I was given my first opportunity to preach in church when I was a teenager. I was so nervous that I compressed a ten-minute message into five by speaking faster than the terms-and-conditions script-readers at the end of a medication commercial. I am sure the congregation heard the sounds of all the words I said, but I am pretty sure they didn’t make much sense of it. The talk was so disastrous that it easily could have become both the first and last talk I ever gave in public. However, there was a great orator in our church who took me aside and gave me feedback in the most gracious and helpful way possible. His encouragement left me with a desire to improve my preaching, and 32 years later I am still on that journey—still preaching and still seeking wise critical evaluation.

I not only try and get feedback as regularly as I can, but I also deliberately try to put myself in difficult situations to force myself to up my preaching game. I try to build in enough of these opportunities into my schedule to force me out of my comfort zone and try new forms of preaching and teaching. My hope is that not only do I play my part in trying to commend the gospel to everyone possible by any means possible but I also sharpen my skills as a preacher. I don’t find any of these settings easy, but being out of my comfort zone is definitely good for my feeble prayer life and brilliant for learning new skills.

A friend of mine has signed up for a 10K race because he knows this looming deadline will be the incentive he needs to get into shape. It forces him to get off the comfortable sofa and put in the miles in to sharpen his skills. That is exactly the thinking I had in mind when I put my name forward to give a TED talk.

TED is a global phenomenon. A conference that started in 1984, it used to revolve around bringing people together to share ideas about technology, entertainment, and design. But under the leadership of Chris Anderson TED started posting the videos of the talks from the conference online, and now over 1 billion people watch TED talks online every year. TEDx events are locally organized gatherings that carry the same values, branding, and sometimes influence as the main TED events. For example, it was at a TEDx event in Orange County where Brené Brown gave her inspirational talk on vulnerability that rocketed her to international renown.

So with a little prompting from my wife I sent off a video I had made about how the UK should respond to the refugee crisis. This video was not a faith-based message. It was trying to use common-sense arguments motivated by my Christian faith. The event organizers liked the video and invited me to give a talk at the TEDx Oxford event. I learned a great deal from the experience. But as I reflected on it afterwards, I felt I had also learned some valuable lessons that I could apply to my preaching.

People Are Hungry for Ideas

With social media and video streaming in constant supply, there seems to be enough content available to us to last many lifetimes over. Who would have thought that a short talk from a single individual with only the most rudimentary visuals and no soundtrack could compete with the big guns of the new media world? But women and men and their diverse 18-minute stage monologues have indeed become a global hit.

Some are great public speakers, some ooze confidence and charm. Others are battling nerves, stumble over their words, and look like they have just woken up. Some are speaking on mass appeal subjects. But who would have expected seminars on strokes, or procrastination, stress and anxiety, or colonialism to reach millions and also make it into the top 25?

TED tells us that people are hungry for ideas. And if you listen to any TED talk, you will notice the speakers pack a lot of ideas into their 18 minutes. If you listen to 10 TED talks, you will be exposed to dozens of ideas that you may never have considered before. I wonder how that would compare with the last 180 minutes of church sermons you have listened to? The Bible is jam-packed full of ideas, observations, stories, applications, and challenges. Most of them never make it to our pulpits. TED made me wonder if we are really feeding our congregations with the inspirational ideas that stem from our amazing source material, the “words of eternal life”, the truths of God that “are more precious than gold” and “sweeter than honey” (Psalm 19:9-10).

Structure Matters

No notes. That’s the rule of TED. It does wonders for your preparation. I have never rehearsed a talk as much as my TEDx presentation. I normally speak without notes, as it happens, because I like to work interactively with the congregation as we explore the Bible text together. But that’s not the TED way. No notes. No interaction. No more than 18 minutes. So I had to memorize my talk pretty exactly. One of the benefits of trying to write a talk that you can memorize is that it should make it more memorable for your audience. The structure becomes important. The logic becomes important. The soundbites become important. The end becomes important.

A long time ago when I was first challenged to speak without notes, the argument I was presented with was this: If I as the preacher who spends so much time researching, crafting, and honing the sermon can’t remember it, why should I expect a congregation to remember anything I say? TED reminded me of this challenge.

Stories Are Crucial

I watched a lot of TED talks in my preparation for my own. What I noticed about all of my favorite talks was how stories were at the very heart of them. This is so pertinent for preachers. Jesus used stories a lot. The Bible is full of stories. In fact, it is one big story from beginning to end. Even the parts of the Bible we assume are not narrative are set within a narrative context—the letters to Philemon or the Philippians, for example, are part of a wider storyline that we’d do well to pay attention to so we don’t misinterpret the text.

Stories are not filler, fluff, or padding for the talk; they can be the heartbeat, the energy, and the organizing principle. Jesus’ use of parables, the Gospel writers’ use of narrative tools, and the historical stories littered throughout Scripture are all rich pickings for the story-minded preacher. Let’s resist the temptation to turn every sermon into three neat alliterative points and instead allow the beauty, power, and surprise of the stories draw our listeners in to the truths of the gospel.

Enthusiasm Is Infectious

I have watched TED talks about things I would never have imagined could be interesting: sea anemones, plastics, drones. All of these were brought to life by the enthusiasm of the speaker.

Chris Anderson, the founder of TED, explains:

Your number-one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners. We’ll call that something an idea. A mental construct that they can hold on to, walk away with, value, and in some sense be changed by.

You can hear something of the clarity and passion of an idea even in Anderson’s instructions to speakers. Compare that with the way that some preachers apologize at the beginning of their sermons. Instead of inspiring, and intriguing us, they warn us that today’s passage is difficult, complicated, tedious, overly familiar, or utterly unfamiliar. With only 18 minutes, TED speakers don’t have much time to grab the audience’s attention. They begin with energy and enthusiasm, and it is often contagious. The listeners are caught up in it and begin to give attention to a subject they had previously cared little about.

If we don’t value the message we have to give, if we have no passion or enthusiasm for what we are about to communicate, if we have not been changed in some sense by the topic in hand, if it doesn’t matter to us deeply, then why should we expect the congregation to invest themselves in listening to us? Perhaps we would do well to begin our preparation with the psalmist’s prayer from Psalm 119:

Be good to your servant while I live,

that I may obey your word.

Open my eyes that I may see

wonderful things in your law.

Be Able to Defend what You’re Saying

Because there is the remotest chance that a TED video might go viral I was very conscientious about checking my facts. I wanted to be as sure as I could be that what I was saying would hold water. I had credible references for all of the statistics I quoted. I was careful to anonymize any stories that might break any confidences. I cut out anything that could cause undue offense or confusion and kept in only what I was prepared to defend.

Perhaps the accountability that the internet offers is a good thing. It can prevent us from making sweeping generalizations, or passing off guesswork as hard evidence. The business people, academics, and health workers in our congregations would never get away with ideas they thought up on the spot, and as preachers, neither should we. We need to hold ourselves to the same standard of fact-checking as we would if we thought that our sermons could go viral.

Eighteen Minutes Is Enough Time to Say Everything You Need

In the fast-moving world of viral videos, sound bites, and social media, two minutes is becoming a long time for our attention spans. The TED team is taking quite a countercultural stance by allowing speakers 18 minutes. They explain, “Why 18? It’s short enough to hold people’s attention, including on the internet, and precise enough to be taken seriously. But it’s also long enough to say something that matters.”

In my preparation I felt the specificity of the 18 minutes. It is not a usual length for a lecture or a sermon, so I had to craft something different that would fit the format. I needed to figure out how to make the best use of the time, as every minute mattered. I have rarely thought about a sermon in that way and it gave me a helpful nudge to reconsider what I am trying to do during the course of the talk. How could I start well and quickly? How could I end clearly and promptly? How could I keep the audience’s attention when I was three minutes in, or ten minutes in? How could I vary my pace and my tone by modulating between stories and statistics?

As I was delivering my talk I felt the weight of the 18 minutes, not just because of the clock counting down, but because in the TED world it is an almost unforgivable sin to exceed your allotted time even by a second. I contrasted that with my regular sermons at my home church, where my sermon lengths have a wide length range. I love the freedom that gives, but sometimes I am so free and relaxed that the sermon doesn’t really land clearly. I have noticed that sometimes our sermons seem to circle like an airplane caught in fog—because we can’t see a clear way to finish the journey we have taken the congregation on.

The 18-minute mandate required a clear sense of my destination. The pace, structure, and a sense of connection and urgency all made me wonder if we shouldn’t task all our preachers with the TED timing model.