Pastor, May We Talk About Your Sermon?

 The following was published recently in the ALPB Forum Letter, an edited and expanded version of what I originally wrote as a simple post on a discussion board.  I used it for my online preaching course this summer
, and I'm putting it here to archive it for future use, and in the event anyone discovers it and finds it useful for their own purpose. 

“Pastor, can we talk about your sermon?”

by Don Engebretson

Pastors differ on the proper and most effective way to evaluate their sermons. They begin by receiving grades on their homiletical efforts by seminary professors, and they receive further feedback from supervisors in the field. These critiques judge the content and delivery according to academic standard

s of biblical content, balance of Law and Gospel, organization by proper outlines, and the technical aspects of public speaking techniques. So pastors-to-be write for their teachers with an imagined congregation in their mind, but they are primarily writing for those who grade them. Their ecclesiastical supervisors later assess them with a rating and include it on material sent to calling congregations. Yet many would debate the value of an opinion of one who may have never heard them actually preach. Pastors’ own self-evaluations come out rather inflated, each preacher assuming his skills and techniques rank high on any scale. Pastors may solicit advice from their peers, but the risk of defensiveness and the need to outshine their fellow clergy skews any objective assessment. Yet in all these cases one constituency remains missing: the person in the pew.    

The evaluation of a pastor’s preaching that truly counts comes ultimately from the pew. Yet even there the assessment varies from person to person. Opinions differ with the personalities and expectations of each person, not to mention their unique situation on a given day. That said, we should realize that most congregants don’t realistically anticipate the preacher to be an absolute dynamo in the pulpit. They don’t come expecting to hear a version of a polished TV preacher. They accept their pastor as a “work-in-progress,” especially if the pastor is fresh out of seminary. But they do have some criteria that are important for the preacher to know, whether just out of school or experienced with many seasons of preaching.  The following is my sense of what they might say if they dared to be so honest.

 

A letter to my pastor

Dear Pastor,

Please don’t be so long-winded. I know what you want to say is important. I get it. But my attention span is only so good. I’ve got restless kids in the back pew and I’m struggling just to catch even part of what you are saying.  Most Sundays I only get snippets, maybe only scattered sentences or words.  I’m on water pills and pretty soon I’m going to have to excuse myself and go to the restroom. I can’t make it the whole hour. I was up late with a sick family member last night and I’ll be honest, I’ll probably nod off from time to time. I worked a long shift in the ER and I’m not too alert either. I’ve got a lot of conflict and drama in my family and life right now and my mind keeps wandering. I’m easily distracted.

So get to your point. Keep it simple and straight-forward. Don’t repeat too much, but please help me to remember by repeating the main point from time to time. And be aware of the clock. Fifteen minutes is plenty. Realize that’s about the time I would expect a commercial and be able to get up and take a break anyway.

And try to be somewhat relevant.  I realize you don’t want your sermon to be just a story time for us. We really don’t want an endless string of anecdotal illustrations about all the things you did and saw this past week. But relate your text to our world and our struggles. Bring the past into the present. Make the personalities from the Bible real people who come alive for us. Let us get to know them like we know each other. And don’t give us so much technical background and detail that we can’t see the central character or theme of the story. We can read about all that later or hear it in a Bible study at another time.

 

Keep it simple

I know you are educated a lot more than we are, with a Master’s degree and all, but most of us here in the pew are high school graduates (and a few less than that). Some of us don’t write well. Some of us don’t read a lot. Most of our reading these days is texts or online posts in Facebook; some of us scan the daily paper, but not a lot more. So drop the big words. Drop the technical jargon. Or at least spend a minute explaining those words to us, but at the same time don’t use a lot of them. One or two are plenty. We are not trained to listen to lectures from professors like you are. Help us learn, but recognize we have minimal knowledge of the Bible and it’s been a while since we were in the classroom. Most of us don’t attend your Bible class. Most of us have never been in a Bible class. And most of us don’t even read the Bible outside of this one hour. A lot of times we don’t even come to church consistently every Sunday. What we know about the Bible is not a lot—actually, very little. So you’re going to have to give us some basic context, but keep it simple. Just enough for us to follow.

Please don’t drone on looking like you are just reading a paper up there. Show some life! Show some variety in your voice! Make it look like you’re really interested in what you are saying! The monotone is putting us to sleep, and so is that predictable “preacher voice.” We don’t care if you’ve memorized your sermon, or you have it all written out, or you’re working from an outline, or if you have a Greek Bible with marginal notes, or whatever. But do look at us. Acknowledge that we are there in the room with you. Sound like you are talking with us, not to us.

 

Give us some hope

We know that it’s important to tell us about our sins. We get that, too. We mess up all the time. We’re painfully aware of it, and we don’t want you to back off of that just because it may make some of us squirm in the pew. Tell it to us straight. But don’t let that be the sum total of what you are planning to say. 

And we understand that there are some “big” sins out there that are really offensive and make the headlines. But don’t make every sermon a diatribe on them. Anyway, many of us will struggle to relate. Remember the typical ways we all sin and remind us of that. Get to the sins you know we wrestle with in our real day-to-day lives, like misusing God’s name, and gossiping, and not respecting parents, and hurting people both physically and verbally, and not treating our spouses with love and kindness. Just make sure they are our sins and not something you simply read about, or something that’s part of a major debate among religious leaders.

But don’t forget to tell us that we are forgiven in Jesus’ name. That is critical! Don’t just tack it on to the end of your sermon. Some of us are drowning in our failures. We are wracked with guilt. We lose sleep and have headaches because of our regrets. We wonder at times if God will not get tired of us making mistakes and disobeying his Word. Throw us a lifeline! Give us real hope! Tell us God still loves us!

Sincerely,

The person in the pew who really wants to hear the Word

 

Don Engebretson is pastor of St. Peter Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Antigo, WI. This is his first contribution to Forum Letter.