Preaching for Impact: How Understanding Personality Can Help Your Sermons Connect (A Guest Post)
Profiled in Christian Standard magazine as one of "40 Leaders Under 40," The Rev’d Sean Palmer is a thoughtful and prolific Christian writer, speaker, speaking coach, racial justice consultant, and podcaster. He is the Teaching Pastor at Ecclesia Houston and author of SPEAKING BY THE NUMBERS, 40 DAYS OF BEING A 3 (ENNEAGRAM DAILY REFLECTIONS), UNARMED EMPIRE: IN SEARCH OF A BELOVED COMMUNITY, a contributing writer to THE VOICE OF PSALM and THE VOICE BIBLE, and a featured writer at Missio Alliance and Preaching Today. Find him at www.seanisaacpalmer.com.
He will be speaking to The Collective+ on Thursday, January 17th.
The best training for preaching is not preaching—at least, that was the case for me.
My first dozen years in vocational ministry were spent as a youth and associate pastor. Like most folks holding those posts, I performed a cameo in the pulpit a couple times each year. I preached when the Senior Pastor was out-of-town or wanted a break or we were celebrating milestones in the lives of our teenagers, but not much more often. The remaining Sundays, like the rest of the church, I was a faithful participant in worship—praying, singing, and, yes, hearing sermons.
“Seminary taught me to read the text. Sitting in the pew taught me to read the hearers.”
It was in those years that I learned how to preach. Perhaps, better said, I learned how not to preach.
I learned when sermon series went too long.
I discovered the loves and losses of preaching the lectionary.
I came to know why and how stories and illustrations worked or didn’t, and what hearers found useful or annoying.
While the preachers preached, I listened. I looked. I examined which messages seemed to land with hearers and which homiletical strategies flopped.
Seminary taught me to read the text. Sitting in the pew taught me to read the hearers.
Who Is A Sermon For?
Fred Croddock said, “The first task of the preacher is to gain a hearing.”
I experienced the truth of his words in the pew, not the pulpit.
After those dozen years, I transitioned to preaching full time and committed myself to a simple principle born from those years: The sermon is about Jesus, but it is for the church.
After a quarter-century of ministry in local churches, I remained stunned by the number of preachers for whom the preacher comes first: her or his thoughts, concerns, anxieties, frustrations, or passing interest.
For other proclaimers, the “points” of the sermon take priority.
For others still, the sermon is a useful mechanism to get the church to sign-on or sign-up for whatever corporate initiative for which the church needs bodies and bucks.
It’s not that those elements aren’t important. Rather, our hearers can only experience them as important after they’ve heard us, after the preacher has gained a hearing.
And we gain a hearing by speaking to the way they see the world.
Center the Hearer
In my book, Speaking By The Numbers: Enneagram Wisdom for Teachers, Pastors, and Communicators, as well as with my preaching and speaking clients, I challenge communicators to center the hearer.
Each weekend, our churches gather, bringing with them a beautiful mixture of varied experiences, insights, struggles, gifts, tensions, and reactions to the world, which we call “personality.” Personality never goes away, never goes to sleep, never takes a day off, and never calls in sick.
As I discovered and studied the ancient, contemplative wisdom tradition which is the Enneagram, I learned that the typology system (which explains what we call “personality”) is designed to give humans insight into four great domains of life:
How we connect with the world.
How we get what we want.
How we perceive the world.
How we solve problems.
“There is no way to guide hearers into a new vision for their place in God’s Kingdom and mission without meeting them, not just where they are, but in who they are. ”
These domains of life step center stage when the Word of God is proclaimed in a local church. Humans don’t do anything which doesn’t affect these four domains.
Imagine preparing and preaching a sermon with great exegesis, research, exposition, illustrations, and invitations, but failing to lovingly enter into these domains of life.
Most preachers don’t have to imagine it. We just need to realize it.
Most of us exclude how people actually function much more often than we know. We try to preach to people without preaching to personality.
The hearers in our churches arrive each week with their personality structures on full display. Personality is our strategy to survive and thrive in the world.
It is the wise preacher who spends her time learning as much as she can about the nature of personality and learning to speak to the beautiful variety present in the pew.
After all, there is no way to guide hearers into a new vision for their place in God’s Kingdom and mission without meeting them, not just where they are, but in who they are.
Moving Forward
In order to center the hearer, I invite preachers to begin with two essential steps.
The first step is to know themselves, and to know themselves well. The ineffective preachers are the ones who believe that the rest of the church perceives the world, strategizes, connects to the world, and problem solves the same way the preacher does. These pastors are essentially talking to themselves.
The second step is to deepen our understanding of human nature and human behavior. The Enneagram is one tool we can use, but it is certainly not the only one. Our tools will always be imperfect and incomplete, but many are terribly useful. Pick one. Learn it.
Since many of us cannot spend extended time with every one of our parishioners, a road map to human personality can aid our becoming compassionate and compelling speakers. And in a world where most folks believe sermons are dangerous and dull, compassionate and compelling speakers are exactly what the church and world need.
In the end, the sermon is about Jesus, but it is for the church.