Transcript

Hello and welcome back to our masterclass

My name is Ian White and right now we’re going to take our next step towards crafting a sermon

We’re seeking to form a bridge between the Bible’s world and its context and and today’s world with our context.

I’m assuming we’ve done all the background slog on the Bible’s text – and we’ve summarised it like this

(you can pick up each of those in previous segments)

and we’re now working on the talk or sermon you’re going to preach

• We want to perceive it’s heartbeat or the big idea we want to get across

• We want to establishing its framework for our talk and

• put down the content in some form that will be helpful to us when we stand up to preach it

You can see the symmetry building up here!

• No particular reason of this, except it helps me cover the important bases when I’m preaching

• … and it’s neat and tidy – which is satisfying!

So in this segment we’ll give some thought to the context of your talk.

• Because we don’t preach to thin air, we preach to people!

• (unless you’re like me right now doing a recording in an otherwise empty room and reading my notes from an autocue!)

• and pausing when planes fly over!

So the big message of this session is

Know your audience

as far as possible

Knowing something about our audience or congregation will help us communicate God’s word well

I remember being invited to preach at a church in South London that was new to me. Somehow they’d got hold of my details and invited me to speak one Sunday morning.

• The date had been booked – and that was about all.

• So ten days or so before I was due to go there, I rang the church administrator to find out a bit about the church.

• And I asked her ‘how may people will be there? What’s the age demographic? Will there be children in the room while I’m speaking? Which version of the Bible do you prefer? How long should I speak for? Etc. etc.

• As we spoke she appeared to be increasingly flustered. “Why are you asking me all this?”

• It turned out, she felt the church was being criticised (by me) – just by virtue of asking questions like these.

• “We’re not a church of hundreds – there might only be a couple of dozen there – and it’s mid-summer so some of them are on holiday”

She took some reassuring that I genuinely wanted to know about her church – and my motive wasn’t adverse in any sense, I just wanted to do well by them – and by our heavenly Father!

I wanted to get a rough idea of the context in which I would be speaking

Well, we sorted our little hiccup and the Sunday services went really well.

What intrigued me (and concerned me) was that my administrator friend had been fed an idea that the sermon is this ‘thing’ that you turn up to ‘present’ to the congregation, whether it fitted them or not.

And by asking questions about the church I was implicitly running it down.

So what factors influence sermon context?

Demographic

Firstly – the demographic matters.

Obviously speaking to largely children, or largely students, or largely working people, or largely retired folk your message will require some appropriate adaptation.

When I taught in a university I could be confident that all the people listening were roughly at the same level of understanding.

The same is true of any teacher, teaching a class in a school or college. The students will usually be in one or two year groups and therefore approximately at the same level – whether they’re 5 year-olds or 15 year-olds..

But this is not true of the average church.

The challenge for most preachers is spanning the huge range of people sitting in front of them.

• You could be speaking to millennials and grannies

• To teens and tradesmen

• to baby carriers and baby boomers

It’s not straightforward to craft a single talk that will have an impact in the hearts of 18 year olds and 80 year olds at the same time.

We do our best, often by crafting a spread of illustrations, each of which will resonate with a different group.

It’s not a guaranteed strategy, but it can help.

and then trust God for the rest!

So far, so obvious.

There are bigger and deeper issues at stake than just the variety of people sitting in front of you

These issues revolve around the assumptions that these people carry into church.

Life-assumptions about secularism

For example, assumptions around being a ‘secular society’ are often brought into church.

Many of the people in your congregation are implicitly expected (and sometimes explicitly told) to leave their faith outside of their workplace.

“We are a ‘secular’ organisation so religion has no place here”

• by all means be a Christian, but do it at the weekends and keep it to your private life.

• So take your Bible off your desk and don’t have a cross displayed in your van or round your neck

• and whatever else you do, don’t talk about Christ at work! We are a secular organisation!

This philosophy is regarded as self-evident and not open to question

But secularism is not the absence of belief. It is an entire world-view that has a belief system all of its own.

And it is the gold-fish bowl in which many of the people listening to us preaching will have been reared. (Including us!)

So if, in our preaching, we’re going to help people find and follow Christ, this context of over-arching secularism is one we will find ourselves calling into question.

Let’s look at one of these assumptions and how it plays out in the context of our preaching.

Life assumptions about personal identity

The question of who I am and where I fit in.

Before Christianity emerged, the dominant idea humanity carried about identity was that individuals didn’t matter, compared with the group, the tribe, the clan, the city etc.

• What I felt, or desired didn’t really matter – these feelings had to be suppressed because I was part of a particular family, or town.

Christianity, however maintained that each of us has worth, not merely as a part of the family or clan, but worth in the eyes of God himself.

• We each carry the image of God within us

• An image tarnished by sin, yes, but still the image of God

Even as far back as Augustine in his book ‘Confessions’ he argued that my feelings, my motivations and my desires are God-given and therefore not to be disregarded when it comes to discovering my identity – especially my identity in Christ.

Much of our contemporary understanding of feelings and identity have grown from these roots.

But secularism has taken this many steps further.

From acknowledging my feelings and desires, to enthroning them

The enthroning of me

The assumptions may people will carry in your congregation go way beyond this.

We are taught (implicitly, if not explicitly) that to find ourselves we must look inside.

• What do I want. What are my desires.

• and we will find our true selves only when these desires are realised.

• And we do this over and against our upbringing, societal expectations and even family loyalty.

Brave was to throw off all external constraints and to ‘chase the wind and touch the sky’

• so the discovery of who I am by looking inward trumps all else

• (I’ll put a link below)

The same is true of Disney’s ‘Frozen’

The heroine is no longer going to be ‘the good girl’ that her family and society want her to be,

• instead she will express the forces that have been swirling around insider.

In her keynote song “Let it go” the heroine says that

• for her there is “no right, no wrong, no rules”

Do whatever you want, find yourself by looking only at yourself

And if our identity is based on our feelings as we look within ourselves, we are on shaky ground because feelings can rise an fall.

• So an identity based on my feelings or desires will be at best unstable.

Therefore, the context into which you may well be preaching is one where people have ideas about personal identity that are not Biblical and end up demeaning who they are in Christ..

Many other assumptions are brought into church that we don’t have time to think about here, but I hope you’re getting the idea that

understanding who you’re speaking to provides the context of your sermon.

One of my favourite examples of knowing the context and preparing for it well comes from Neil DeGrass-Tyson, the American astrophysicist.

He was to be interviewed on a radio station and he knew, from experience, that the interviewer was likely to be all friendly and agreeable to begin with, but then come in with more aggressive questioning in the latter part of the interview.

Knowing this was going to be the context, he prepared accordingly.

One of the questions he anticipated (because it comes up frequently) was ‘How can you justify spending so much money on space research?”

He understood his context – and he was prepared.

“Well” he said “As a nation we spend more on lip-balm than we do on space exploration”

the interviewer was floored by this and he tells the story that at a later talk people waved their chap-stiks in the air when he came on to speak.

So to summarise

An effective preacher will frame their message according to the people they’re speaking to

especially

• the demographic of the audience

• and the life-assumptions they bring into church.

May you know wisdom in crafting your preaching to the people in front of you

God bless you.