Notes on Preaching

In a culture addicted to scrolling and soundbites, preaching is a way of managing people’s attention. Usually in these articles, I reflect on the management of other aspects of a congregation—governance, planning, staffing, program evaluation, and budgeting. Today, I’ll talk about attention management and share some “hacks” I use to help me manage people’s attention while I’m preaching.

1.   Start with “notes.”

With some sermons, I know I’m going to end with words from Scripture, and that the text’s resonance depends on my listeners’ ability to recognize the words and understand their implications. Because there are always people in the room who might not recognize the words, I tee up the sermon with some “notes”—explanations of where the text came from, what it meant, what it means. I say, “I’m going to give you some notes before I start preaching,” so that once I start, the sermon can flow without a lot of intrusive explanations.

2.   Share yourself.

This was a huge “no” when I first started preaching, although it was a “no” I heard from a distance because my seminary produced more graduate students than preachers. But I’ve discovered that the sermons that move people most are the ones in which I reflect on a text by telling a piece of my own story. Personal stories are usually easy to listen to, even when the stories are about trauma or tragedy, and telling stories about my experience helps people locate God in theirs.

3.   Vary the genre.

Some of my sermons are self-revelatory, but not all. Some are more like lectures about history or the meaning of some word in Greek or Hebrew. Some are closer to spoken-word poetry, where the particularity of my words—their sound and their rhythm – creates meaning. Some sermons are light and have humor at their core while others are darker and more deeply serious. The genre of any sermon depends not just on the text from which I’m preaching but also on current events and on the genre of other sermons I’ve preached recently. I never want listeners to think they know what’s coming—part of their willingness to listen is their trust that they will hear something new.

4.   Vary the pace.

I also vary the pace within each sermon, both because variety is more interesting to listen to and because pace provides content clues. Explanatory sections may be delivered at a lecture hall pace, stories are usually at a slightly faster, folksier pace, poetry is at a slower pace because every individual word needs to be heard. Sometimes I even stop the forward movement long enough to spell a word if I think it may be hard for some of my listeners to hear.

5.   Carry on a conversation.

I mean this literally. Even in the most formal settings, I ask my listeners questions that I expect them to answer by raising their hands or by calling something out. They don’t always take me seriously at first, but I persist because hearing a question and providing an answer returns listeners to what’s happening in the present moment.

6.   Offer something to listen for.

I recently wrote what I thought was a fluff sermon—some random thoughts about strategies for prayer. I wrote the sermon early in the week and then put it away until I was ready to practice it on Saturday. But by Saturday, something traumatic had happened in my life, and as I started to practice, God inhabited the words so profoundly that I couldn’t stop crying. My note to the congregation Sunday morning was that I needed their prayers to help me make it through the sermon without crying, which was absolutely true and also gave them something to listen for—was I going to cry?

7.   Be intentional with your hands.

I still preach in a lot of churches that either don’t have screens or don’t use screens to illustrate sermons. Instead of screens, I end up illustrating with my hands. If I’m talking about two kinds of people or two choices, like the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, one hand is always one choice and the other is always the other choice. If there’s a third way, my hands always come together in the middle. When choices collide, so do my hands. When I’m working my way through a list, I hold up my hand and count with my fingers. In other words, I help people follow the sermon by using my hands.

8.     Speak to a specific group that doesn’t include everyone.

This is an old Fred Craddock strategy in which we allow people to overhear. If I say, for example, that this morning I will be preaching specifically to families with children who are neurodivergent, and I invite others to listen or not as they choose, they almost always listen because they believe the sermon is not going to be about them.

9.   Pull imagery from different vocations and backgrounds.

I read widely so that, over time, I’m able to draw sermon material from a variety of vocational and social contexts. One of my favorite sermons was almost entirely a reading from a Gary Paulsen book on farming with draft horses. In another sermon, I compared prayer to working with hand tools—in this case, a draw knife and a crosscut saw. I’ve used references from early folk music, from drawing with pastels, from canning tomatoes, and from Harvard Business Review articles, all to capture the attention and reflect the lives of my listeners.

10.  Subvert the space.

I’m currently preaching to a traditional congregation in a very traditional sanctuary—long aisles, an elevated pulpit, and the choir all behind me when I speak. On the Sunday that I wanted to reveal that I don’t always believe in God, I wore jeans, I preached on the floor, and I asked the choir to sit with the congregation, all so that I could say to everyone, “This is the real me. No mask, no pretense. I’m just like you.” I know that these days many preachers are already on the floor, but in this case the impact came from doing the usual thing differently.

When I preach, I’m managing the attention of the congregation, managing where and how it sees God and how it feels about itself. This kind of management builds trust and love—and makes those other, administrative kinds of management possible.