Tag Archives: preaching

For a long time I have been interested in preaching, way back when I was a teenager in Nottingham my youth leader gave me the opportunity to preach a few times at my Church, and since having that door opened up to me I have spent a fair bit of time reading and thinking about preaching.

My view on what constitutes good preaching has changed a lot in those years, and as I have had more opportunities to preach my own personal approach to preparation and delivery has changed too. I make it a habit to listen to a variety of great preachers, but remain convinced that the most important preachers to me are the ones who preach at King’s Church Leicester on Sunday mornings and care deeply for them. I praise the time and effort they put into preparing and preaching at Church, and I love it when they show concern for their own preaching. When I remember (which to my shame isn’t very often), I pray for the guys who preach at King’s Church, and I thank God for every message they bring, whether it was delivered skillfully or not, whether I agreed with it completely or not, whether it moved me or not.

I am going to attempt to be disciplined and write a series of blog posts on preaching. There are a few different topics I want to cover, and I’m hoping to condense my thoughts on each of them into a few short paragraphs.

I regularly read the frequently excellent Biblical Preaching blog which Peter Mead writes and have loved his insights, as a listener as well as a very occasional speaker. He has mentioned first person preaching a handful of times in the past, and in a recent post one of his readers tracked down a couple of examples of first person preaching which I have since listened to.

First person preaching fascinates me. I have never come across anyone personally who has tried it, and really have only heard of the idea from Peter. Having read a little of what he has to say on the matter, and having now actually heard some first person preaching I am even more intrigued by it.

The two examples are both from Dr. Torrey Robinson (who has written a book on the subject), and can be downloaded from his Churches website here;
http://www.fbctarrytown.org/messages.html, 01-25-2009 The Bitter Man of God (Jonah), and 03-23-2008 Fighting Against God (Acts 5:12-42)

My inclination is that the approach is valid and useful very occasionally, but only if the text you are working with very clearly allows for it. Torrey uses the story of Jonah in one case, and an invented dialogue between Caiaphus and Pilate focusing in on the events in Acts 5. There are clear weaknesses to first person preaching, primarily that if you remain in character you can’t really deal directly with a text. Of course if you are working from a piece of narrative I don’t think this matters hugely. But there are inherent strengths to the approach which it would be much more difficult to achieve in any other way, primarily that by playing a part you create an immediate connection between your character and the congregation. Listening to Jonah telling his side of the story had a far deeper impact on my understanding than listening to someone trying to explain his emotional state from a third person perspective.

I am going to try and track down some more examples, and I may well pick up Dr. Robinsons book and see what he has to say on the subject. Preaching is a far broader discipline than I often think, and I thoroughly enjoy finding out more about it!

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?