I want to talk about something that should be obvious, but that a lot of preachers seem to forget or miss: You must work to get and keep the congregation’s attention.
If you do not have their attention, then what are you doing? What’s the point? You are wasting your words. You might as well not be speaking. Get some photos of a congregation printed on cardstock and paste them against the wall—they will listen to you as much as a real congregation that has tuned out.
You have to work to get their attention in the first place, then you have to work to keep their attention for the length of the sermon. When you lose their attention, the sermon is effectively over (even if you keep preaching for twenty more minutes).
This does not get easier over time, either. When you first start preaching to a group, they give you a lot more grace in the attention area. After you’ve spoken to the same people for years, after they have heard all your stories and can spot all your mannerisms, it’s much harder to keep their attention. (And usually, this is when preachers start getting long-winded, too.)
Study is only half the work
Nor can you count on your voice, volume, accent, or movement around a room to keep people’s attention. Yelling a boring sermon doesn’t make it any more interesting. You may be able to get people’s attention back by running around or modulating your voice, but their minds will wander as soon as you go back to being boring.
Obviously, the most important part of sermon preparation is getting the message right. We have to work to accurately understand and apply the text. This should make up most of our study. But study is only half the work. The other half of sermon preparation is making what you study interesting.
Your study is like laying the foundation, the frame, the plumbing, and the electrical work in a house. It is absolutely crucial and the most important part of what you are building. But you aren’t finished. That house, as solid as it is, still needs walls, paint, carpet, and furniture.
Another way of saying this is that when you do your study well, you have almost all the raw materials that you need for your sermon—but you still have to take those materials and craft a sermon. You still have to put them together in a way that makes the sermon engaging.
I submit that before you get up in front of any group of people to preach to them, you should have a plan for how you are going to get their attention and keep it so you can deliver the fruits of your study.
Think of your study as getting groceries. You get the flour, the butter, and the salt. But you don’t serve people flour, butter, and salt—that would be almost indigestible. Just like you would work to make those groceries into something appealing and appetizing, you have to work to make the raw materials of your study into something your congregation has the ability and desire to digest.
How to get and keep people’s attention
How do you do that? Well, you have to work at it. You have to think through how you are going to present the message. Here are ten tips I would give a younger preacher on how to do that:
1. Be captivated so you can be captivating.
Probably the biggest factor in keeping people’s attention is making sure that the subject has your attention. Mark it down: if you are bored by what you are talking about, so will the people who are listening to you. If you treat it like another history lecture that has to be gotten through, then why would the people you are preaching to care? The message has to captivate you if you hope for it to captivate them.
2. Start with a bang and build a bridge.
There is a reason I said that you have to work to get and keep attention. Getting the audience’s attention in the first place is not a given. You have to work at how you are going to introduce your material in such a way that people start by listening, but also do it in a way that leads naturally into your message.
There are many ways to get people’s attention. You could tell a joke, you could cuss, you could start taking your clothes off—all of these would get their attention—but they also would detract from the message. The trick is to write an introduction that is interesting but also leads naturally into what you want to say.
3. Know where you are going.
While we are talking about a message—you have to start the message with a known destination. No pilot would take off if he didn’t know where he was landing the plane, and you shouldn’t start a sermon unless you know where you are going (the message) and how you are going to land the plane.
In general, it helps to be able to put your message into a single sentence and to make sure that your message has a specific application. You ought to be able to ask someone after the message, “What did he talk about and what did he want you to do about it?” and get a clear answer.
4. Stay on point.
I HATE rabbit trails. Nothing will kill your message faster or give your congregation the idea that you are not serious about your subject than chasing down rabbit trails. You can’t break off mid-point to talk about politics, preferences, or your pet subject. Doing so just means that YOU are bored. (Again, if you are bored, the congregation will be even more bored.) Respect your point enough to stay on it, then move on deliberately to the next point in a way that brings you closer to your destination.
5. Speak into people’s lives.
It should go without saying that your message will not keep people’s attention if they see no practical value in what you are saying. If what you are talking about doesn’t touch their lives, you may as well be talking about nuclear physics or marine biology.
Spurgeon said that the golden key to keeping people’s attention was to say something worth listening to. Maybe you should print that out and hang it above where you do your sermon preparation.
Yes, you need to teach people, and no, you don’t need to dumb it down—but you must always be making connections to people’s real lives, or they will go back to daydreaming about those lives.
6. Avoid long explanations.
If you are writing out a manuscript (which is a good practice, even if you do not bring it into the pulpit), you do this by keeping an eye on your paragraph length. If a reader could get lost in the middle of one of your paragraphs, then your audience will get lost in it.
Remember, when you are speaking, people do not have the ability to go back and read it again. So keep your words, sentences, paragraphs, and points short.
One thing that greatly helped me in this area was making daily devotions for the radio that had to be two minutes or less. You learn to leave a lot on the cutting room floor and to make your point quickly and clearly when you only have a minute to make it.
As Haddon Robinson teaches, you state your point, restate it, illustrate it, and apply it. Learning to do that with brevity will go a long way toward keeping an audience’s attention.
7. Speak to the back of the room.
I’m grateful for microphones and amplification, but I think that a good preacher should pretend like he doesn’t have them. Learn to use your voice well and modulate volume while still projecting. Don’t yell at people, but speak as if you are trying to be heard and understood by the people sitting in the back row. Projecting your voice properly (again, not yelling, but projecting) communicates that you are speaking with authority. Remember, people cannot hear you if they do not hear you—so speak up and speak clearly.
8. Variation is your friend.
People naturally tune out sameness. Our brains are really good at identifying patterns and ignoring them. So work on being hard to ignore.
I remember one day in homiletics class when my teacher (the great Scott Pauley) held up a sheet of paper where every word was highlighted. He then asked us, “What part is highlighted?” The answer—none of it. If everything is the same, then none of it is highlighted.
Variation helps people stay interested. No matter how much you like a meal, you’d quickly lose interest in it if you had to eat it three times a day, 365 times a year.
Of course, you need to vary your voice—in speed, pitch, and volume. But you also need to vary your content. Don’t fall into patterns.
I hate rabbit trails, but I’m a big fan of a technique where you seem like you start talking about something completely different, only to quickly bring it back around to the subject. (Malcolm Gladwell isn’t a preacher, but he is a master at this.)
Break it up. Use different kinds of words. Use different types of supporting material. Use different structures for your sermons. Imagine that your audience is a boxing opponent—hit them with every proverbial punch that you have and hit them from every angle.
9. Kill All Jargon.
Jargon is a shibboleth. Its intended purpose is to confuse the uninitiated so an in-group can identify each other. It can be a time-saving device around people who know, but at the same time, it will confuse the uninitiated.
For instance, I could have a conversation with another web programmer, and you would likely have no clue what we were talking about—not because what we are talking about is inherently confusing, but because we are speaking to each other using insider language.
Preachers often do this when they talk to a congregation like they are talking to a seminary professor.
People do not like to be made to feel dumb. You can do that by being too patronizing and talking down to people, and you can do it by using language no one in your congregation understands. Avoid both extremes.
10. Aim for SUCCES
One of the most helpful books I’ve read about being interesting was Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. (The Heath brothers are not preachers and certainly were not writing to a Christian audience, but the book is extremely helpful.) In the book, the brothers give the acronym SUCCES (I know, missing an S). They argue that the most memorable communication has the following six attributes (which are kind of a summary of what I’ve already written):
- Simple - Avoid big and complicated words, phrases, and paragraphs.
- Unexpected - Break the pattern.
- Credible - Stick close to the Bible, don’t share things that are questionable, and major on revelation, not speculation.
- Concrete - Talk about real things that people can easily imagine, and avoid abstract concepts that aren’t connected to real life (like Jesus did with the parables).
- Emotional - Emotion gets our attention. So show emotion and stir it up (where appropriate).
- Story - Our brains are hard-wired to want to listen to a story—use this to your advantage to keep people’s attention (like Jesus and the apostles did).
The Crime of Boring Preaching
I will leave you with a few quotes by preachers much more gifted than myself:
If you think the gathering of biblical facts and standing up with a Bible in your hand will automatically equip you to communicate well, you are desperately mistaken. It will not. You must work at being interesting. Boredom is a gross violation, being dull is a grave offense, and irrelevance is a disgrace to the gospel. Too often these three crimes go unpunished, and we preachers are the criminals. -Charles Swindoll
The preacher must never be dull, and he must never be boring… there is something radically wrong with dull and boring preachers.
How can a man be dull when he is handling such themes? I would say that a “dull preacher” is a contradiction in terms; if he is dull, he is not a preacher. He may stand in a pulpit and talk, but he is certainly not a preacher. - D. Martyn Lloyd Jones
It may be their duty to attend, but it is far more your duty to make them do so. You must attract the fish to your hook, and if they do not come, you should blame the fisherman and not the fish. Compel them to stand still a while and hear what God the Lord would speak to their souls. The minister who recommended the old lady to take snuff in order to keep from dozing was very properly rebuked by her reply, “If he would put more snuff into the sermon, she would be awake enough.” -Spurgeon