What is in Kelvin's Head?

Six Points for Preachers

29/10/2012

I’m scheduled to attend a conference on preaching soon so inevitably I’m thinking about how preaching works and about how to extend my homiletic repertoire.

Someone asked me a good question yesterday – “How did you improve as a preacher”. It is a good question because it is affirming and something that all preachers should be able to have a go at answering. (It was asked of me incidentaly by someone who has never heard me).

I remember long ago during my curacy, one of my training rectors (I got through more than most) saying after one of my sermons “That was good, you’re going to be an excellent preacher one day”. What was intended to be a compliment made me fizzing mad. I wanted to be excellent than (and maybe even thought I was).

I wasn’t, but I know I’ve got better.

Which leads me to six things that I think have helped me:

1 – Accepting that there is always more to learn. When you think you’ve got preaching sussed, you are a long way from even beginning to get better. Everyone can improve. Learning to learn is a learnable skill.

2 – Putting it online. I’ve got better as a preacher since I started putting sermons online. Why? Well, for two reasons – firstly, because I listen to myself preach when I’ve made a recording and that allows me to reflect on what worked and what didn’t. Secondly because I know who might listen – people who taught me; people who are close enough to me to be honest with me; people who are apt to criticise me. I preach not only for those sitting in church but for all the rest who might be listening along – including the angels. It may be that those who are most help in learning how to preach are those whose opinions you value the most and those whose opinions you value the least. Listen to both.

3 – Learning to fail boldly. To preach is to risk. Accept it and know that sometimes what you hoped for won’t work. Experiment. Play.You don’t have to fit it all into one sermon and you are not going to be 100% right all of the time so why pretend?

4 – Trying to learn what makes people smile. That is different in different places. People usually like it when you tell stories about yourself. But be careful for local variations. I was recently in a place where someone said “Don’t try self deprecatory humour here. if you do they’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re not that bad’ and give you a self-help book.”

5 – Knowing that people like it when you give something of yourself. Yes, preaching, like blogging, is a striptease. Don’t show them everything. But know that if you don’t show them anything they may go away disappointed. Reveal yourself. That’s what God has given you and in the bizarre economy of the Kingdom of God your own feeble experience of God may be the pearl of great price. But only if you keep sharing.

6 – Realising that people need to be told that God loves them. And told again. And told again.

homiletics, preaching

7 responses to “Reclaiming the web”

Paul Hutchinson

14/10/2015

Thank you for making me think in a different direction just before pausing for lunch. I have never had a blog, so came quite late to Internet social discourse, and have engaged more since joining one major network in 2010 and another in early 2014 – normally using those networks rather than a comment box such as this. Not all of us are natural creators of substantial original content, but like to be thoughtful in brief exchange, and so both those major networks, though cursed with many difficulties, serve those brief exchanges quite well. I do agree that the endless recycling of links (on both of them) can be wearying, and I do wish that some old friends would be a little more self-critical. But the price of any kind of social discourse is that one is vulnerable to the otherness of the other.
I feel I ought to be writing a more substantial comment here, but hope that this is enough. The time is not always there to offer deeper reflection: but sometimes a blogger needs to hear at least a small splash from the stone thrown down the well!

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1. Kelvin
  
  14/10/2015
  
  Thanks for the comment, Paul. I’m aware that not everyone is a content creator, but perhaps what I miss is the sense of discovering different communities online and keeping the comments more or less in one place helps with that.
  
  The glory days of 50 or more comments on a post are probably over. I suspect I mourn the sense of community being created even more than I miss the interesting reflections of others. Retweets and shares are always welcome – but they are the means of amplification. Becoming loud isn’t the same as becoming wise, nor the same as becoming connected.
  
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Seph

14/10/2015

It’s a damnable shame—and mostly the fault of Facebook. Twitter at least has an etiquette of sorts, wherein it is considered impolite not to respond to the original tweet, which is usually made by the blogger in question.

Facebook, in short, is the scourge of the Internet. I have often been in groups which have decided to do all of their organizing on Facebook, despite my protests that I’m not on Facebook and don’t want to be, and really an e-mail list would be just as easy, and would they like me to set one up. This inevitably leads to my marginalization within the group, as no-one bothers to keep me abreast of the discussions to which I am not party.

Can you tell I’m upset about this?

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Daniel Lamont

14/10/2015

I am only an occasional user of Facebook but I know what you mean, Kelvin. And indeed, I never read the comments ‘below the line’ on newspapers like ‘The Guardian’. You offer some useful advice. I read yours and one or two other blogs on a regular basis but don’t always comment. However, I can see that the author of a blog would like some feedback. I would be sad not to have the blogs that I do read because they do give me a sense of what people are thinking and an odd sense of community.

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Father Ron Smith

14/10/2015

My own contribution to the blogopshere is, I’m afraid, Father Kelvin, limited to comments I make on other people’s blogs (such as ‘Thinking Anglicans’ and ‘Anglican Down Under’ – a local NZ forum; plus my own blog ‘kiwianglo’, where i pluck articles that interest me personally from the web and provide my own commentary. This still interests me, personally, and provides my few readers with information they might not otherwise be bothered to glean for themselves. Like you, I am no longer an avid Facebook fan.

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David Campbell

16/10/2015

Hi Kelvin – thoughtful as ever – and yours is invariably the first blog I turn to each day. That you bring pressing issues to a wider audience and to people who know, or used to know, the church you serve is a great thing. I’m still blogging relatively strongly, but it’s certainly a different blogging experience when work is set in a very different context and especially community from previously, writing these days mainly for myself about things that interest me, although not quite at the address you have in your Blog Roll. http://www.limpingtowardsthesunrise.com is where it’s “all” happening.

Reply
1. Kelvin
  
  16/10/2015
  
  Thanks David – nice to hear from you. I’ve amended the link.
  
  I don’t think many people use blogrolls to find blogs these days but whenever I remove it my mother complains…
  
  Reply