See theme

How conscious are you of the seekers represented among your listeners on Sunday morning?

Stanley: I'm very aware. I'm a relational person. When a member introduces me to a visitor and then whispers to me, "You know, he's not a believer" or "This is the guy I've been trying to get here," I find myself preaching with them in mind.

How specifically do you address that person?

I'm not preaching at them, but I feel like I'm sitting at the table with them. It's an invigorating thing for me because I'm partnering with our members in reaching that particular person. They may have spent four or five months trying to get this person here, and what they're saying is, "Andy, here he is. You'd better deliver."

Does this "outsider focus" reflect your personality?

I'm very involved in relational evangelism. I know what I want the experience to be like when my friends finally show up. So we'll go to just about any length to tear down all the walls and to say, "if you're going to be offended, we want you to be offended by only one thing: the gospel." After all, that's supposed to be somewhat offensive to a sinner.

But we don't want anyone to be offended by something that happened in the parking lot, or by some off-the-cuff remark about a social issue.

What's the overall strategy at North Point?

Our church is built around three kinds of environments:

1. The foyer environment, where people are made to feel welcome as a guest.
   
   
2. The living-room environment, where they're treated like a friend.
   
   
3. And the kitchen environment, where they're made to feel like family.
   
   

The goal is to move people from the foyer to the living room to the kitchen.

Do you avoid "kitchen issues" on Sunday mornings?

When I am forced by the text—which I think has to rule in preaching—to talk about "family issues," then I say to our guests, "if you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, this next part is going to sound awfully strange to you. In fact, what I'm about to say may be one of the reasons you don't go to church."

I don't avoid topics, but I let them know that I know how this might strike them. This gives them permission to say, "Okay, they at least understand. Maybe we aren't on the same page in terms of what we believe, but at least they know we're not on the same page."

I don't pull punches, but I qualify a lot of things, because from the world's perspective, we Christians believe some strange stuff. Sometimes preachers are not sensitive to that, and so people are afraid to bring their friends to church because they feel like they have to sit real close and explain, "Here's what he meant," or they're thinking, I hope he doesn't talk about that today.

Lots of planning goes into your services—music, multimedia, and sermons all work together. So how do you plan your preaching?

We start with Easter. That's the beginning of the preaching calendar year because that's when the most people come for the first time. So we ask ourselves, "What new series can we announce on Easter that's most likely to bring an Easter visitor back?"

That's likely to be topical. But we also need to balance topical themes with more directly Bible-oriented material. So we do a Bible-book series usually toward the end of the year as we head back into Easter.

We think of it in terms of a maturity cycle. It's not perfect. People pop in and out, but you have to start somewhere. So far it's worked.

Where do you get the "hook" for your sermons?

I always think in terms of relationships, because that's where all the tension is. Take, for instance, the topic of money. What's the tension with money? It's a relationship. Everything goes back to some sort of relationship, either between you and God, or you and another person. With money, you may resist giving away your money because you fear God may not take care of you.

You can take any topic and pinpoint where the tension is and how it affects a person relationally. And when you start talking about that, most of your audience will connect.

So, the issue isn't so much the topic as the way the topic is presented.

There's no topic we can't talk about. We just have to take into consideration what the immediate negatives are. How do we disarm people? How do we do it in an authentic way?

The great communication issue for a pastor is NOT just about what I want them to know and what do I want them to do. That's the summary. The question that great communicators answer is, "Why do you need to know this?"

Most of the time, the Bible answers the question why. I can talk to a lost person about anything if I will spend my time studying and answering the question "Why would God say such a ridiculous thing as that?"

Most times, the answer is, "Because he's a good God and he loves you, and he wants what's best for you. You don't have to do it, but he's not just up there making stuff up."

The heavier the topic, the clearer I have to be on the why behind the what.

We hear about the shorter attention spans of the contemporary audiences, that this A.D.D. generation can't handle more than 15 or 20 minutes of preaching. Yet you typically preach for more than a half-hour.

My dad preaches an hour, and they can't get everybody in fast enough. The attention-span thing is a myth.

We've all listened to communicators, and, number one, we couldn't believe the time went by that fast and, number two, we wish they wouldn't stop because they're great communicators. It has nothing to do with attention span. It has to do with the environment, the type of chair you're sitting on, what happened before, what your expectations are, the interest, the content, the visuals, the pace.

We have to be as clear as MUD—memorable, understandable, and do-able. Can they remember something? Do they understand it? Can they do it?

Most of the time that means the preacher should just make one point, communicate one thing well.

You usually use a visual aid in your preaching. Do today's audiences need props?

I want to communicate at every level. There are auditory learners and visual learners. There are people who learn by talking. There are multiple levels, and I want maximum impact. So whether it's props or songs or illustrations or humor, I want to do whatever it takes to get the message across.

We're about to start a series called "Character Under Construction." We're going to turn the whole campus into a construction site—not just the stage, but everything. We're putting trailers and porta-johns outside. All of our hosting people are going to wear hard hats and tool belts to reinforce the idea that we are God's construction sites. The entire church will be a visual aid.

How much of your effort to reach today's listeners is a matter of style as opposed to content?

In general, it's the style we use that gets people's attention. The method is what draws the crowd. The joke around here is we'd have a bigger problem if we changed our music than if we changed our doctrine. We can change our doctrine, and a few people would get upset and leave. But if we changed the music, we'd split the church. So, the method of communication takes precedence over content in terms of audience appeal. I don't think that's a good thing, but it would be hard to argue that that's not the case.

So just presenting the truth is not enough to connect with contemporary audiences.

I talk to pastors sometimes who rationalize their church's lack of growth by saying, "I'm just preaching the truth. If they don't like it, that's too bad." But we're supposed to be a little more proactive than that. That would be like a salesman saying, "Well, you know, I made a few calls, but they just don't want to buy my product." That guy wouldn't keep his job very long.

Preaching today should be less about defending the truth and more about applying the truth.

For ages, preachers have struggled to walk the fine line between wholeness ("God loves you just the way you are") and holiness ("but he loves you too much to leave you that way"). How do you balance those two themes in a seeker-sensitive setting?

That was the brilliance of Jesus' ministry: he didn't try to balance those two extremes. He took them both and brought them together. That's the task we have as the body of Christ. We should reflect that paradox. We shouldn't try to find where we are on a continuum. We need to go to both ends, both extremes, and say, "You are fully accepted, but compared to the standard, you have a long way to go."

There's always the temptation in preaching to compromise at one end because you might lose somebody, or to make this sin worse than it actually is compared to other sins. But that's our challenge as preachers of the gospel.

—Adapted from "Invite Them into the Kitchen," Leadership (Winter 2000)

Andy Stanley is the founder and pastor of North Point Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.