A Way with Words. Adam T. Trambley
faithful. The issues I processed in one week took my leaders five to ten weeks. Most of these same leaders, however, had also been in the church for a long time. They had spent decades at church, learning one way of operating and diligently living that way out. When I preached, or spoke to them outside of the pulpit, I wasn’t starting from a blank slate. Tapes were already playing in their brains—tapes that had to be erased and rewritten. No wonder things took so long, even for the church’s dedicated leadership. For the person in the pew, who may average two hours of church time each week for two or three Sundays a month, things take even longer. A change that took me an intense week to process may take more than a year for the bulk of the congregation to understand and live into.
People who study change know how long the process takes. They also understand how frustrated leaders can get, and so warn against impatience. In his book Leading Change, John Kotter says that one of the primary reasons that change efforts fail is that the vision for change is undercommunicated by at least a factor of ten and maybe a factor of a hundred or a thousand.1 I know that when something is important enough for the congregation for me to spend two or three sermons on it, by the time I’ve finished I feel like I have said everything I need to say; I’m ready to move on. Kotter cautions me, however, that maybe the congregation still needs to hear it another twenty or thirty times. Or maybe even another two hundred or two thousand times. When I think about important changes that did not take root in the way that I had hoped, I can usually find places where I stopped sharing the vision for that particular change far too soon. Maybe a crisis came up, maybe I began a push right before Holy Week or the summer or another time that pulled away everyone’s energy and attention, or maybe I just got bored and moved on.
Change, of course, doesn’t happen in a clean, linear kind of way. The reign of God doesn’t materialize simply because we gave twenty sermons or even two thousand sermons instead of two. Even so, thinking about the time spent does tell us something about how we might approach our effectiveness as leaders who preach. One piece of good news from Kotter is that many of the same elements that make up good preaching are also the best ways to help people understand the vision for change. Kotter lists as key communication elements the techniques of drawing verbal pictures, repetition, leadership by example, explaining perceived inconsistencies, and elimination of “jargon and technobabble.”2 His two other elements are communications basics that we can easily incorporate if we think about preaching more expansively than the fifteen minutes following the gospel reading. Kotter suggests using multiple forums and having opportunities for give-and-take.3 Many preachers have found their sermons more effective by getting feedback afterwards or even input before preaching, and every congregation has multiple avenues available for a pastor to reinforce their vision.
We know, too, that good preaching is going to illuminate and reinforce the work being done in the rest of the congregation’s life. Today, perhaps more than any time in the last century, the sermon is foundational in leading a congregation to where God is calling. No longer can a quality sermon expect to see fruit by merely instructing, cheerleading, or exhorting. If the sermon’s purpose is to get people to do one thing or to make one change, we are probably thinking too small. The person who pays close attention and does whatever is asked might go home and try a spiritual exercise, read a Bible passage, or find a way to bring up Jesus in one conversation that week. Then, the following week, they will drop that discipline in favor of a newly assigned sermon task. Such behaviors aren’t the fruit we need. Instead, we need to preach a new approach and understanding, with corresponding new actions and habits, and such preaching takes significant time and intentionality.
I believe that our contemporary preaching task is more like teaching people a new language than it is getting them to do something at the end of the sermon. When children are learning a language, the act of speaking and reading allows them to gain the skills, experience, and worldview needed to be able to process what they need to hear. This approach does not make any of the individual books or conversations unimportant. On the contrary, each particular element becomes even more important because not only does the content need to be appropriate to the situation at hand, but also the vocabulary and word-building skills have to be in place. Talking about a chrysalis to a three-year-old child is not going to be helpful; neither is reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to a sixth-grade science class. The goal of our particular teaching lesson, however, is not only for a child to put out a leaf for a caterpillar to eat or to spell chrysalis correctly, but also to come to recognize the beauty of God in creation while living an environmentally sustainable life. The immediate goals should help the long-term one. Focusing exclusively on the easy wins can lead us to forget the difficult place we need to be going.
Using the analogy a little bit differently, we might compare preaching to law students learning the legal language. While they have to work with specific cases and statutes, the particulars are all in the service of forming lawyers that will have the right capacities, approach, and skills. No one, however diligent, can memorize all the laws, and many of them will be modified by legislatures after those students have graduated. Nevertheless, knowing how to write a brief, where to find relevant precedents, and how to handle various proceedings are all the fruit of intense study sessions, even though the specific details may never be encountered again.
One central outcome of giving people a new language is that they are able to use it. Children on the playground can look for and talk about caterpillars, and lawyers can go to court. Christians who hear a sermon about a new aspect of their walk of faith can talk about it together. Too many coffee hour conversations are restricted in their themes because people’s understanding of church is limited to making sure the children have a good Sunday school or that enough money is raised to fix the roof. When the sermons begin a sustained discussion of topics like stewardship, or evangelism, or Christian conflict resolution, the people in the pews are given the language and the permission they need to have conversations about those subjects. What is acceptable to talk about has expanded. Those informal discussions are powerful mechanisms for the deepening faith and developing practices necessary to effect change. To me, the most striking effect of the long-term sermon is listening to parishioners using the new language learned to express their own understanding of what the church is about.
Thinking about preaching in this way is not new. What I am describing is the basic formation process. Paul expressed a similar sentiment when he talked about feeding people milk instead of solid food. Babies start with milk and eventually grow to the point of eating cereal, and then a whole range of solid food. But the process takes time. Trying to share a delicious steak with a baby just makes the baby sick (and wastes the steak). No one weaning a baby is planning to see a significant change in only one week, but the transition to solid food has to be made.
I am talking about preaching to help people learn how to eat solid spiritual food. I have not seen the discipline of preaching looked at in this particular way, although I assume others have thought about it. The books that deal with planning out sermons over the course of the year use a different approach and a slightly different set of goals. What I have found important is a long-term understanding of preaching that uses sermons over the course of more than a year to help a congregation move in a specific direction.
I see preaching, especially by the senior or lead pastor, as an essential component to congregational growth and development. As people’s lives get busier, the sermon in Sunday worship is the time people are willing to listen to something important. They may not attend a meeting or read an e-mail, but when they are in church, they pay attention to a good sermon. In today’s church environment, any significant attempt to change without a preaching strategy is likely to fail.
Using a long-term preaching strategy does not mean ignoring a church’s lectionary, engaging in forced readings of scripture, or preaching only on one topic. Regardless of the congregation’s focus, preachers still need to cover an array of scriptural, ethical, and doctrinal subjects. Amid those sermons, however, an extended sermon strategy encourages preachers to find a way to insert a few minutes about the long-term goal into every sermon. Such inclusion may make the sermon less rhetorically tight