preaching

Preaching Without Notes: A New Habit to Transform Your Sermons

Seedbed.com recently started a new Preaching Collective. I’ll be a regular contributor there and wanted to share my first post with you!

“If you can learn to do this one thing, I guarantee you’ll get more responses from your sermons.”

When one of my mentors said this to me over coffee about a year ago, I listened intently. It sounded like he was about to tell me a closely guarded secret that people, including my seminary professors, had been keeping from me.

“Learn to preach without notes. It won’t necessarily lead to you preaching better content, but it will lead to a deeper connection.”

I thought about his words, admitted my fears, and committed to making it happen. After a year of preaching without notes, I’ve discovered he was right.

My sermons now connect with my congregation in a way they never did when I had my rehearsed manuscript. I receive more positive feedback than ever before. People often tell me what they’ve been thinking about the sermon weeks after I’ve preached it. And stories about people being “doers of the Word” are becoming more and more frequent.

My mentor didn’t give me a handy ten steps to learn how to preach without notes, but over the last year I’ve learned from many others who’ve made the journey before me. Here are the five most helpful things I’ve put into practice:

1. Let connection take priority over precision

Most preachers are trained in seminary settings that prize precise language, perfect grammar, and phrases that read beautifully. But if you’re going to preach without notes, you have to be willing to sacrifice some precision of language for the sake of connection—unless you can memorize long form content verbatim on a weekly basis.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t do careful exegesis or commit certain phrases and transitions to memory. It does mean that you let eye contact and being fully present with the congregation take precedence over those sentences that took you hours to painstakingly craft in your study.

As Will Willimon recently wrote, “Even when we know our manuscript well, we tend to look at the manuscript rather than look at our listeners. We miss clues that our listeners are sending us when they don’t understand, or when they are losing interest.

2. Understand your sermon

Don’t try to memorize your sermon. It will be extremely difficult and probably leave you frustrated. Instead, simply understand your sermon. It’ll make preaching it without notes much easier.

Carey Nieuwhof puts it this way: “When you understand the structure of your talk, you understand your talk.” And when you understand your talk, you can stand in front of people without worrying that you’ll forget everything.

To help understand and remember the structure of my sermons, I often use structures popularized by others such as Andy Stanley’s Me, We, God, You, We or Paul Scott Wilson’s Four Pages of the Sermon. Other times, I create a structure unique to the text I’m preaching.

In all cases, I make an outline of the talk’s structure with as much detail as I feel I need for every point. When I started, I converted manuscripts to detailed outlines, and then converted those to simple outlines. Now, I start with a detailed outline to save time.

Before I step in front of the congregation, I make sure I can write down the structure of my sermon on a sheet of paper with no hesitancy. Then, even if I forget specific points or phrases, I know I can still convey the big picture.

3. Practice out loud on location

Most performers wouldn’t step on stage without having rehearsed what they’re going to say and do. Most preachers will.

If you want your sermons to stand out, the most effective thing you can do after understanding your sermon in your head is to hear it in your ears. Yes, I know it’s awkward. But it’s less awkward to discover that your sermon is too dense, has too many stories, or is it just plain bad while you’re alone than when you’re surrounded by a crowd of people.

Schedule practice time into your sermon preparation and try to rehearse in the room where you’ll be preaching. This will help you get a feel for the room, platform, lighting, and other elements.

Like Tim Ferriss does when he’s rehearsing public speaking, I’ll write down one-liners and phrases that I like so that I can remember them for later. And I continue going through my message until I nail it once.

You can read the last two points here.

July 30, 2015 by Jonathan Leave a Comment

Where is God in the Hunger Games?

The Hunger Games trilogy is set in the nation of Panem, home to a dystopian society that exists in a post-America and “post-God” world.

Panem largely occupies what was formally North America. Its residents live in “The Capitol” and thirteen other geographically distinct districts. The elite and wealthy of the nation live in the Capitol alongside the leaders of Panem’s dictatorial government. The districts are governed by this regime and face constant oppression as they fulfill what the Capitol sees as their sole purpose for the nation — the production of goods and services for the people of the Capitol. In most of the districts the people are poor, dependent on welfare from the government, and live in fear of what may happen if they step out of line.

The Hunger Games are an annual event that the Capitol established for the purposes of keeping the districts in line and providing the citizens of the Capitol entertainment. The Hunger Games Wiki (yes, the trilogy has its own dedicated wiki community) sums up the games well when it states that the games are an event “in which twenty-four children between the ages of twelve and eighteen, one boy and one girl from each district, are chosen from a lottery and entered into a gladitorial competition where they must fight each other to the death until only one remains standing.”

The games are brutal and savage. They put on display the gross manifestations of the sin and desire for survival that lies deep within the contestants. The games also display ways the oppressive government sins against the contestants and the districts. And if all of this weren’t bad enough, the people in the Capitol love watching every minute of the games, capitalizing on the contestants who become celebrities, and talking about them wherever they go.

This background material helps one understand why the author, Suzanne Collins, named the nation Panem. According to The Hunger Games Wiki, the name “derives from the Latin phrase panem et circenses, which literally translates into ‘bread and circuses’. The phrase itself is ‘used to describe entertainment used to distract public attention from more important matters.'”

The idea of distraction and the nation of Panem fit well together. The Hunger Games distract the people of the Capitol from realizing the ways that they oppress the people of the districts. The Hunger Games distract the people of the districts from realizing that they have great power even in the midst of the oppressive system that they are under. And everyone in the nation is distracted from asking big questions about the government or why their world is organized the way it is.

The questions that the series raises about oppressive governments, love beyond boundaries, the effects of war, self-sacrifice, the brutality that people can inflict upon others, dedication, and hopelessness are all relevant for us today.

Yet, readers may notice that in the midst of these “ultimate questions” there is no form of religion or concept of God among the people of Panem.

This fact is what led the professor of one of my preaching classes, Dr. Joy Moore, to assign our class the first book of the trilogy. Dr. Moore pointed out to us that a “post-God” and “post-Christian” world is one that we as preachers may soon inhabit. As religious concepts and the story of God’s redemption of the world in Jesus Christ fade in importance throughout society, the preacher will have to be ready to tell the story in new ways.

In order to help us begin practicing living and preaching in such a world, Dr. Moore assigned us the task of preaching a sermon to the people who reside in the Capitol city of Panem based on the first book in the trilogy, The Hunger Games. Dr. Moore asked us to look for echoes of the Christian story and glimpses of ways God might be working in the post-America and post-God world of Panem that is narrated in the book. We were then asked to faithfully preach the Christian story, the Gospel, to this “congregation” who has no conception of God.

Below are three sermons from my class. We each took a different creative approach.

I envisioned preaching my sermon, which is audio only, to a group of Capitol citizens I encountered on the Capitol’s busy streets. Here is the audio:

Pete Brazier, a visiting student from the Methodist Church in Britain, produced a short sermon that he envisioned would be given to small groups of Capitol citizens and perhaps also be broadcasted over the airwaves.

Andrew Ruth’s sermon assumed that any challenge to the Capitol’s reign would warrant immediate death. He produced a 5 minute video to quickly convey his message.

Andrew aptly introduced his video by stating:

I don’t think that my single sermon can include neither all the nuances of Christian faith nor the particularities of every Bible story. These will require conversations and community to gain intelligibility (cf. Kallenberg).

Thus, I am pretending that there exists an underground Christian community. I assume that I am a product of this community, and their faithful, though clandestine witness to the Triune God. This underground movement retains copies of the Bible in languages they comprehend. As I imagine myself in this community, I assume that at one point I was a full participant in the culture and life of the Capital City. I altered my appearance and filled my existence with entertainment. The physical alterations I made to my body via cosmetic tattoos still remain, while I have slowly relinquished other practices I once held.

We as a community have decided after much prayer and fasting that the Lord is calling us to announce our existence, even if it means inviting persecution. To do so, I will hack into the national television feed during the middle of the Hunger Games, and as quickly as possible share the content of the Christian faith. We pray that the Holy Spirit falls, like at Pentecost, and that through this sermon and the subsequent conversations instigated by the Underground. Pray with us.

This assignment stretched our thinking about how we are to proclaim Christ in a modern world that is quickly changing. And it led most of us to delay our other assigned readings so that we could finish the trilogy.

Best of all, it pushed us to see anew that God’s redeeming activity pops up in our everyday lives. We asked: Can we recognize it? Can we communicate it?

Can you?

Have you read The Hunger Games? If so, what were your thoughts on the book and how it could connect to Christianity?

February 29, 2012 by Jonathan 3 Comments

Are you running to win?

Below is the sermon I preached last week in Goodson Chapel at Duke Divinity School on 1 Corinthians 9:24-27. It was a privilege to share the Word of God with students and professors who have journeyed with me over the past three years in school.

“Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable garland, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.”

While this theme wasn’t fully explored in the sermon, never forget that God invites us to start the race, the Holy Spirit is our strength throughout the race, and a life fully conformed to the image of Christ is the finish line of the race.

February 23, 2012 by Jonathan 2 Comments

A modern day parable – The Director

In one of my classes this semester, Proclamation in a Virtual Reality with Dr. Joy Moore, we’ve been exploring how a new generation of preachers is to proclaim the Gospel in today’s world. We’ve been reflecting on how technology shapes us and our views of the world, how the biblical story challenges the default stories of our culture, and how we are to proclaim the biblical story to a generation whose imagination has not been shaped by it.

One of our recent assignments was to write a modern day parable. I hope you find it to be challenging and edifying.

There was a playwright and director who was known throughout the nation for his magnificent works. People received them with great fanfare whenever and wherever they were performed. He loved traveling and sharing his works with new people. So one day, this man moved to a new city and put out a casting call to all in the community. He put fliers that included details about the audition in storefront windows downtown, on windshields of cars in store parking lots, and in the hands of everyone he came in to contact with.

Many in the community responded, and amazingly, the director found a role for each of them in the play. This was his normal routine, for as he traveled to different cities he would always adapt his most famous script to fit with the region, their customs and culture, and the number who responded to the casting call. The cast practiced nightly for many months. The first few weeks they all simply read through the script and practiced their parts aloud. The director told them his thoughts and feelings behind the script, how they should say each line, and why he crafted the words as he did. After this, they began staging. The director carefully placed them on stage for each scene and directed their movements. Finally, they did weeks of dress rehearsals until the director was pleased with everything.

At this point, the director began placing fliers all over town and inviting all the new friends he had made to the show. He encouraged his actors to do the same and for weeks they went around telling their friends and families how much fun they had had preparing and rehearsing for the show and how excited they were for them to come see it.

On opening night the show was packed. People had begun waiting in line that morning in order to make sure they got tickets, and the box office sold tickets until they were sure the fire marshal would shut them down. Children sat in their parents’ laps. Young people stood along the walls so that the older people could have seats. And the place was buzzing with excitement. The director came on stage and thanked the community for their hospitality, their support of the arts, and for their attendance. And then the show began.

November 19, 2011 by Jonathan 2 Comments