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Book Review of Andy Stanley’s Communicating for a Change (Lesson Five) Engage Your Audience

Posted: December 26, 2012 in Book Review of Communicating for a Change, Book Reviews
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Andy Stanley believes that “Presentation trumps information when it comes to engaging the audience.” Do you agree? Had he said, “Presentation trumps information” I would have balked. But if we are boring with the truth, they will hear it and not be set free by the truth. If we shot over their heads we will miss the bull’s eye: their hearts.

On most Sunday mornings, we preachers must “pose a question your audience wants answered, create a tension they need resolved, or point to a mystery they have been unable to solve.” If we don’t then our listeners will listen but they will be counting the ceiling tile and mentally reviewing their “things to do” list.

Stanley works the hardest on his introduction. “If I don’t capture the audience’s attention in the first five minutes, all is lost. My hours of preparation are for naught. My life-changing insights won’t change anybody.”

Once you have grabbed them by the nap of the neck in the introduction, then you must hold them in a head lock for the rest of the sermon.

Stanley gives five suggestions to help you keep your audience engaged past the introduction.

So far we have reviewed: Determine your goal, Pick a point, Create a map, and Internalize the message. After Engage your audience, we will review Find your voice and Start all over.

1. Check your speed

Stanley quotes Jeff Miller in a Leadership magazine article: “Studies have shown that speaking slightly above 150 words per minute adds an element of dignity to one’s message. Faster speakers—up to 190 words per minute—were rated as more objective, knowledgeable, and persuasive than slower speakers.” Your Words Per Minute communicate your interest in and passion for your topic. When your child runs at you shouting “Daddy, Daddy” talking a mile a minute, his passion has your attention.

2. Slow down in the curves

We need transitions between the main parts of our sermon. Stanley gives these transitions he uses when he is moving from WE to GOD: “Fortunately for us, we are not the first group to wonder about this….” “Now, in light of all that, what should we do? How does this principle intersect with our lives? What do you do with this tomorrow morning when you show up at the office or school? How does this look like around the dinner table? here are a few suggestions.”

If for some reason, we have lost our listeners the transition hopefully will give them a chance to catch up.

3. Navigate through the text

This is where it is easy to get bogged down. Therefore

1) Have the audience turn to one passage and one passage only.

2) Don’t read long sections without comment.

3) Highlight and explain odd words or phrases.

4) Voice your frustration or skepticism about the text: “That’s just hard to believe, isn’t it?” Then resolve the issue.

5) Help the audience anticipate the main point of the text: “Okay, get ready, here it is.”

6) Deliberately read the text wrong, inserting a word that means the opposite and then pause to let it sink in: “It is more blessed to receive and than to give.”

7) Have the audience read certain words out loud for emphasis.

8) Summarize the text with a well-crafted statement.

9) Use visuals every chance y0u get. Stanley gives several great examples. Stanley was preaching on the individual Christian role in the body of Christ. He got several big glass containers, filled them with yellow water and put one rubber body part in each. Then he covered each one with a cloth. (When you have stuff on stage covered with a sheet, you are already ahead of the guy down the street before you even start preaching.) It looked like something out of a horror movie. When he pulled the covers off people thought they were real. I explained that that’s how God viewed Christians who refused to act as part of the body. Detached body parts are gross.

10) Resist the urge to share everything you have learned in you research.

4. Add something unexpected to the trip

For example, interview someone, banter with an audience member, bring people up on the state, let someone draw or paint while you speak.

5. Take the most direct route

Tell your listeners up front what you are going to talk about. “Get there quicker than you think you need to. And be more specific than you think than you think you need to. And repeat it more times than you think you need to.”

Book Review of Andy Stanley’s Communicating for a Change (Lesson Four) Internalize the Message

Posted: December 7, 2012 in Book Review of Communicating for a Change, Book Reviews
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Stanley was asked, “Are you saying to deliver it with no notes, from memory?” Stanley responded, “I’m saying that until you can deliver it with no notes, from memory, then it’s not your message. You may know where you want to go, but you haven’t internalized the way to get there.” Stanley observed, “How can you expect your listeners to care enough to remember what you’re saying when you can’t.” Also, “When you stand up and speak without notes and without having to read your sermon, you’re saying, ‘This is so important that it’s a part of me—and I think you should make it part of you, too.”

Stanley doesn’t completely preach without notes: “Another thing I do quite often is write out my main point on a three-by-five card and lay it beside my Bible. . . .My final memory aid comes to us from the wonderful world of technology. We have a video monitor on the front row facing the stage. Occasionally I will give the production team a short list of things to put on the monitor to jog my memory.”

Internalizing the message is very important. I agree. But, does this mean that every preacher has to memorize his sermon? I think not. Jonathan Edwards read perhaps the greatest sermon in our history as a nation. The sermon: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. This sermon was used by God to spark the first Great Awakening. Vance Havner read his sermons. Mark Dever takes a manuscript sermon with him into the pulpit every Sunday. You can read one such manuscript sermon. Josh Harris has a Sermon Notes Series in which he gives a brief biography of current, well known preachers and actual PDF examples of their sermon notes. The preachers are: Mark Dever, Mike Bullmore, C. J. Mahaney, Ray Ortlund, Jr., Mark Driscoll, and Josh Harris. All of these contemporary preachers use notes and most of them use manuscript notes.

My point: You don’t have to memorize to internalize. Obviously, we should not be chained to our notes as we preach. In my opinion, we should reduce our manuscript sermon to an extended outline or even a bare bones outline as Driscoll and to some degree Stanley do. How can we internal our messages? Start early in sermon preparation, practice it out loud, pray over the sermon, meditate on the sermon until you own it.

Perhaps W.H. Griffith Thomas‘s advice to young preachers captures the secret to internalizing the sermon: “Think yourself empty; read yourself full; write yourself clear; pray yourself hot; then into the pulpit, and let yourself go!”

 

Book Review of Andy Stanley’s Communicating for a Change (Lesson Three) Create a Map

Posted: December 6, 2012 in Book Review of Communicating for a Change, Book Reviews
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Stanley’s lessons so far in his book Communicating for a Change are Lesson One: Determine your Goal and Lesson Two: Pick a Point.

Once you have picked your point you, you need to introduce it, support it, and apply it to your audience. Stanley does this with his sermon map: ME, WE, GOD, YOU, WE. This is a relational outline verses a informational outline.

ME is the Orientation.

This is where you connect to the audience by admitting your personal struggle with the one point of your sermon. I would add that you would convey that God is helping you with this struggle.

WE is the Identification.

This broadens the struggle from me to the entire audience. Stanley says, “Don’t transition from WE to the next section until you feel like you have created a tension that your audience is dying for you to resolve.” This is what is traditionally called the Interest Step in the introduction. Stanley says that Chuck Swindoll, Bruce Wilkinson, or Rick Warren believe that “seventy to eighty percent of the Gospels and Epistles are application oriented.” Therefore, Stanley concludes “Application isn’t a section of the message, it is the context of the message.” The We puts the sermon in the context of application.

GOD is the Illumination.

“Now for the meat. The Bible part. The God part. The text!” The transition to the GOD part can be made with, “Well the good news is, we are not the first people to struggle with this.” Stanley says, “Don’t just read the text. Don’t just explain the text to death. Engage the audience with the text. Make it so interesting that they are actually tempted to go home and read it on their own.”

YOU is the Application. 

This is the “So what?” and “Now what?” part. There are several ways of making application. There is the concentric circles of relationships that applies the sermon to my family, the entire church, or those in the marketplace.

You can also apply through the various stages of life: teenagers, college students, singles, newlyweds, parents, and empty nesters.

WE is the Inspiration. 

The second We is where we cast the vision of the entire church body applying the sermon. It is a moment of inspiration. It is where the preacher dreams out loud. “Dream on behalf of your church families, singles, kids, churches, the kingdom. This is where you remind your audience that the Scriptures were given not just as a means of making our individual lives better. They were given so that as a body, corporately, we could shine like a beacon of hope in our communities, our neighborhoods, and in the marketplace. Imagine what WE could do together.”

Book Review of Andy Stanley’s Communicating for a Change (Lesson Two) Pick a Point

Posted: December 5, 2012 in Book Review of Communicating for a Change, Book Reviews
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This is what Andy Stanley calls “a one point message” in his book Communicating for a Change. If a sermon has multiple points, Stanley says, this is like trying to drink from a fire hydrant: “You’ll drown yourself before you ever manage to swallow.” Stanley makes another accusation that in my opinion does not have to be true: “If life change is your goal, point by point preaching is not the most effective approach.” Wow! Does mean that all the preachers in the past and in the present who preach with points have been or are ineffective in maturing the saints? What about points preachers like Adrian Rogers, John Piper, John MacArthur, etc.

When Stanley says one point message, he means “every message should have one central idea, application, insight, or principle.” One problem, Stanley is trying to solve is too much information in sermons unloaded on our listeners. “One of my favorite communicators told me that on several occasions his wife has turned to him after a message and said, ‘I really enjoyed the sermons.’”

There are three steps in developing a one point message.

1. Dig until you find it.

What Stanley calls a one point message, is called propositional preaching by others. The two, however, are not exactly the same. The one point in a propositional sermon is the proposition or the sermon reduced to a sentence. The difference is finding how many developmental truths are in the text about the one proposition. Each developmental truth (point) is then explained, argued theologically, illustrated, and applied. But still there is just one point or proposition.

2. Build everything around it (the one point).

A helpful contribution here is this question every preacher needs to ask himself: “Does this really facilitate the journey or is this just something that will get a laugh or fill time?” If it is not pertinent to the main point or text, leave it on the cutting room floor.

3. Make it stick.

“Take time to reduce your one point to one sticky statement.”

Stanley says the one point of the sermon is what his dad, Charles Stanley, calls the preacher’s “burden.” “You can tell when a communicator is carrying a burden versus when he is simply dispensing information.” Stanley says, “At some point in the preparation process, you must stop and ask yourself, ‘What is the one thing I must communicate? What is it that people have to know?’”

So, the one proposition from the text must become the burden of the preacher. “The sermons that have put you to sleep were delivered by men with information but no burden. A burden brings passion to preaching.”

Book Review of Andy Stanley’s Communicating for a Change (Lesson One) Determine Your Goal

Posted: December 3, 2012 in Book Review of Communicating for a Change, Book Reviews
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I bought Stanley’s book on preaching on late Friday and read it this weekend. I don’t know if was the book or just the Lord choosing to bless, but I saw a difference.

Andy Stanley makes this admission: “We’ve all walked to our cars after a message feeling like we knocked it out of the park. And, we’ve all slithered out the back door, hoping, we didn’t have to make eye contact with anybody. There have been Sundays when I felt I owned the audience an apology for making them endure whatever it was I did up there for forty minutes” (page 91).

In his book on preaching, Andy Stanley and Lane Jones communicate seven lessons to help us increase the impact of our preaching.

Lesson One: Determine Your Goal.

Stanley says there are three possible goals in preaching. The first is: Teach the Bible to people. Stanley says this goal is typically seen in verse by verse preaching through books of the Bible. He makes a statement that does not have to be true of expositional preaching: “This approach requires no creativity. This approach need not include any application” (page 93).

The second possible goal is: Teach people the Bible. Stanley says “preachers and teachers who embrace this goal often use alliteration and multiple illustrations” (page 94). Again, this is an oversimplification.

The third goal subscribed to by Stanley is: Teach people how to live a life that reflects the values, principles, and truths of the Bible. This goal, in my opinion, can be accomplished through verse by verse preaching through books. Stanley advocates “preaching for life change requires far less information and more application. Less explanation and more inspiration. Less first century and more twenty-first century….When you preach for life change, your preaching is not complete until you answer the questions “So what?” and “Now what?” I agree this should be our goal as it was Paul’s goal as stated in Colossians 1:27-29. We can, however, preach to change lives verse by verse through books. This is not just a generational difference between say a John MacArthur and a Andy Stanley. Mark Driscoll preaches verse by verse through books.

This goal helps us figure out why we preach before figuring out how we preach. Of course, the goal can affect how we preach.

In our next post, we look at the second lesson.

Randy Alcorn’s Fourth Law of Return

Posted: August 18, 2012 in Book Reviews
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Alcorn’s reward principle # 4: When we see our lives through the lens of eternity, our attitude toward wealth will change drastically. Alcorn wrote what a recent dying friend said to him with a smile: “I don’t buy jumbo shampoo like I used to. I don’t even buy green bananas.” David in Psalm 39: 4-7 also had the proper perspective on life in light of eternity:

“O Lord, make me know my end
and what is the measure of my days;
let me know how fleeting I am!
5 Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths (the width of a hand),
and my lifetime is as nothing before you.
Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! Selah
6     Surely a man goes about as a shadow!
Surely for nothing they are in turmoil;
man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather!

7 “And now, O Lord, for what do I wait?
My hope is in you.

David described the brevity of life as a breath. Because this life is so short, we might conclude it’s inconsequential. Our lives may seem like pebbles dropped in a pond. They create ripples for a moment, tiny wrinkles that smooth out, then are gone forever. What do you know about your great-grandparents? What will your great-grandchildren know about you? Our brief stay here may appear unimportant, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Bible tells us that although others may not remember us or care what our lives here have been, God will remember perfectly, and He cares very much—so much that the door of eternity swings on the hinges our present lives.

Alcorn makes this possible life changing observation: “Eternity will hold for us what we have invested there during our life on earth.”

Jesus didn’t say, “Follow Your Heart” But “Your Money Will Follow Your Heart”

Posted: August 18, 2012 in Book Reviews
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In Matthew 6:21, Jesus said, “Where you treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Randy Alcorn observed, “What we do with our money doesn’t simply indicate where our heart is. According Jesus, it determines where our heart goes.” So when a believer says, “My heart is not in this ministry” it could also mean, “My money is not in this ministry.” Jesus would say, “Put your money in your ministry and your heart will follow and also be in the ministry.”

Does that mean we should not invest for the future? Of course not. Proverbs 6:6-8 describes the wise ant storing up in the summer provisions for the winter. So should we prepare for the winter years when our income earning ability is less. But when does our savings become stockpiling, our retirement our security, or our nest egg our idol? When these investments become excessive and draw our hearts away from investing in the Lord’s work.  Best cure for hoarding is giving. Listen to what Paul told the already poverty stricken Philippians who sacrificially gave to him in his first Roman imprisonment: “Not that I am looking for a gift, but I am looking for what may be credited to your account” (Philippians 4:17). That statement could be revolutionary. When we give to support our church’s ministry when the offering plates are passed it is like we are making a deposit in the bank of heaven. “When we give, we withdraw funds from our earthly account to have them credited to our heavenly account” (Alcorn, The Law of Rewards, page 40).

Financial advisors tell us, “Think thirty years ahead” and invest in a Roth IRA. Paul would tell us, “Think thirty million years ahead” and invest in or through your local church ministry.

I just read that if you invested $5,000 in a Roth IRA at age 18 at 13 percent interest and left it alone until you were 72, you would earn over 3 millions dollars. What is the percentage of interest if you invested in God’s work? Jesus informed us the interest rate is 10,000 percent: Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.  And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life” (Matthew 19:28-29). You make the choice!

Randy Alcorn’s Third Law of Reward

Posted: August 17, 2012 in Book Reviews
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Alcorn’s Reward Principle # 3: God offers us rewards that are eternal, imperishable, and inexhaustible.  Moses prayed in the oldest psalm, “Establish the work of our hands” (Psalm 90:17) or “Make permanent the work of our hands.” The way we make permanent the work of our hands is to give away what our hands have worked to produced. John Wesley said, “Money never stays with me. It would burn me if it did. I throw it out of my hands as soon as possible, lest it should find its way into my heart.” Wesley earned considerable book royalties. At a time when a single man could live comfortably on thirty pounds a year, his annual income reached fourteen hundred. Yet Wesley’s goal was to give so generously that he would leave virtually nothing behind when he died. He achieved that goal.

Imagine you’re alive at the end of the Civil War. You’re living in the south, but your are a Northerner. You plan to move home as soon as the war is over. While in the South you’ve accumulated loss of Confederate currency for U. S. currency—the only money that will have value once the war is over. Keep only enough Confederate currency to meet your short-term needs.

When the Lord returns, all remaining money not invested in God’s work will be like Confederate money, useless. Money given to support Gospel spreading ministries will be like “gold, silver, and precious stones” in eternity.

Are you stockpiling Confederate currency? Or are you exchanging it for kingdom currency that will survive this world…and retain its value for all eternity?

Randy Alcorn’s Second Law of Reward

Posted: August 16, 2012 in Book Reviews
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Alcorn’s Reward Principle #2: When we invest money now in God’s kingdom, we will receive great rewards later in Heaven. The apostle Paul phrase this principle this way in 1 Timothy 6:19, “lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age.”  All our wealth on earth will definitely be lost. “Either it leaves us while we live, or we leave it when we die. Treasures on earth are all flammable. The only way to fireproof them is to turn them into treasures in heaven.” A. W. Tozer said, “Any temporal possession can be turned into everlasting wealth. Whatever is given to Christ is immediately touched with immortality.”

You can’t take it with you but you can send it on ahead. Alcorn gives this example: “For instance, with $15,000 I may be able to buy a new car. With the same money, I could help translate the Scriptures for an unreached people group, support church planting, feed the hungry in the name of Christ, get gospel literature distributed in Southeast Asia, or send out multiple Nigerian or Indian missionary families and support them full-time for a year. If I have an investment mentality, I ask myself, What’s the better investment for eternity? If I need a car, I may ask, can I buy a used one and give away the difference to God’s kingdom?”

Randy Alcorn’s First Law of Reward: “Giving Brings Greater Blessing Than Receiving”

Posted: August 15, 2012 in Book Reviews
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Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). “Why?” asks Randy Alcorn, “Perhaps because when we give it blesses not one but three parties—God, the recipient, and us….By not giving, we don’t just rob God or rob others of blessing. We rob ourselves of the rewards God wants to give us. On the wall of President Lyndon Johnson’s White House office hung a framed letter written by General Sam Houston to Johnson’s great-grandfather, Baines more than a hundred years earlier. Baines had led Sam Houston to Christ. Houston was a changed man, no longer coarse and belligerent but peaceful and content. The day came for Houston to be baptized—an incredible event for those who knew him. After his baptism Houston offered to pay half the local minister’s salary. When someone asked him why, he said, ‘My pocketbook was baptized too.’ Martin Luther similarly said, ‘For each of us there must be not only the conversion of the heart and mind but also the conversion of the purse.’”

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