Preaching Today: Preachers want to be both faithful and effective in what they're doing. Why is it so hard to hold to both of those values equally?

Duane Litfin: You have to think first of all about what we mean by faithfulness, and what we mean by effectiveness. By faithfulness, people often mean the content of what they have to say. They don't want to be locked into adapting to their audience, such that their content winds up being lost or distorted or obscured.

They have something they want to say, and they don't want to be confused by who is going to hear it and how they're going to hear it.

That's right, exactly. At the other end are people who are so audience-oriented, they so adapt themselves, that the content is lost or distorted. There's a tension between those, knowing exactly what the balance point is, where you're being true to the content, the truth you're dealing with, but you're also communicating in a way your audience can understand and be drawn to. Sometimes we find ourselves too far along one end of that continuum.

It seems the Bible teaches that God accommodates himself to our limitations as humans. As we talk about things like the sufficiency of Scripture, sometimes we can lose track of what that means as it relates to our humanity and how we have to communicate. Can you talk about that and the terms you would use to help us to understand that?

I would make a beeline to a couple of passages of Scripture, which speak to the two ends of that continuum. One is 1 Corinthians 2, where the apostle Paul says: I came among you knowing nothing but Christ and him crucified. I didn't come with cleverness of speech or persuasive words of wisdom, but I came simply with the gospel, simply announcing. I'm there as a herald, a keryx, announcing the kerygma, the gospel, lest your faith rest upon the wisdom of man and not the power of God.

He's arguing against some kind of persuader's type of adaptation to the audience. He says, I come, and this is what I preach everywhere I go. I simply proclaim Christ and him crucified. It is playing down adaptation to your audience.

On the other hand, is 1 Corinthians 9, where the apostle Paul says: I have become all things to all men that I might win some.

He's adapting himself to his audience. There is a proper type of audience adaptation, and there is an improper type of audience adaptation. Understanding the difference between the two is important for us as preachers.

Break that down for us.

There was an article in the Handbook of Social Psychology on attitude change. To persuade someone, you must capture their attention, they must comprehend what you have to say, they must yield to it, they must retain it, and act on it. So you have attention, comprehension, yielding, retention, and action. When all five of those have taken place, the person has been persuaded.

What the apostle Paul is arguing for makes a great deal of sense for us, in both our evangelistic preaching and in our Sunday morning expository ministry. Obviously Paul hasn't used these five categories, but the five categories are useful to us in thinking about what he is saying. The role of the herald is the first two of those five steps: attention and comprehension. The business of yielding is the business of the Holy Spirit.

We have an obligation as expositors, as heralds, as preachers of God's Word, to communicate to our audience, to adapt to them in such a way that they will pay attention to it, and that they can comprehend it, that it registers with them.

That's where adaptation comes into play.

Yes, we can use all of the strategies, all of the techniques that are available to us, short of immoral things like lying or something. But all of the rhetorical stratagems that are available to us, we can use them to gain attention and to build comprehension without raising the specter of interfering with the realm of the Holy Spirit. It's when we start using our strategies to get people to yield, to bend, to accept, retain, act; when we start using rhetorical technique to bring about that part of the process, that's the kind of distinction Paul is making.

The persuader was in the business of going after all five of those steps. Paul is saying, " No, I came among you as a herald. " He is distinguishing himself from the persuader of his day, the orator of his day, the sophist of his day. It's a very important distinction.

There were two major figures of the day who were public speakers; one was a herald, the other was the orator. The most eloquent orators were the movie stars of the day.

But Paul's argument is: I came among you in weakness and trembling, simply announcing Christ and him crucified, playing the role of the herald. I adapt to my audience to make sure they can attend it and can comprehend this gospel. I'm not there speaking to them in a language they don't understand. I'm talking their language in terms they can grasp. I'm not talking past them. My adaptation is for their attention and comprehension. I do not begin to use the many rhetorical techniques available for the business of yielding and retention, the latter part of the process.

Some such distinction is what we're after here. It also forces us to go back and define our term effective. What does it mean to be effective? Effective in accomplishing what? That determines everything. Let's say an evangelist says, " I want x number of people to receive Christ tonight, to come forward, sign cards, or whatever. " He's going to measure his effectiveness in terms of how many people came forward, how many people signed cards, how many people made a profession of faith. That tail could begin to wag the dog pretty easily. That's dangerous.

We need to set our goals differently, as the apostle Paul did. He says his goal is to effectively proclaim the gospel, but by that he meant giving a clear, straightforward, faithful presentation of the gospel to audience after audience, in ways they could understand. He was willing to let the chips fall where they were going to fall, recognizing he would be a savor of life to some and a savor of death to others. His effectiveness was the degree to which he was going to fulfill his role as a herald. It wasn't measured in terms of how many people came forward at the end.

So the desire for effectiveness would be abused by pursuing a wrong sort of effectiveness.

Exactly. There are all sorts of goals we can set in churches, in preaching, and ministry settings. We can set the wrong kind of goals. We shouldn't set goals saying, " We want to be a such and such size church by such and such a date. "

These are good things, but we can't control them.

That's right. It's a mistake. We ought to set our goals in terms of what God calls us to be and what he calls us to do, and we let the results be whatever the Lord is going to let the results be.

Paul is very countercultural here, both in his day and in our day. What he would argue would be to set goals in terms of what God has called us to do, what he has called us to be. Let's do that in every way we possibly can. Then when we stand before the Lord, we will be able to give an account of ourselves. " Lord, we did everything we knew how to do and to be, and then the results were left up to you. "

When we define effectiveness that way, we are wedding both effectiveness and faithfulness.

It's a redefinition of what it means to be effective, but it's a much more biblical distinction. If you measure effectiveness in terms of actually accomplishing — what do you want to accomplish?

What do we make, for example, of Jesus talking to the rich young ruler? The ruler began asking, what do I have to do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says — reaching right to the core issue, grabbing this man at the jugular vein, realizing he was possessed by his possessions — he says, you've got to give up everything you have. Come, follow me. And the text says, " His face fell, because he had much goods. " And he turns and walks away. Was Jesus effective? Was he faithful?

If you measure effectiveness by whether this fellow became a follower of Jesus — maybe he did later, but he didn't on this occasion — Jesus was a terrible failure. That's no way to measure effectiveness. Jesus was entirely effective in doing and being what needed to be done in that moment.

I want to circle back to what you said earlier about persuasion. Paul said, " Knowing the fear of God, we persuade men. " How does that come into play?

That is the one place where Paul uses a verb to refer to his own preaching that is also used widely in the rhetorical literature. The difficulty is, again, at what we mean by persuade.

He is simply talking about his role as a herald and how people come along and respond to that. He's been the instrument of their persuasion, even though he has limited himself to the role of a herald. That one reference doesn't offset all the other places where Paul talks about himself as a herald.

Peter, in his sermon in Acts, says things like, " Save yourselves from this wicked generation. " That kind of speaking — where we tell someone judgment is coming, we urge them to repent, and we plead for men's souls — where does that fall in the distinction?

Our job is to be faithful as messengers. 1 Corinthians 4: It is the steward's responsibility to be faithful. But that does not imply some disinterested stance on our part. We may desperately want people to respond. If we come as God's heralds, what is the message we bring? It's a message of invitation. When we communicate that message, we communicate with passion, the passion that is part of the message itself: the love of God, the grace of God, the mercy of God, all found in the person of Christ. Pleading with people for response in our evangelistic preaching is what it means to be a good herald. That is the king's message, and we are being faithful to that message when we communicate the full dimension of it. It's not just an information dump.

God makes his appeal through us.

Absolutely, that's what Paul says.

So when you're trying to rule out the wrong sort of persuasion, you're not ruling out appeal; you're not ruling out a call.

By no means, because what is the king's message? An appeal and call is at the heart of the king's message we are to deliver.

Duane Litfin is a writer and speaker. He served as president of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, and is author of Public Speaking (Baker).