Preaching & Communication

I organized the Leadership Nexus ministry with the goal to serve the needs of the Church – to provide the kind of training that we need to be more effective in our task. I have asked a lot of people what kind of training they feel we need, and I get a lot of interesting answers! Most consistently, however, the answer I get from administrators in the Church, like Bishops, superintendents, and lay leaders of various denominations, is that clergy need help with their preaching. Recently, as I have spoken to several of my friends who are Bishops, they have described our preaching as “terrible.” That is a pretty negative commentary.

Today, we research and develop most everything we do in our society. We have learned how to travel faster, fly further, and communicate better. Communication has become the focus of so much research and development. Social networking, movies, television production, theater, and the arts have come to specialize in the science of communication. We have studied learning theory and realized that people learn in different ways. We have studied communication through body language and realized how important our posture, hand movements, and eye movements are in communicating. We have become experts in relationships and learned that the way in which we speak – the language, the pronouns we use – has so much to do with the relationship of communication. We have realized that stories and pictures, movement and sound are important in communicating. Therefore, the communication industry is operating with a new effectiveness by using this research and these techniques. We have realized that music is useful for setting the mood and creating motivation. All of these advancements and extensive research have provided the tools for advertisers, movie and television production and all areas of communication.

So often, the Church has only relied upon the simplest spoken word form of communication. Certainly, very cognitive, logically sequenced ideas communicate, but, all too often, it’s the emotion, the drama, the feeling, and the mood that create the motivation for significant decisions and major learning.

Out of our academic, logical learning experiences in seminary, too often, we have come to see the sermon as an extension of a graduate course and the worship service as nothing more than a lecture. In our high-tech, emotionally-loaded, communication-focused world, the sermon is simply boring. In a world that so desperately needs to hear the Good News, it’s time that we who have taken on the responsibility to be the preachers learn how to communicate effectively, and to lead people to make decisions to follow Christ. It’s time that all of us find the ways, means, styles, systems, and ideas that make our presentation of the Gospel attractive, clear, motivational, and helpful!

I’m committed to finding a way that we can do preaching academies across the United States to preach, share, and learn from each other on how to communicate better and better. The need is so great! The opportunity is now. As church attendance has declined all across the country, one of the reasons may be a direct proportion to our lack of communication abilities. It’s time for us, clergy of all types and styles, to become highly effective communicators of the Gospel of Jesus Christ!

Preaching Academy - May 2-4 Arlington, TX


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