Despite many warnings from homiletics professors, mentors, and fellow pastors, I spent my first few years of weekly preaching committing one of the most common, grievous errors of a young preacher: the content dump. In those early years, I wielded God's word less like a fountain of life and more like a fire hose in what was surely a weekly endurance test for our congregation.

From "Content Dump" to "Content Delivery"

Simply realizing this, though, was not enough to make me grow out of content dump preaching. The next step came from a conversation with one of our congregants, a doctoral-level researcher devoted to the development of pharmaceutical delivery systems. She explained to me that drugs, once manufactured, cannot simply be sprinkled onto someone's head and expected to work. Researchers like her devote their careers to pioneering effective drug delivery systems that transport these life-saving substances past the body's defenses and into the precise places that need treatment, and at high enough levels to remain until the illness is cured.

As I reflected on this, I suddenly realized the problem with my preaching: I was spouting off biblical content and expecting my congregation to simply absorb it and be changed. While I do believe mature disciples should be able to do this (to some degree), I saw that a good sermon should act as a content delivery system for God's Word. Effective preaching takes biblical content past one's defenses, into the areas of life that need it most, and make it stick long enough to provoke, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, prayerful growth over time.

My sermons began to change.

Four Ways to Think Like a Filmmaker

Perhaps my greatest revelations about effective content delivery have come, not from books or articles on preaching, but from working with my wife Laura to make documentary films. She has produced films professionally for as long as we've been married, and I have often rested from my work by helping her with hers. We've had the opportunity to write, shoot, edit, and direct together. I've discovered strong similarities between the arts of filmmaking and preaching that have helped me move from content dumping to skillful content delivery. Here are a few of the most powerful:

Find the Story

Thierry Guetta obsessively filmed everything around him, and became fixated on the world of street art. Promising to make a documentary, he gained the trust of several prominent street artists, including the enigmatic Banksy, in order to film them as they worked. However, Thierry simply stockpiled footage without any thought to story, and the "film" he produced was a chaotic mess. Banksy allegedly gained access to the 10,000 hours of footage and spent a year combing through it to find the story, which became the successful documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop.

The documentary filmmaker must be an astute exegete of life and the world around her. She must observe, gather, record, and analyze an enormous amount of footage. She may go into a film project with hopes of what she'll find, but she never knows what will happen once she hits the record button. Then comes the all-important task of sorting through all of that footage to find the story. She cannot simply play raw footage for her audience; rather, she must organize and present the content as a story that is clear and engaging, often distilling hundreds of hours of footage into less than an hour.

In the same way, thorough exegesis yields pages and pages of reflection. The preacher will gather data on themes, significant words, principles, theological connections, application ideas —all 'exegetical raw footage,' if you will. The problem, though, is that many of us stop there. We give people raw footage instead of a coherent narrative.

Like filmmakers, we must discover the story within our exegetical findings. Or, to put it another way, we must identify the central theme we wish to develop. Any passage can yield a wide array of possible story lines. For example, I recently preached from John 15 and pursued the theme "Knowing our place in God's mission." But, I could have chosen instead to focus on "Jesus as the culmination of the Old Testament," "Jesus' last words before his crucifixion," or "abiding in Jesus." The same core exegesis yields many possible story lines. Whether your style is to preach three points, verse-by-verse, or some other method, I believe a central theme is vital for effective preaching.

Develop the Plot

Good filmmakers don't just tell stories; they know how to tell stories. The Pixar hit film Up opens with a montage of every important moment in the shared life of a man and his wife, until the wife passes away and we see the aging man alone in his house. In roughly four minutes, we have come to care for him deeply, and we want to see what happens. The well-paced plot unfolds from there.

Good filmmakers work through their content to answer vital questions:

• Why does this story matter?
• Who are the main characters?
• What is the conflict?
• What is at stake?
• How does the tension build?
• What is the climax?
• Is there a beginning, middle and an end?
• How are the conflicts and challenges resolved?

The best stories follow a plot arc: initial equilibrium for the characters is disturbed by some conflict, initiating a journey to resolve the conflict. The tension rises, until there is some critical choice leading to a climax, and then a resolution where the character has changed in some way.

Sermons can follow a similar trajectory. You can introduce conflict and tension any number of ways: ask a question for the sermon to resolve, make a cultural observation and then explore its truthfulness, make a challenging statement and then explore its implications, identify a desirable goal and then show how to get there, etc. You introduce tension, and walk your congregation through it.

There is art to building tension in a sermon. A great place to do this is during your transitions. For example, if you're preaching on depression, after your first point, say, "What we've just looked at is helpful, but without "x" it is insufficient…" You can also ask additional questions that build your congregation's intrigue about the subject matter: "Now we understand this about Jesus, but that doesn't explain why…" These are all ways of taking your congregation with you on a journey into the Scriptures, rather than simply dumping content.

These are basics, but so key. Preachers should be able to answer certain questions about their sermons:

• Who is the audience?
• How does this passage speak to them where they are?
• What are the questions raised by this passage?
• How are they resolved?
• What are the stakes that make this passage worth understanding?
• Is there a beginning, middle and end?
• How might tension build?
• Is there a climax?

Be a Visual Storyteller

Despite having neither music nor narration, the documentary Sweetgrass earned a 97 percent approval rating by critics on the movie review site, RottenTomatoes.com. In other words, it was a smashing success. The best filmmakers excel at visual storytelling, inviting viewers to discover the story for themselves. Many documentary purists will tell you that the ideal documentary is able to tell a story without the help of a narrator. Narration at its worst takes what could be an active, dynamic experience of discovery for the audience and renders it passive, less interesting.

Image-rich preaching can be a kind of visual storytelling. This means that sermon illustrations are not simply a way to spice up your message. They are vital. Jesus's own teaching was full of rich imagery that invited his listeners to discover for themselves the truths they illuminated. This was hammered home to me recently when I had a follow-up conversation with a woman in our congregation after our worship service. Before asking her question, she reproduced the sermon as she remembered it. Guess what? She remembered the images, and only the images. My witty wording, my puns, my alliterative outline — they had faded from memory in the span of about an hour. But the images remained.

Effective imagery can come in the form of stories, metaphors, and even simple word pictures. This often means making very simple adjustments. Instead of saying, "jealousy impairs our joy," consider saying, "jealousy robs us of joy." The word "rob" conjures images that reinforce your point, drawing on the imagination of your audience and involving them in the formation of the story.

Edit Ruthlessly

Merciful preaching requires merciless editing. Once you know your theme, have a sense of how you plan to develop your narrative, and have strong visuals, it's time to get out the pruning shears. This, for me, is the absolute hardest part of sermon preparation. Maybe you have a juicy illustration you've been dying to use. Maybe you discovered a precious nugget of word-study goodness. Regardless, if it doesn't serve to advance the plot, it has to go.

Think of it like American football. Does every play move the ball down the field? Every reference, every sentence, indeed every word should in some way move the ball down the field toward the end zone. If not, cut it out. Your preaching will be clearer, and your congregation will thank you.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this skills article.

Tommy Hinson is the Senior Pastor at the Church of the Advent Anglican Church in Washington D.C.