If I say, 'I heard someone preaching recently who….', promise me you won’t try to guess who it was. Just relax; it wasn’t you - ok? Because I heard someone preaching recently who I really struggled to listen to and I’ve been thinking about that experience and what it teaches me about my own preaching and how it might be perceived.
So here’s how it was (for me):
- His manner seemed really quite unnatural - the guy was very different in personal conversation to how he was when preaching. Now, of course, that’s probably true of all preachers to varying degrees - preaching isn’t, in the nature of it, a face-to-face over a coffee somewhere. But this was more than that. His verbal delivery and the use of his body bordered on being odd at times. I’m trying not to be unkind, but that’s how it was. It left me feeling strangely disconnected from him and from his message, because it was disconnected from his own norms.
- He was very passionate about what he was preaching on - hooray; nothing worse than insipid preaching. It’s not a talk about Tupperware, after all. But there was something about the intensity of his passion that acted as a kind of force-field around him and around the whole experience of trying to engage with him. You could enter but only if you were willing to let it be wholly determinative for you, if you were willing to ‘surrender to the void’.
- He really wanted to do justice to the Bible, to convey its message and to persuade us of its importance and application. I have no doubts about that and, again, it was a very welcome trait. But there were aspects of what he was saying that raised legitimate questions - questions about interpretation, questions about application - yet the whole manner of the address left me feeling that they simply could not be asked. What he was saying had to be received in toto, as a job-lot, or not at all.
The whole experience - the quirky, unnatural manner; the intensity of the delivery; the brook-no-argument style, even where it would be legitimate - left me feeling unable to really engage with what he was saying and, ultimately, standing outside his world. And, if I’m honest, a little judged for being outside.
It’s the last thing he would have wanted, I’m sure. And it’s the last thing I, as a hearer, wanted. Yet it happened.
I think there are significant lessons in that whole experience for me as a preacher:
- I need to try to minimise the differences between how I come across in a public-speaking situation and how I am in more regular scenarios. There has to be more continuity between the two, not less, even whilst acknowledging that there will be valid differences.
- I want to preach with passion but it has to be a passion that breathes a genuine invitation, that speaks of a world that is open and that can be engaged without an uncritical capitulation to the personality of the preacher.
- I want to preach faithful to the Bible yet in a manner and with words that encourage further reflection, that open a dialogue. It strikes me that this is especially important when people who are not Christians are listening.
