness. This is because these examples promote a punctiliar approach to gaining attention—appearing in spots throughout instead of a stream.

The thinking goes like this: every five minutes or so the average person’s attention dwindles and must be revived. Therefore, the speaker must insert a rhetorical device aimed at gaining attention (a joke, a prop, stepping away from the podium, and so forth). The speech or sermon is dotted with points of focused attention like this:

So not only is it a challenge to think of ways to bring the attention of the audience to the actual message, but it also must be done every few minutes. As soon as you have your audience’s attention and begin to move on with the actual content of the exposition, it begins declining until the next point of attention. This approach relies on gaining involuntary attention. Involuntary attention is easy to gain because it is passive. Anything can arrest it. A sudden sound or sudden silence. Motion, light, colors—this kind of attention is instinctive but only lasts a moment.

Voluntary attention, on the other hand, is attention that is intentionally given to the speaker by the listener. The listener makes an internal decision: “This is interesting; I’m going to listen to this.” The attention that the audience lends involuntarily must be converted into sustained interest.9 That is, involuntary attention only lasts for a moment, whereas voluntary attention is sustained by the listener.

What I am looking for as a communicator is a way to capture attention in a more durative sense. I don’t want attention to come in spurts or like blips on a screen. I want to win attention early on and keep it so that it looks more like this:

To gain sustained engagement, we need to use one primary method for commanding attention that serves as a constant throughout the sermon, buttressing along the way the attention that was won at the outset.

I’m not saying we should completely abandon traditional ways of winning attention. We can still employ humor, anecdotes, and the like. In fact, it is good communication to vary the landscape in this way. But illustrations and quotes function best as moments of clarity rather than moments of attention-winning. In other words, if the illustration or quote truly helps the listener understand the point you are making, then you should use it. If it doesn’t, it is simply a device for attention and you don’t need it. The devices typically used for gaining attention should instead be used for the purposes of exposition. We ask, “How can I help them understand this difficult point?” or “What would really serve to drive this home in their hearts?” rather than, “What can I insert here to get them listening again?” The listener can be engaged continuously throughout the message, and humor and anecdotes can now be used solely to enhance the clarity of that message.

In the effort to communicate, we must work at preaching in a way that commands attention. A scattering of rhetorical devices across the sermon doesn’t sustain attention for the whole sermon, but there is a way to command and sustain attention. This way, I believe, is not only more rhetorically effective, but more sharply focuses an audience’s attention on the content of the exposition. The key to this approach is the built-in anticipation that is latent in every text of Scripture. We keep the listener’s focus on the passage by unveiling the tension that the passage will resolve.

HOW TENSION WORKS

Tension is the suspense that is generated when someone discovers there is something of interest that will soon be revealed. The tension experienced by a sermon’s audience is one of expectation and anticipation. This is not to say that the listener is necessarily made to feel tense. Tension is simply the desire for resolution.

If you receive a phone call from a friend who starts with, “Hey, I’ve got great news for you!,” you’re going to experience tension. If your friend delays even for a second or two, you will likely ask, “Well? What is it?!” There is tension in the ultrasound room when expecting parents are waiting to hear from the nurse whether they are looking at a boy or a girl on the monitor. Children feel tension when they see wrapped presents under the tree. They want to open them so bad. It’s a good tension. It’s a hopeful anticipation that something needed or desired is coming.

Expert orators have been capitalizing on this since the dawn of rhetorical philosophy. The renowned Greek rhetorician Isocrates understood how tension works even at the level of the sentence. In order to press the advantage of suspense as much as possible, Isocrates popularized the use of the periodic sentence. Richard Katula explains: “In a periodic sentence suspense is maintained through several members until the meaning of the sentence is completed at the point of climax.”10 This would be achieved by withholding the subject and verb until the end of the sentence. An example for a preacher might be: “While we were yet sinners, when we rejected God, indeed when we still grieved him, Christ died for us.” There is, within the sentence, a kind of buildup to the climax that the subject and verb provide. For Isocrates (and the many that would follow his style, most notably Cicero), the periodic sentence was highly effective because the stacking of ideas develops expectancy in the audience that there will be a resolution in the end.11

If suspense can function in the unfolding of a sentence, it can work across an entire speech. Just as a sentence may provide a succession of ideas culminating in a now-weightier subject and verb in the end, so may a speech or sermon provide a succession of movements climaxing in a now-weightier resolution in the end. If listeners can anticipate something coming, they will lend their attention.

Let’s think about this from the listener’s perspective for a moment. You are trying your best to pay attention to a sermon, but the preacher drones on and on with no end in sight. You want it to end because you really don’t care where it is all going, if it is even going anywhere at all. It is just difficult to stay attuned. In their book Effective Public Speaking, Joe Ayres and Janice Miller point out one of the reasons we fail to pay attention to a speaker: our intentional decision to label the speech uninteresting.12 At some point along the way, we decide we are not able or simply not going to follow. If someone is laborious to listen to, most of us will not have the energy to force our attention for a long period of time.

Ayres and Miller then share tips on how to become a better listener. One such tip is for you to essentially generate suspense on your own while the communicator is speaking. They offer the following advice: “Anticipate. As you listen, you can think about what the speaker is trying to accomplish.… This is an excellent way to build your interest in what is being said. It’s like putting together a mental puzzle; you try an arrangement and then see if the speaker confirms it.”13

The encouragement is for listeners to create questions they want answered and then to hang in attentively to see if those questions are addressed. But how much easier would this be if the speaker makes it clear what those questions are and how they are progressing toward the answers? The speaker should present questions that he knows the audience will want answered, or else present statements that naturally prompt the right questions in their minds. This creates a positive tension as they await the resolution to all of the unsettled questions. This makes the audience interested in what the speaker is sharing. Tension creates interest—it commands attention.

This is no secret among writers. Have you ever loved a novel only to find out that literary critics can’t stand it? In his book Narrative Suspense, Eric Rabkin probes the mystery of why certain books are so popular when they are widely considered poorly written. He provides example after example of works that continue to be read broadly over the years but do not match any conventional standards of literary excellence. He observes that, while the literary quality may not be very good, the reading itself may still be found to be worthwhile for many readers. Why? “Interest,” he argues. “I knew a boy in high school who would read anything that promised to be about trains; and he would read nothing else...