Most of the people in the pews — and the people in the pulpit, for that matter — know this inconvenient truth: a lot of sermons are dull.

But the guy in this story, from the Boston Globe, thinks he has the solution:

‘Most preaching is boring.” There. He said it.

In front of 30 pastors, Jeffrey Arthurs acknowledged a time-honored complaint usually expressed in glassy stares, yawns, and the occasional snore. His listeners took no offense. Sitting in a classroom at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, they were among more than 400 preachers from around the country who trekked recently to the South Hamilton campus’s biennial preaching conference.

The point was to improve the clergy’s power with words to preach the Word. At one of several workshops, Arthurs, a former pastor and current associate professor of preaching at Gordon-Conwell, gave some simple advice: Variety is not just the spice of life but of good homiletics.

And he has a variety of tactics to suggest, starting with visual communication, and not just the movie-screen extravaganzas beloved by some megachurches. Simple hand gestures and pacing back and forth boost the impact of a narrative, Arthurs said. Flip-charts and simple props such as candles are useful reinforcements as well.

Although he’s not opposed to well-done, high-tech visual aids, Arthurs offered a caveat: Use with care; technological glitches can sink the best-laid plans of preachers.

In an era in which “interactive” has become the buzz adjective describing just about everything, Arthurs also suggested dialogue – preachers interacting with their flocks by asking questions during sermon. “Our Lord was a dialogic communicator,” he said, his Biblical teachings brimming with questions aimed at spurring listeners’ attention and thought.

Caveat two: Throwing Scripture up for discussion in a service may invite a question as to whether the passage under consideration is true. “And by the way, people are asking that a lot more than we give credit for,” Arthurs said.

Sprinkling homilies with storytelling and arts – dance, poetry, drawings – round out the quiver of arrows that Arthurs says modern preachers can aim at their flocks’ attention span.

For traditionalists wary of dumbing down sermons with show biz, Arthurs has a ready reply: Scripture and Jesus did this.

The Bible is “a cornucopia of [literary] forms,” he said. And “Christ took things people saw at the moment to teach,” sometimes relying on props, even human ones. Remember Jesus setting a child in front of his disciples, to illustrate the behavior that would get them to heaven?

Toss in modern research showing that people learn things in different ways with the fact that “we live in a visually dominated age” of video, television, and film, Arthurs said, and the one-size-fits-all approach of sermon-as-lecture is bound to miss some listeners. “Most of our sermons basically sound the same,” he said. “[We] run every text through the same sausage grinder.”

There’s a lot more where that came from, so be sure to read the rest at the link.

Photo: by Lisa Poole, Boston Globe