PreachingToday.com: Over the last several years what have you learned about urgency and preaching?

John Ortberg: My appreciation of the urgency of preaching has gone up. I think largely that shift comes from talking with folks and realizing what's at stake.

I remember a few years ago we were doing a series on anger at our church, and after one of the messages a guy came up to me. He was one of the biggest guys I'd ever seen, this huge, massively built guy. His right hand was in a cast. We were in a series on anger and had spoken that morning about how venting anger is contrary to much of the wisdom of Scripture. It took psychology a while to realize the dangers of venting one's anger. Anyway, this guy came up to me and said, "What you said about venting your anger was right. It is dangerous. I got so mad last week that I smashed my hand into a concrete wall and broke two of my fingers." Then he said to me, "So I'm coming back for the rest of the series, and it had better be good."

If my life is okay, I can forget that as I'm preaching to folks, there'll be marriages hanging on by a slender thread; there will be people who will be on the verge of jettisoning their faith in God. There will be other people who are seeking, and they're not sure if God is somebody they can trust. There are people who will be thinking, God, if you don't show up or answer some prayer in my life this week, I've had it. There may be the need for God to speak through preaching into people's lives, way beyond what I'm apt to see.

Is there anything in your own personal growth as a preacher that has especially brought this home to you?

Ortberg: My default tendency is to focus primarily on how I'm doing as a preacher. Questions like, Is this connecting? Are people being attentive? Do they think it's going well? One of the areas that I want to grow in is the ability to let go of that self-focus. I want to simply help people take their next step toward God. When I do that, it relieves personal anxiety because it's no longer my own well-being or esteem or sense of value that's on the line.

It also makes preaching much more important. If preaching is just about trying to convince people they should like me, then that's a pretty trivial task. But if it is about the proclamation of the Word of God and allowing the Spirit to form Christ in people's hearts, then it is an authentically urgent task.

Why is urgent preaching important in America today?

Ortberg: Richard Mouw writes about how urgent preaching on hell-fire and brimstone, or on the fact that God is a God of judgment, tends not to happen often in suburban-type churches. We're often uncomfortable with those things. Whereas, in the Old Testament, because people faced oppression, or often in African culture in our day, the theme of God as judge is hopeful and welcome, because if they don't get justice from God, they're not going to get it at all.

I think for many people who preach (as I do) in a culture that is primarily suburban and relatively affluent, we're likely to miss the urgency of the gospel due to comfort. The more comfortable we or our society are, the more likely we are to be "assimilated" in that mindset. And so, we need a real prophetic edge, a sense of urgency. Why? Because for most pastors, the danger isn't that our people will defy God; it's that we will drift comfortably away from the deep call to follow Jesus.

I had a man in my church who was from Oregon. I recall him saying that he liked a certain minister because he was laid back. He said that's the whole way of life out there. How does urgency in preaching play out in an area that places a high value on a relaxed, laid-back style?

Ortberg: Urgency is not an issue of style. There are some people whose "wiring patterns" tend to be relaxed. There are other people, by the way they are wired up, who are intense. It's possible for either type to be appropriately urgent. It doesn't have so much to do with how loud you talk or your body language; it has to do with being gripped by a sense of the value of the human soul, of what's at stake in every life.

Each person listening to me is an immortal being, destined for an eternity in the presence of God, destined to live a kind of life in his kingdom beyond our wildest dreams. Or they're destined not to have an eternity with God, never to fulfill the kind of life that he has planned for them. That perspective gives the right kind of urgency to somebody's preaching. I think of Jack Hayford, for instance. He generally has a pretty calm and relaxed style of presentation. But there's an urgency to his message that grips everybody who hears it. Then there's Tony Campollo, whose energy level is a lot higher. His urgency is easier to see in terms of style. But in both cases, the authentic drama is the gospel coming through.

Let's say you listen to some of your own sermon tapes—

Ortberg: Which is torture. I do it sometimes because I know I have to, but I'd rather walk on a bed of nails.

Let's say you're listening to your own sermons tapes, and you decide, The urgency level here is really lax. I need to work on this; the passion is missing. What for you would be the fountainhead of the authentic urgency you want to increase in your soul?

Ortberg: If it's not there authentically, the danger is that I will try and fake it. Like the preacher who puts a little note to himself in his manuscript: "Weak point. Yell louder!" The temptation is to try to manufacture deep earnestness or zeal, or to get more animated in order to try and convince people that I am more passionate than I really am.

The life I live has to be much more richly immersed in God than the words I preach. To the extent that I'm not living in the reality of God's presence, to the extent that there's ongoing grimness and barrenness in me, I don't have much urgency to offer. I'm not living in the reality of what I'm preaching. I periodically ask myself: Is the life I'm inviting other people to live the life I'm living myself? If it's not, if there's a gap between the life I'm inviting folks to live and the life I'm living myself, then there will be a lack of urgency—probably not so much a style thing, as it is a reflection of the thinness of my own life with God.

When you listen to others preach, what makes you feel that perhaps they are contriving urgency?

Ortberg: There's an incongruence between the words the person is saying and the level of passion they're trying to express. Maybe through the tone that they use or their facial expression or body language, it feels like they know people will respond to a hyped up, high energy, highly emotionally charged delivery, and so they are trying to manufacture that kind of delivery, but it's not really flowing out of the words they're saying.

For myself, the messages that have struck me as the most urgent or the most captivating, sometimes they're somewhat understated in their delivery. The words themselves, the teachings themselves, carry so much power that you don't have to manufacture other stuff to drive it home. I think of this in many of Jesus' teachings, such as in the Sermon on the Mount, where he says we don't need to worry because God is so present, so good. I have imagined that he delivered those words in a fairly relaxed way, but anyone that heard them had their world turned upside down. They're not casual words, but they don't require a lot of histrionics to drive it home.

When your own urgency has waned, what were the signals?

Ortberg: One signal is fatigue. I feel I don't have anything to say. Or, as I'm working through a message, if I'm thinking, I don't know that they need to hear about this, that's a signal that urgency is waning. As I'm working on what I have to say, if I feel like I have to find clever ways to talk about it, to find something highly imaginative or picturesque or funny because what I'm actually teaching about doesn't feel urgent enough to grip folks, then my sense of urgency is waning.

This past year has been an interesting learning experience for me. One thing I've discovered is that in the opening moves of a message, one question that needs to get answered is: Why is it urgently important that we talk about what we're going to talk about today? It has been interesting for me as a student of preaching to listen to folks preach. Almost uniformly in messages that are grippingly, appropriately, biblically urgent, early on in the message, that question gets answered. In other words, I have a sense after the first move of the message that I urgently need to hear what it is we're talking about today. If I'm not able to answer that question in the introduction, there's a good chance I'm talking about the wrong thing.

Your sermons often employ humor, yet there is still passion and urgency. How do those two things get together in your soul and both work without one hurting the other?

Ortberg: I have to do more restraining on the humor side. I enjoy joy a lot. I love to laugh, and I love to make people laugh. I always have. I think to some extent that is a gift of God. But I have to be careful—and again this is an area where I'm trying to grow as a preacher.

For instance, if there's a story or something I think is funny, I am tempted to shoehorn it into a message even if it just does not fit. I'm trying to work hard to restrain that, and I've talked about that with two or three other folks and asked them to monitor that for me.

Another thing is, there will be times in preaching when a moment emerges, perhaps of vulnerability or of challenge or of tension, and I'll find myself tempted to use humor at that point. One thing I'm learning is to allow there to be a highly charged moment that does not get relieved by humor, because God may use that to change folks.

But in general the two feel compatible to me. Often I'll find that when humor is used well, people open up. Their defenses get lowered in those kinds of moments, and it becomes possible to challenge them, to spur them on, or even to do spiritual surgery.

Do the humor and urgency have to be compartmentalized to make it work? Or is there such a thing as joyful urgency?

Ortberg: No, when preaching is at its best, it is not a series of compartmentalized statements: here's a didactic proposition, here's an example, here's a joke to relieve tension, here's application. That approach to preaching often feels stilted, canned, and artificial to folks. In the best preaching, the heart is deeply stirred with a sense of fierce joy and deep challenge. When that happens, that's preaching.

How does your audience affect the way your urgency works itself out in your delivery? How does an appropriate expression of urgency differ from one part of the country to another?

Ortberg: This church thrives on challenge more than any other that I've been a part of or familiar with. That's part of the culture of this particular church community. Whereas, in some places you might have to be more subtle in expressing urgency directly. Here, people just love it. They have a hunger to be challenged. And if it doesn't happen, they will express some disappointment. It's a wonderful gift as a preacher to feel like people are saying, "Stretch me, challenge me, provoke me, and rebuke me where it's appropriate. I'm open to that. I want that to happen." So for anybody who's preaching, my first piece of advice is, find folks like that to preach to. And where that's not the case, you need to educate people about the role of challenge in preaching and listening.

I have preached before in African American congregations, and I find it an exhilarating experience. You shift in your style of preaching. Maybe it was an inauthentic thing on my part, but I don't think so. I think they just brought it out of me. Would you express urgency differently in another part of the country or in another setting that would be an authentic expression of John Ortberg?

Ortberg: Each church is a part of a culture and has its own unique culture. Certainly, from my experience, both in listening and in preaching in African American churches, a highly directive, highly challenging, highly confrontational style of preaching is part of what the people are used to, thrive on, grow from. A couple of years ago I preached at a church called Saint Sabina, which is an African American, charismatic Catholic congregation in Chicago. It was about a three hour service. It was a really hot weekend in June, and we didn't have air conditioning. The people elicited from me a level of urgency and passion that I was surprised to find coming out of myself, but I didn't feel like it was inauthentic. It just felt like a part of me that was able to be expressed because I was in a setting that was different from where I usually am. There are some places where the challenge can be there, but the style of the church is such that it tends to be understated rather than overstated. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it's just part of the culture of that church.

Along those lines, is it possible to be too urgent? Can a preacher's urgency wear on a congregation to where it has diminishing returns?

Ortberg: One of the dangers of urgency is you can want to have the reputation of being an urgent person. Or people can feel like urgency is the only note to be sounded in the proclamation of the gospel. G. K. Chesterton says that part of the reason he was drawn toward Christianity is that it expresses the whole palette of the "color of human emotion." Urgency, challenge, passion, zeal is a very important part of the gospel, but the offer of confidence and the proclamation of peace is an important part of the gospel, expressing the tenderness of God's love. It's possible for the preacher to live in such a chronic state of urgency that it is as if he and the church live in crisis mode. Every week becomes another adventure in crisis. The human body was not created for chronic crisis mode, where each week the pastor has the congregation standing on the brink, saying, "If you don't do this, next week is a full-blown crisis." People can't endure in that condition. If every message is do more, pray more, give more, perform more, that will not sustain people.

Any final thoughts?

Ortberg: Urgency in preaching has to be connected to a sense of urgency in my own life. I often tend to underestimate the significance of the task of preaching, partly because I don't want to take myself too seriously. It's good not to take myself too seriously, but when I think back on my life, I can think of a number of points where somebody's preaching has changed my life.

When I preach, on the one hand I need to say, "God, I don't want to take myself too seriously in this, because I know how fallen and flawed I am." On the other hand, I want to remember that this task is much bigger than me, and although I don't want to take myself too seriously, I don't want to take up this task as anything less than the urgently important task it is. That means I have to be urgent about my life, my preparation for preaching, the closeness of my walk with God, the way that I read and feed my mind, and the way I observe other people. Then there's a richness to my life out of which I can preach. So if I want to be urgent when I'm preaching, I have to be urgent about the way I live outside of the pulpit.

John Ortberg is pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.