Occasionally I see articles about how to give good preaching feedback. Often the focus is on things like getting the person to feed back themselves first, then it is about sandwiching negatives with positives. That’s all good stuff, however, I want to suggest a slightly different approach.
Here are some of the questions I encourage those giving feedback to cover.
- What was the main point of the sermon?
- What do you think is the main point of the passage?
- Did what the preacher make the main point of his sermon marry up with what you believe to be the main point of the passage?
- What illustrations did the preacher use?
- Were they helpful or a distraction?
- How much eye contact did the preacher make with the congregation?
- What was their tone/emotion?
- Describe their body language throughout. What hand gestures did they use? What about facial expressions? Where and how were they stood?
- How did you feel as a result of the talk?
- What do you think that you are meant to do as a result of the talk application?
- How likely on a scale of 1-5 to do this?
- Where did the conclusion leave you.
I hope that you will notice that primarily these questions are factual/objective. You are not really asked to give your opinion on how well the preacher did. This is intentional. If you ask a few different people how well the preacher did, you may get lots of different answers. It also risks turning the preacher into a performer. Should we really be scoring sermons?
This objective kind of feedback should be helpful for the preacher because it should help them check back and make sure that they achieved their objectives. Did they get the tone right in terms of what they were intending, did they communicate their main message effectively and did it have the desired heart response.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place after this to talk through whether or not they had got the right point from the passage and whether they had chosen the right tone. We will still want to talk together as preachers over time about how effective we are and where we can improve. However, at this stage we want to encourage a level of self-reflection. So objective feedback is the best kind for the preacher.
It’s also the best kind of feedback for the person giving it. I encourage people to give feedback and to give me feedback not just because it helps me, which is important, but also because it helps them. It will help them to become better listeners to sermons and as it gets them to observe preachers closely and as it forces them to go back and study the word, I believe that it is helpful for preachers, especially those training. So I encourage trainee preachers not just to receive feedback but to give it too.
Why not have a go at using these questions to give or receive feedback next Suinday?
Faithroots 