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PREACHING SKILLSPreaching on My FeetCould I speak for 35 minutes without ever writing notes?Craig Brian Larson
I have recently been experimenting with a preaching method that is stretching me like nothing I've done before. To use a phrase from author Fred Lybrand, I have been "preaching on my feet." And this appears to be an enduring adventure.
The adventure began when I found Lybrand's book Preaching on Your Feet, which I expected to describe the benefits of an unscripted approach to preaching that fosters eyeball-to-eyeball engagement with hearers. He did that, but he went on to describe what I had not anticipated—a preaching experience that includes a greater sense of inspiration, freedom, and being fully in the moment. That caught my interest. I could identify with his description of the disconnect that can occur with scripted preaching between the inspiration experienced in the study versus what actually happens in delivery. How many times have I outlined a sermon that was powerful to me in the study but sagged in the pulpit?
No memorized script
As Lybrand describes it, preaching on your feet is not the delivery of a memorized message or even (necessarily) a memorized outline. It's not fundamentally about trying to remember what you thought about during sermon preparation. Instead, Lybrand encourages thorough preparation coupled with allowing the inspiration to come at the actual moment of delivery.
That was good news, because I've tried memorizing sermons and found that is not an option for someone preaching once or more each week. Done badly, the results of trying to preach from a memorized script are worse than skillfully reading a manuscript.
When you preach on your feet, you speak in a way that resonates better with listeners than readers.
Nevertheless, as intrigued as I was by the idea of preaching on my feet, I did not see it as a style that suited me well. During my 33 years of preaching, I have typically prepared full outlines: introduction, main points, all sub-points, and conclusion. When delivering the goods, I rarely stray from my prepared notes, though normally I maintain good eye contact and glance at my outline only occasionally.
Still, my sermon delivery is all about recall. I've never identified with preachers who describe getting ideas while they preach. If my ideas didn't come ahead of time, they generally didn't come at all.
That brings up something else relevant about me. I'm typically not a rambler. I usually don't follow associated ideas smoothly one after another, like someone surfing links on the web. Winging it has been the farthest thing from my experience. Most people would probably describe me as introverted and logical, carefully weighing my thoughts before they come forth like dollars from a money manager's hand.
So as I read Lybrand's book, I had lots of questions. How do you actually do this? How do you prepare? Preaching on your feet sounds like a great idea, but I could get 15 minutes into a message and run out of things to say. I might find myself wandering through ideas without direction—an embarrassing flub.
Even so, I was drawn to it irresistibly and figured it was worth a try.
No crib sheet
One week I decided to go cold turkey. Lybrand says he writes several pages of notes in preparation, which he leaves in the study, and he suggests that makes for a better sermon. Most homiletics professors agree that writing a sermon brings clarity, even if you leave the notes behind. I know myself, though, and because I'm a writer I can be way too meticulous in my thinking when I'm writing. I figured that if I allowed myself to write notes, I would end up with thoughts too detailed to deliver well orally. So not only would I not take notes with me into the preaching moment, I would not write notes at all. I'd inevitably be trying to recall a phrase I'd written down.
I did almost all my preparation on Saturday with a block of several hours in the morning, a block in the afternoon, and a block at night. I thought. I prayed. I read. I memorized and meditated on my preaching passage. I asked my normal preparation questions: What's the subject of the text? What does the text say about that subject? What does the text teach about God, about humanity, about the gospel? How do these truths relate to my hearers? How should I organize my thoughts? And so on. I did my normal preparation, but I didn't write anything down.
I found that not writing my ideas down tended to keep them simpler, but they felt intangible, wispy, there and then gone. Words on paper feel so much more concrete and reliable! As a result, as much as Lybrand said that preaching on your feet should not involve a focus on trying to remember what you prepared to say, I found my Saturday preparation involved making mental Post-it notes of these fleeting ideas, memorizing what seemed to be my main points and trying to recall them in each subsequent preparation block. I knew I could not remember or sort out all the sub-points that occurred to me, but I did feel a need to have an introduction, main points, and a conclusion in mind. If this was going to be a debacle, at least let it be a minor one—a clear, devotional thought, if not quite a sermon.
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