Or at least two of them…
One of my favourite books is by Marcus Buckingham and it’s called First Break All the Rules. It’s about how leaders are taught a whole load of conventions or rules but truly successful ones break those rules. In effect Buckingham is seeking to discover a better set of leadership rules, ones that work.
Well, I want to suggest that preachers might benefit from a similar approach from time to time. Christmas is a góod opportunity to try it out.
A lot of people preaching over Christmas will have grown up with a set of preaching rules that came through the Proclamation Trust. Now, I’ve a lot of time for what Proc Trust has done in terms of seeking to encourage expository preaching However, I think that one risk is that they can have a tendency to create clone preachers with a one dimensional approach.
So, I want to push back on two things in an article from them from Andrew Sach. And the first and biggest rule to break is that your preaching must be expositional. Sach says not to give up on expositional preaching for evangelistic carol service talks, instead find a Bible passage and teach on it.
Expositional preaching should be the heartbeat of your church life. However if it is and when you know that over time, you and the congregation will be soaked in Scripture so that the Word of Christ will dwell in you richly. That means when you preach, you will naturally be exegeting, naturally bringing out God’s word.
The point is that expositional preaching isn’t the only way of preaching and some contexts and some people are better suited to other forms. Some of the worst sermons I’ve heard have been from good preachers attempting to show horn in exposition. And some have been from people who are great evangelists but feel that they must provide an exposition. The result in both cases is that the exposition isn’t great.
Further, this form of preaching relies on your congregation following along with Bibles open. They won’t be.
So, I’d encourage you for your Christmas preaching to find your own style and run with it, Responding to the context you will find yourself in. The reality is that when you preach, you will have perhaps 10 minutes to grab and hold people’s attention with and you want to get them to the heart of the Gospel. How can you best do that.
Secondly, don’t write it down. Sach talks about when you sit down to write your sermon. Don’t. Now I generally work on the basis of preaching without it with minimal notes. Much of contemporary preaching relies on lengthy scripts and detailed notes. That hampers the relationship you are seeking to build with the congregation. It also makes it difficult for those of us who already don’t have brilliant eyesight given you are highly likely to be speaking with minimal lighting and lots of candles.
Writing down will shape your style, especially if you write in a study. It will affect your tone. It will also reduce your responsiveness.
My approach to preparing this kind of talk is to start with an idea, it might be the line of a carol, part of the Christmas story or a comment I’ve heard. Then I spend a lot of time thinking through what I’m going to say. I’ll do this going out for walks or chatting with others. I’ll also listen to rehearsals or recordings of the carols and solo pieces. On the night I’ll be listening to what people are talking about as they come in. I’ll listen to the readings again and I’ll listen to any testimonies that we include.
That means I’m studiously not settling on the final version of what I say, often to the last minute. In fact on a few occasions I’ve changed my mind about halfway through the third reading. You see, even on the night I’m listening in to what is happening in order to engage in a conversation . Indeed, because I’m focusing less on exegeting the text, I’ve got more space to exegete the congregation.
Now I guess that there are two other rules to consider breaking. You will have to choose which one. You can either break the rule which says that you shouldn’t change your plans if you already have your talk ready. Alternatively if you already have something planned you can choose to break the rule which says you must listen to whatever the bloke on the interweb says.
Faithroots 