Part I: Listening for our Congregation
Preachers often think of preparation in terms of preparing what to say. Yet what we say every Sunday emerges from how we listen to the Scripture, to our people, and to the Holy Spirit’s voice. Most sermons are exercises in attentiveness: helping a congregation stop, look, and listen to God’s heart, and to accept His invitation.
Sermon preparation, too, is an act of attentiveness, harmonizing the dual choruses of both biblical witness and contemporary listener, helping the sermon “sing” as God uses it to express a fresh invitation. The odds are, much of the sermon preparation literature we usually read focuses primarily on how we weave these two choruses together into a sermon. But how do we identify these choruses at all? That comes down to our practice of listening.
Over the next months, we’ll be posting a series of content on Wesleyan Sermons that will focus on pastoral listening–to God, to Scripture, to imagination, and (this week) to our own congregations.
Here are a few obstacles preachers face in listening to our congregations:
- Thinking we’ve already heard. Whether because we feel familiar with our church, have high demands on our schedule, or have been in ministry for a while, it can become easy to assume we know what our congregation is primarily concerned about. Whenever we say, “I know what my congregation thinks about _____” without having spent significant time talking to diverse members of our congregation about that issue, we treat them as stereotypes. We assume we understand others’ feelings, motives, and, and as a consequence, we miss preaching that hits core human needs of those in the pew. We’re preaching at what we think they need; but in the process, we’re missing what they really need.
- Rush to diagnosis:
If a doctor prescribed your medication without accurately hearing your symptoms, it would (at best) be partially useful, or (at worst) lead to nasty side effects and a malpractice suit. Yet pastors, in both sermons and counseling sessions, often rush to prescribe. Part of this is motivated by the Sunday-to-Sunday rhythm of preaching, which (in conjunction with other pastoral duties) can compress our diagnosis into a small time span. Part of this is because we possess deep knowledge of our own motives and shallow knowledge of others’ motives. In Homiletical Plot, Eugene Lowry writes, “For adequate analysis, one must always go behind the ‘simplicity’ of the behavior to the complexity of causality. Upon my own personal introspection, I notice how much more merciful I am toward my behavior than I am toward that of others. The reason is not that I intend to be unjust–simply that I am more in touch with the interior complexities of my life than others’.” If we rush through the part of sermon preparation (and pastoral life) that allows us to dive deeply, our sermons will solve problems that don’t exist, while leaving people’s actual concerns unresolved.
- Setting up an “us” and “them”: Within your congregation, you likely have people who are struggling with depression, wrestling with doubt, grappling with their sexual orientation, working to get free from addiction, and grieving hopes that have not found fulfillment. People in your congregation likely also have different opinions about expectations of what’s “normal” in a family, how religion interweaves with work, and how faith should influence their politics. They probably also know someone who has had an abortion, work with someone who is of another faith (or no faith), and have loved ones who are in different denominational traditions. One of the surest ways we can squelch listening in our congregation is to use our pulpit to condemn those who don’t share our values, doctrinal statements, or lifestyles as “bad people,” or “those people,” not emphasizing their importance as beloved children of God. If a sermon rallies the congregation around condemnation of an outside group, the church’s ability to listen is compromised. If people walk away from a sermon believing they have a license to pre-judge another person, they will not approach their neighbors as listeners. Holiness is God’s invitation toward deeper life in Christ, not a set of beliefs that helps us keep others out.
And here are a few things that help us get more deeply in touch with the people we serve:
- Longings and Losses:
People are complex; but so often, what they really want is to be known. The faces you see during your sermon leave the room to enter into relationships, work situations, neighborhoods, and routines that they’ve built into their lives. All of them–the farmer, the single mom, the mechanic, the businesswoman, the counselor, the accountant–have hopes for how life will be, and grief about unfulfilled hopes from their past. For preaching (and for pastoring in general), it’s important to sit with people in both hope and grief, honor their questions, gain familiarity with their dreams, and acknowledge their pain.
- Action Step: Over the next 10 days, meet with 3 people in your congregation, and ask questions that help you get to know them better (examples here):
- “What’s been a theme you’re noticing in your life recently?”
- “What’s been a challenging thing to process over the past few years?”
- “What’s something you’ve left unsaid that you’re holding onto right now?”
- Empathy in Diagnosis: As you try to diagnose the obstacles to living out the Gospel, push beyond what seems “obvious” to you. If you’re preaching a sermon on the importance of obedience, you might touch on the topic of apathy. Don’t just preach about the danger of apathy; ask, “Why are good people–people who come to church and long to do what is right–unable to align their lives with God’s call?” Your first answer might be, “They just don’t care about the things of God.” But people are more complex than that; so dig deeper. Why might people who do care about God be apathetic? A whole range of possibilities are exposed. Maybe they don’t know what the first step would be. Maybe the change that obedience would require would cause them to displace their family from their familiar routine, or would disappoint someone whose opinion they hold dear. Before caricaturing your congregation, ask why people who are trying their hardest would still not arrive at what the text invites them to. And do the same with Scripture. Instead of leaving the Samaritans as “good,” and Pharisees as “hypocrites,” examine how the hearers would have heard that. Help the congregation ask who (like the Samaritans) they often overlook, and where (like the Pharisees) they have narrowed their categories for what obedience can look like. Help your congregation build empathy by taking an empathetic look at both themselves and Scripture.
- Action Step: This week, look through the text and identify:
- “What’s the ‘obvious’ reading of this Scripture?”
- “What’s behind that ‘obvious’ reading that might surprise us?”
- “How would the audience have heard this?”
- “What assumptions will the congregation bring to this text?”
- “What might resist the congregation in carrying this out to obedience?”
- “Start with Us”: Christian communities often tend to see sin as external–as something at work in society, or systems, or in “others.” But in moments of humility, we can admit that what’s wrong in the world is also wrong with us. Every week, the people who walk into your sanctuary are not purely moral characters; they are real people who struggle against selfishness, impatience, greed, and pride. Don’t be afraid to mention sin by name; but don’t rally your congregation around condemning other people. Instead, acknowledge that what God will do in the world (repentance, healing, renewal), He may first have to do “in us,” right here in the church.
- Action Step: Sometime in the next month, review your last 3 sermons and identify:
- “How often have I depicted sin as something ‘out in the world’?”
- “How often have I paused to allow our congregation to see how God’s way might be ‘other’ than their own way?”
- “In my own life, how often recently have I seen the discrepancy between my own way and God’s way?”
As much as listening can help preaching, it’s also a crucial skill that translates into all relationships, as empathy, openness, and listening (not to reply, but to understand) help us to be more responsive to both the Spirit and the people around us. Listening well helps us tear down the insulation present in our “Christian language,” so that words we’ve come to love
(words like sin, grace, Kingdom of God, redemption) take on raw human experience, broadening the scope of our sermons, our shepherding, and–maybe most importantly–our way of loving others God’s given us to love.
2019, Ethan Linder
Ethan Linder is the Pastor of Hospitality, Collegians, and Young Adults at College Wesleyan Church in Marion, Indiana, and the Editor of The Wesleyan Church’s Education and Clergy Development writing staff.