Having just last weekend given three talks for the youth in my Church on the prodigal son, I find myself longing for some proper feedback on what I said. So far what I have managed to determine is that noone will say anything bad about the talks, and the good points are generally vague (although one really useful specific point was given). I am not so foolish to think this means my talks were perfect! Which leads me to believe that people aren’t willing to give proper feedback for some reason.
I spoke to my pastor, and it seems that there is no real feedback structure for the Sunday service preaching, although it seems he wants to set something up and has a few ideas which is great.
Feedback is essential when you’re doing pretty much any skilled work because without it we really cannot grow and improve our skills. But feedback is also really hard because it means we need to be humble and open to criticism. Feedback is also really hard to give because most of the time you aren’t really any better than the person you are feeding back to, and you must be humble and loving when you feed back or it will be ignored (and probably offend).
Feedback also needs to be balanced and consistent. It’s no good telling the preacher about all his mistakes without mentioning his successes, but equally completely positive feedback is unhelpful too. And only feeding back when a talk is brilliant or terrible isn’t helpful either, the average talks need feedback just as much!
So what are we going to do about it as a Church? Well Richard has said his plan is to arrange for regular feedback to happen among the men who preach on Sunday regularly. This is a great idea because it levels the playing field, they each know how much feedback is valued and will be aware of the dangers in being overly negative and such because they preach themselves.
I am thinking also about putting together a feedback questionnaire, basically so that if you aren’t really sure what is important to feed back on you have a series of singposts pointing you towards useful information.
What questions you would want people to answer if they were giving you feedback on your preaching?
At The City Church Canterbury, some of us tend to preach our sermon in advance to another member of the teaching team, and give feedback to help in the final stages of preparation, rather than just reflecting on the successes/failures after the event. It’s a pretty odd experience, but really beneficial (and it forces people to prepare in advance of the night before!) It helps to notice our blind spots and hone our preaching – and on the odd occasion stop the odd heresy from making it to the pulpit by mistake!!
Particularly we tend to consider: Introduction (Did it take off well, did it sufficiently summarise the series so far etc), content, structure, illustrations (were there enough, were they coherent, did they appeal to a wide range of people etc), body language and other habits, christian jargon (was it accessible to non-christians, were jargon words explained well?), exegesis (did it really do justice to the text), gospel application (how was Jesus preached? Would a non-Christian have got a sufficient understanding of the gospel from it?) time-keeping (was it too long/short? What could be altered, cut down or expanded?), application (is there enough, is it clear, does it apply to all age groups or have you only given application for a limited demographic?) conclusion (did it land well?), response (what will you expect people to respond to and how have you built to achieve that response?), practical considerations (how will you use powerpoint etc, when will you invite the band up for response, what song might you want them to do etc)
It’s not usually that formulaic, and it depends from person to person, but those are the kind of things we often touch on. I’ve found it helpful to consider practical things as well, because so often a preacher can have their content honed, but then when it comes to getting the band up, praying, inviting people to respond they wing it in the moment and go from a smooth sermon to a shoddy, un-thought-through mess of a response time, which isn’t conducive for people knowing how to respond.
I’ve been doing a bit of this stuff before and after with some of the younger preachers at Frontiers Church Exeter. I’d say these are worth reading as part of the process:
On receiving critique (by Alfred Poirer)
http://www.lhc-pa.org/_files/TheCrossandCriticism.pdf
On giving critique (by me for Marcus Honeysett)
http://marcushoneysett.squarespace.com/blog/on-giving-critique-of-sermons.html
Creating a context where we can encourage one another, but also sharpen things up for the good of the church is hard but worth it.