While not even close to an eighteen-month-long sermon, this extended four-month focus allowed the congregation to move forward. Pledges increased, and we got on a solid financial footing for the next year.
Taking the Time to Teach and Equip
Teaching a new language through preaching allows people to become comfortable with new concepts in discipleship before they are asked to begin applying them. Setting a copy of War and Peace in front of a third grader and making them feel guilty for not understanding it will neither aid their comprehension nor make them particularly interested in picking the book up later in life. Too often, we as preachers can be guilty of employing a similar pedagogy that is not only ineffective but also lacks love for our congregation. I have sat through sermons in failing congregations where preachers have guilted their people for not doing enough evangelism work, without sharing any tips, techniques, or perspectives on how that particular parish might be effective in sharing the Good News.
Churches almost always have some crisis happening, at least when viewed from a slightly anxious perspective. The temptation for church leadership is to want the issue of the moment solved immediately, and to start exhorting the congregation to drop everything and fix it. Important congregational transformation is unlikely to occur in a week or two, regardless of how impassioned the preaching, nor is serving the problem up with a large side of guilt on a Sunday morning likely to help matters.
Teaching a new language to move people toward a congregational goal is a better option than guilt because of the assumptions it makes about the people in our pews. Too many mediocre sermons assume that people both know how to do something and have the resources to do it, but still choose not to. A long-term sermon assumes that people want to move where God is calling the church but are unable to get there. Instead of being afraid that the church is refusing to do what is necessary, the long-term sermon trusts the congregation enough to believe that as they grow in their understanding and capacity—their faith—they will also make choices to grow in their discipleship. As the cultural incentives of church attendance have declined in recent decades, the congregations with us on Sunday morning deserve our trust. With fewer motivations to come to church outside of a desire for a deeper relationship with God, we can be confident that those present will take the right steps when they are able.
If we believe that people will move forward in discipleship when they are prepared, our sermon goal becomes preparing them to move in the direction that is currently most important for the health and growth of the church. To live into a new direction, the people in the pews will need some important information.
Elements a Congregation Needs to Make a Change
The first, and possibly most important, need for people to live into a change is to understand why that change is important. This understanding is essential before people make any change in their lives and is doubly important when that change involves something with the layers of personal importance, family history, and institutional authority as their church. Even early adopters and change agents in other areas are often more conservative about modifications in their church life and personal pieties.
Preaching about the importance of change usually covers a variety of areas. The most important is a vision of how things can look for the congregation and the larger community when the change is made. When a congregation has had a reasonable degree of success in the way things have always been done, painting a picture of how things could be better is essential. This understanding for change is a practical one. Hand-inhand with the future vision, we must offer a description of ways that the current situation is not as good as it could be. Things may seem to be chugging right along, but many in the pews may not be aware of just how precarious things are. Or maybe what is happening is working well, but the community’s needs have become so much greater that the church is no longer living into the fullness of its mission.
In addition to the practical, any change in a church context also has a spiritual motivation. Discipleship requires us to grow as individuals and as communities. God has a call for each congregation, and every church will undergo a variety of transformations to fully become what God has created it to be. A central preaching task is helping our people hear God’s call through illuminating scriptural connections and the spiritual stories of the congregation itself. This spiritual underpinning is a key motivation for any change that will happen in the church context.
In addition to understanding why they need to change, people also need to know how to change. Teaching people how to make needed changes is, in some ways, a newer requirement of our preaching. In the past, preachers could expect that large portions of the congregation were able to learn something that they needed to know by attending church school sessions, parish meetings, and congregational trainings or other gatherings. Today in many congregations, the best or even only chance to teach a large percentage of the church is during the sermon; key leaders may not avail themselves of other opportunities. Even if the topics seem less “spiritual,” using sermon time to look at the practical way to implement a change may be essential for a church to live into God’s call. We can no longer afford the luxury of limiting the subject matter of our sermons when God is trying to get our people to grow.
Teaching people how to do something does, of course, includes a spiritual component. Talking about how to pray and create the spiritual momentum for congregational growth is essential. An important part of teaching people how to move forward is helping them understand that even the practical aspects of any changes are going to be done by cooperating with the work God is already doing. That spiritual emphasis may be paired with any variety of practical skills. Depending on the current focus, helpful sermons may walk people through putting prayer apps on their smartphones, giving people practice in naming a place they saw God working in their lives recently and sharing those God-sightings with someone else, or discussing the appropriate time to talk to someone on the vestry about a conflict in the church.
Addressing these topics is not something that can happen in a single morning sermon. Even a short series is likely inadequate to handle all aspects of what a congregation might need, although the sermon series can be a component of a larger initiative. A long-term sermon is the best approach to offer the needed theological rationale, practical vision, and concrete skills at an appropriate pace.
The goal of the long-term sermon is to allow time for the variety of information and application needed for a congregation to understand, get comfortable with, and be prepared to make changes. Instead of moving directly through information, a long-term sermon allows a preacher to introduce something in a small way and then circle back a couple of times while weaving in other relevant information that illuminates and reinforces the overarching goal. Such a practice assumes that the congregation needs to hear something several times to become comfortable with it. Preaching a consistent focus over a year or two also acknowledges that the average congregant is not in church every Sunday. Points need to be repeated for everyone to hear them, but preachers can’t just preach the same sermon over and over again until it reaches the whole congregation. If some key leaders miss a great sermon while traveling, that is a loss. If those same leaders miss a key point about the parish’s current focus during their trip, the preacher needs to ensure that the point is reinforced at other times.
Long-Term Sermons Integrated into the Weekly Sermon
Preaching a long-term sermon means that the goals for our weekly sermons will be slightly different. In seminary, most of us were taught to have a tight, coherent sermon. Many books on preaching rightly emphasize the effectiveness of having a single point for each sermon so that listeners know exactly what they are hearing and what the sermon is asking them to do. Some successful preachers argue that even the traditional “three points and a poem” sermon contain two points and one poem too many. As people’s attention spans shorten, a homiletic laser-focus is helpful.