Clarity 10.9.2025

    It is better to drive on a clear morning than a foggy morning. In football it is easier to run a play if the offensive line clears a path. In intellectual tasks clarity is preferable to obscurity. When it comes to communication, clarity is seldom accidental. In our preaching we are giving both guidance and information to our listeners. Central to that task is making the text of scripture as clear as we possibly can without reducing or minimizing its content. Clarity helps our congregation to understand what we are saying and why. Clear thinking and presentation of the text allows a congregation to see how a sermon is derived from, based upon, or related to Scripture. 

    When listeners complain about boredom or that a speaker does not have their attention it is easy to misunderstand the issue, to diagnose the symptom(s) rather than the real problem. In my experience, more often than not the issue is clarity. The speaker is her/himself unclear about the object of his/her message and that lack of clarity is transferred directly to the congregation or audience. There are a few learnable strategies that can help an individual write and prepare better speeches/lessons/sermons. These strategies are unfortunately the victim(s) of changes in both technology and pedagogy. I begin with attitude or approach and then move on to technique and tool. 

Slow Down

    Even with a deadline there is no reason to rush. One of the reasons that preaching or any other presentation is unclear to the auditors is because the subject was unclear to the speaker, generally because the speaker was moving too fast to grasp the complexity before her. 

    This is an educational and cultural outcome. The idea of slowing down, annotating what you read, making notes or comments, and even paraphrasing seems quaint and old-fashioned. Yet the outcome seems clear. The velocity of teaching may have changed but learning still takes time. And if a speaker has not assimilated his text/message/presentation and written out what she wished to say with clarity then almost by definition the congregation will be unclear or confused as well. The lack of deliberate preparation will result in disconnect which leads to “boredom” and inattention. 

    Working slow does not mean that we allow unlimited time to prepare. We still must give ourselves deadlines. What must change is how we work within the time restraints that we provide. It is here that we must rely upon processes and procedures. The simple addition of a checklist that you work through provides speedbumps as we prepare insuring that we don’t skip the most important step of all—understanding the text and properly articulating its meaning in our message. 

Structure (Outline)

    Structuring and outlining go hand and glove. Preparing an outline, mind-map, diagram, or storyboard of our text and our message helps us to visualize structure and provide the scaffolding for what we want to say. 

    Beginning with an exegetical outline of the text helps us to nail down the author’s intended structure. This step of the process allows us to grasp or visualize the bones upon which the Biblical author grew his text. Some texts, poetry and parable for example are more difficult to outline—all the more reason to persist. Not everything in the Bible is narrative and treating it like it is diminishes the vision of the Biblical author and yields confused interpretation. Confused interpretation leads to confused audiences. So, work through the most difficult of texts until you can clearly see the bones of the text and how the flesh is connected. 

    I admit, that as a young preacher that was often the end for me. The exegetical outline became the preaching outline. And while that can be successful, it is the transformation of your exegetical outline into a preaching outline which is your own composition that is the point at which you “own” the text. You can then preach it with greater clarity because you have read, assimilated, and analyzed it to the degree that you can provide a preaching outline in your one voice. 

Edit

    Regardless of the clarity you arrive at when your preaching outline is complete, you still have work to do. One of the primary reasons to write a very detailed outline or manuscript is that it allows you to work out the actual phraseology of what you want/need to say. Without that necessary step of writing to completion you also eliminate the most important step for clarity: Editing your work. Extemporaneous preaching will always feel like preaching your first draft. Because it is.

     Regardless of how many times you practice or mentally work your way through what you wish to say the preaching event itself will be wholly unique. Without a manuscript you do not have any benchmark for whether you have hit your mark. You don’t have the opportunity to test phrases, diction, and vocabulary. You don’t even have a document that you can provide to a friendly proof-reader for comment. The message is in your head, and your preaching document is nothing but a guide for the content that you are keeping in your memory. 

    I must confess that the first decade and a half of my ministry was mostly extemporaneous. What I have found is that rather than liberating it is stifling. Performing without a net does not liberate the acrobat whose every step becomes potentially terminal. Writing it down gives you ample time to not only reflect and revise but also to fix entire sentence. Rather than composing in the pulpit you can actually preach and connect with your audience. 

    Let me conclude by saying this, my friends. We have all heard bad preaching. We’ve heard good preachers on bad days. We’ve heard mediocre preachers on their best days. I have preached bad sermons. It’s a hazard of the task. All my experience teaches me that most bad sermons can be fixed in the study. It is in the study that the correctable errors arise. It is in the study that poorly worded transitions miss the editor’s scissors. It is the study that clarity is lost. And it is in the study that clarity can be restored.  

    I believe and teach that we can improve our preaching. Not by copying others. Not by plagiarizing the work of megachurch pastors or by purchasing the products of sermon mills. We can improve our preaching by improving our sermons. Better sermons make better preachers because it allows us to go into the pulpit, clear about the revealed meaning of the text so that we can declare with clarity the Word of God.

For your Consideration 10.2.2025

    There is no such thing as post-church Christianity. It is a myth perpetrated by mega-influencers who hope to divert our attention from the local church and its “economy of interest” to globally defined issues. It is not only a myth it is wrong. It is un-Biblical. It is counterproductive.  It is an assault on the incarnational deity of Jesus who lived, died, and was resurrected in time and space. There was a there, and a then that redefined all subsequent human experience. Multiple generations of mega Church “biggerism” have impeded our judgement about what is truly important. We have lost our understanding of what we do and where we do it, which means we have also largely lost our identity. 

    I understand that many readers will see me as a malcontent who does not see anything good coming from the contemporary currents moving the Church. This is not entirely true. Yes, I see issues that must be addressed. Yet, I also believe that the Scriptures, rightly interpreted and applied to our present environment offer the solution that the Church needs to rise above our infatuation with culturally driven deviations. 

    This is an issue which has always confronted the Church. It always will. The salvation in Christ, described in the Bible is incarnational. Time, place, situation, circumstances, culture, social structure, national and political environment—these have always been realities the Church has had to navigate. This is not a bug—it is a feature. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” This is a theological truth not only about Jesus but about us. He came here. He did so then. His then and there allow for salvation everywhere and throughout all time. In celebrating this truth at the heart of our faith we sign up for a life of cultural and social embeddedness, engagement, and evaluation. 

     Jesus lived a culturally Jewish life, yet He questioned those elements of His culture which stood opposed to the will and purpose of God. If Jesus was able to summarize the whole of the law into two signal points and to hold His contemporaries accountable for social and personal deviations from the intended will of God, we must be ready to do so as well. We must understand, as Jesus did that the issue is not so much the content of culture, as the proper place and limits of culture. When cultural commitment creeps into the life of God’s people causing us to lose sight of God’s will it is right for the authorized shepherds of the flock to rise in protest. 

    This is essentially Paul’s position throughout his epistles. There are times when he functions well within the cultural norms of his time and place. There are times when his Jewishness takes precedence. At other times his Hellenistic education takes precedence. And there are times when he relies upon his Roman citizenship. But never do any of these lesser identifying markers supplant his primary commitment to Christ or his unfailing allegiance to the Church. Indeed, there are times when Paul addresses each of these lesser cultural identity markers noting the ways in which they tempt believers into accommodation or inculturation.  He consistently makes a clear distinction between cultural realities and Biblically derived commitments. 

    I offer for your consideration the idea that maybe, perhaps our capacity to make those kinds of clear distinctions we find in the New Testament has eroded. At one and the same time we have allowed media driven, even propagandistic concepts to mold our message whilst compromising the central spiritual and theological commitments which have historically authenticated our allegiance to Jesus. We live in an era in which the very name “Christian” has been emptied of its Christo-centric, Biblical content and replaced with a series of culturally derived prejudices. 

    Again, this is nothing new. In his epistles Paul generally does not address the surrounding culture in which the Church was embedded. Rather, he addresses those points at which the culture had invaded the Church. For all intents and purposes, we have reversed the Pauline emphasis. We focus tirelessly on the beliefs and behaviors of avowed non-Christian culture while avoiding any commentary on the behavior or beliefs of confessed Christians who deny Jesus in both word and deed. We have abandoned theology for sociology because the former is controlled by scripture while the latter is controlled by...us. In making this shift we are risking the broader testimony of the Church. 

    To be blunt. People are not stupid The Bible is widely available to anyone who wishes to read it. What we teach is not a secret nor the behaviors expected of believers. For those who wear the name of Christ the wariness and reticence of the culture far too often evoke a contentious response rather than considerate, patient, instruction. It seems that the very fallenness of the world insults us and insulates us from any empathetic, compassionate, evangelical response. The more we argue against culture, the more we take offense at the behaviors of those who are outside of Christ, the more we attack, the less effective is our witness the less resonant our voice. 

    Perhaps we need to be more compassionate and understanding rather than contentious and condescending. Outsiders who consider the Church can readily sense and easily see the disconnect between the words of the Church and the words of Jesus. In the 21st Century far too many Christians have become desensitized to this disconnect. I would offer, for your consideration, that something must change if we are to recover our voice amid the despairing, dying culture in which we find ourselves.