PREACHING SKILLS
Preaching on My Feet
Could I speak for 35 minutes without ever writing notes?
Craig Brian Larson
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Oh, by the way, lest I sound either too bold or foolhardy, you should know I do not preach to a large group of people. If I spoke to hundreds of people on Sunday, I probably would have done this experiment in another, smaller setting.
On Sunday morning as I drove to church, I couldn't help but review my mental Post-it notes, but I continued to meditate and pray freely on my subject, and new ideas kept flowing. I arrived at the hotel where our church worships and stepped into the current of a normal Sunday morning—normal except for the excitement that accompanies the first step in the beginning of a huge adventure. When the time came to preach, I felt like a guy who is about to jump out of an airplane for the first time. Yes, he has a parachute, but he is jumping out of an airplane thousands of feet in the air! Here we go. Help me, Lord!
Preaching in the moment
That first Sunday I discovered I had better than a parachute; I had wings. On an experiential level, this kind of preaching was totally exhilarating, like getting shot at without effect, as Churchill says; you are thrilled to have survived.
On the level that really matters—How effective was the sermon? How well did I convey the truth of the text? Did I communicate clearly and with authority?—I felt the message was a complete success. In fact, no hyperbole, it was one of the better messages I have ever preached. I engaged better with the congregation. I had a much greater sense of freedom and inspiration and presence in the moment.
Lybrand compares preaching on your feet to having a conversation. You don't know where a conversation is going to go, yet go it does and with great freedom. I felt that. Ideas came freely and without fail. One thought led to another. I said things I had not planned. I truly was thinking in the moment rather than just remembering what I had written. This was part of the exhilaration.
In addition to freedom and inspiration, passion also came more easily. Concentrating on the ideas in my notes can distract me from being aware of God, from what is in my heart, and from the people in front of me. When I am not struggling to reproduce what I thought would work when I wrote the message, I flow more with what God (I hope) is releasing in my heart on the spot, and that tends to be urgent.
The salt of eloquence also found its way naturally into the soup. No, I am not an orator; but on occasion I do try to put words together in a special way: an extended metaphor, a turned phrase, a parallelism, a crescendo. I have found over the years that the occasional special phrase I have written into my notes almost never works authentically in delivery. However, in the time I have experimented with this type of preaching, occasional eloquence comes more naturally. It feels authentic.
I humbly graded my first sermon as a ten out of ten. My second was a six. Since then, the sermons have been sevens, eights, and nines. In my opinion, all have been better than my normal preaching from a full outline. As I grow accustomed to this way of preaching, the level of excitement and risk that I had at first, which likely contributed to the intense focus with which I preached, has naturally moderated some. Still, my passion and freedom are significantly ahead of where I was. I have never had a moment when I came to a complete loss for words, which is a glitch ratio way better than when preaching an outline; with a written outline I will have one or more longish pauses or episodes of arrhythmia in delivery.
Hazards of da feet
Preaching this way does have its hazards. There have been a few times when I have drilled down into an idea further than was necessary or strayed off briefly on something that was not important. I hate to say it, but I guess that's called rambling. When you preach on your feet, you have less time to weigh ideas that present themselves to you on the fly, and so I suppose you are more likely to say things that in retrospect you might regret.
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