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PREACHING SKILLSPreaching to Everyone in ParticularHow to scratch where people nicheHaddon Robinson
While Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts, was without a pastor for over a year, I preached there often. The church is remarkably diverse, having Harvard professors and high school dropouts, doctors and lawyers and house cleaners, political activists and those who don't even read the newspaper, people with multimillion-dollar investment portfolios and minimum-wage workers. In addition, members are of many races and colors.
I stood before such diversity each week amazed at the responsibility I had to reach them all. As I prepared my sermons, I stewed over how my sermon could reach the entire cross section.
As men and women who preach, our task can be expressed simply: to become all things to all people. To actually do it is a formidable task.
Sacrificing what comes naturally
When we fail to speak to the entire cross section in our churches, we resemble the doctor who knows only how to set a broken arm: if a patient complains of a bellyache, the doctor breaks his arm so she can set it.
Reaching broader audiences demands that we sacrifice what comes naturally to us. When Paul said, "I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some" (1 Corinthians 9:22), he wasn't talking about just evangelism. He was talking also about helping converts grow. "To the weak"— believers who had weak consciences—he became weak; he restricted his freedom for their sake.
Speaking to a broader audience requires a sacrifice from us. We give up our freedom to use certain kinds of humor, to call minority groups by names that make sense to us, to illustrate only from books and movies we find interesting, to speak only to people with our education and level of Christian commitment. Sometimes such sacrifice feels constricting to us.
A pastor who objects strongly to the women's movement, for example, might take a passing shot at its leaders and activities. By doing so, though, he risks needlessly alienating women in the congregation.
Sacrificing what comes most naturally to us, though, is what gives us a platform to speak. Just as a legalistic Jew wouldn't regard Paul as credible if Paul ignored the law, so many women, for example, won't regard a preacher as credible if he shows zero sensitivity to their issues.
Why go to all this trouble? Because it is right and because it is wise.
The people we are most likely to offend are those on the edge, those cautiously considering the gospel or deeper commitment but who are skittish, easily chased away by one offensive move from pastors. Those already secure in the fold will probably stick by us in spite of our blunders. The new people we're trying to reach are as easily spooked as wild turkeys.
A young couple moved into a Chicago suburb and attended one church for several months. The church helped them through the husband's unemployment. Several times the pastor met with the man, who had advanced degrees in ecology and was interested in deeper involvement in the church.
Then he and his wife abruptly stopped coming. The pastor repeatedly tried to contact them, and finally after several months, he was able to take the man out for lunch. He asked him why they had not come to church in such a long time. "In several of your sermons," the man replied, "you made comments that belittled science. If that is the way you feel, I don't think we're on the same wavelength."
The pastor remembered the remarks, which were either passing comments or rhetorical flourishes contrasting the power of Christ and the weakness of human thought. But the consequence was not passing: a man who showed promise of moving into deeper discipleship had been diverted.
How can we gain appreciation for lives unlike our own, for people as different as security guards and investment bankers? The same way novelists do: listening and observing. Listen to the people you counsel and the conversations around you in restaurants and stores. Observe characters in movies and common people interviewed on the news. Note how these people state their concerns—their specific phrasing, their feelings, their issues. Get an ear for dialogue.
I know one pastor who holds a focus group each Thursday before he preaches. He eats lunch with several people from diverse backgrounds, tells them the ideas in his sermon, and asks them how they hear these ideas. They often raise issues that had never occurred to him.
After one service a woman told me how she and several other African-Americans had taken out an ad in the New York Times to explain their resentment of homosexual activists who draw on the black experience to describe their own. "They identified themselves as a minority," she told me. "We're both minorities, but that's the only thing we have in common. They don't know what we've gone through. They don't know the pain of being black. She helped me understand what a disadvantaged minority feels, and someday I'm sure I'll include in a sermon how God can help those who feel the pain of being black in America.
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