What’s the point? The power of crafting sermons with the end in mind
Do we hope our sermons have an effect?
Yes?
Then what effect, exactly?
Do we hope to see minds changed? Hearts softened? The poor championed?
In hopes of preaching to greater effect, I took a couple of voice-acting lessons to help me with my sermon delivery.
The teaching that most deeply affected me was this:
The speaker needs to decide the purpose of every “beat” of speech: What do we want the listener to think, feel, or do?
For instance, if we want a listener to feel an urgency to act, we might speak rapidly, our voice focused, tense, and clipped, while we lean toward the listener.
Or, if we want the listener to feel compassion, we might speak slowly, pausing often, with our voice soft and rounded, and our posture relaxed, arms at our sides.
O. Wesley Allen, the Lois Craddock Perkins Professor of Homiletics at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University and author of multiple books on preaching, says the same question applies to the purpose of a sermon in his book Determining the Form: Structures for Preaching.
He writes:
The sermonic claim is an expression of what preachers want the congregation to think, feel, and do at the close of the sermon. The end of the sermon, at which point the message fully "claims" the hearers intellectually, experientially, and ethically, is the climax of the sermonic event. (Kindle edition, loc. 218. Emphasis mine.)
What we hope our listeners think, feel, or do at the end is the purpose of the sermon—its raîson d’étre, its intended effect.
For example, in a few weeks we have Luke’s Beatitudes on All Saints’ Day.
At the end of our sermon on this text, we might hope our listeners feel empathy with the poor.
We might want listeners to think about a question: Have we treated others as the way we want to be treated?
Or we might want listeners to actually do one thing: love our enemies.
How do we do this?
Step 1: Discern what the Spirit is hoping listeners will think, say, or do
In our sermon prep, the most compelling idea is a mere clanging gong if it doesn’t move the listener deeper into the mind and heart of Christ.
And any encounter with Christ changes us.
In what manner do we hope the encounter with Christ in this sermon forms us to be more like him?
What call to action, thought, or faith will we issue based on how God meets the human condition in the scripture before us.
We must define this point, this “so what,” for the sermon to do more than offer interesting anecdotes or cultural context.
At BsP, we call this idea the “Invitation to Transformation.”
Step 2: Craft the Sermon with the End in Mind
Once you’ve identified the sermon’s takeaway, write toward that end.
The intro should set up the question or conundrum or conflict that the ending resolves (or at least addresses if there are no answers).
The body offers examples—Biblical, worldly, congregational, personal, etc.—of how this question or problem plays out in our lives.
And somewhere after that issue is well established, the sermon begins to introduce how God enters those questions and conflicts. Who is God in this challenge? How does God behave? What does the passage reveal about God’s character and our ability to trust and follow?
Ideally, then, the entire sermon crescendos toward the takeaway, the call to action/thought/faith. Allen describes it this way:
This means the strongest imagery and/or the most provocative language should come at the close. To put it as directly as possible, the beginning and middle of the sermon serve the ending (Kindle edition, loc. 218).
In the rewriting phase, the more you can have the language and imagery of the start and end mirror each other, the more compelling your sermon will be.
All parts of the sermon function like a call and response, each initial question answered. Each named problem affirmed. Each element finding its conclusion in the sermon’s intentionally crafted end.
What are you inviting your listener to understand or believe more deeply? Why does it matter? Every word of the sermon lays the path to those answers.
Step 3: Trust the Spirit and our Listeners
This does not mean we have to tell listeners exactly what a gospel response looks like.
Allen instructs, “We should lead our hearers up to a climactic moment and then trust them and the gospel to do the rest.” (Location 300)
The call to action need not be prescriptive. If our sermon message is that God calls us to love our enemies, we can trust the Spirit to nudge each person to identify the enemy they’re encouraged to love.
For some, that may be a family member. For others, that may be those of a different political party. Still others may feel conviction around a coworker or neighbor or even themselves.
Crafting a sermon around loving your political enemies may resonate with some but will surely feel hollow for others.
Rather than presume to know where God is working in each person’s life, get specific enough in your message that the takeaway is clear, but leave space for each listener to discern that takeaway’s application to their own circumstances.
The power of preaching is in trusting God to reveal the sermon message to you, and then trusting the relationship between listener and Spirit to connect the sermon to their particular struggle.
Step 4: Temper Expectations
Your work is to preach.
The Spirit is responsible for the rest.
Allen writes:
It is too much to aim for 180-degree turns in our hearers each week. We should aim for smaller, more realistic transformations-changing formations-changing an idea, more deeply understanding an issue, building stronger commitment to a principle, reforming a habit, opening where previously closed. A climax can be an internal "Hmm" as much as a spoken "Aha" or a shouted "Amen!" (Kindle edition, loc. 227).
How your listeners embody your message is not your business nor responsibility.
Relationships are unlikely to be reconciled by the following Sunday. Political affiliations almost certainly will not change overnight.
But it’s possible that away from your gaze, someone offers a gentler response than they may have otherwise. Someone else may be thinking through a particular voting issue. Still others may pray for someone they’d rather curse.
These small, invisible shifts are the work of the Spirit.
And we can trust she is ever at work among our people.
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