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PREACHING SKILLSHow to Translate Male Sermons to WomenAnd connect with what may be the largest half of your congregation.Alice Mathews
"All conversation between men and women" according to Roy McCloughry, "is cross-cultural conversation." If he's right, any preacher may communicate well with only part of the congregation and miss the other part. As a woman who has listened mostly to male preachers during the past six decades, I've reflected during many sermons on why some connect with my world and others don't.
How men and women think
Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse compares the male and female thinking processes to two kinds of vision we all use: macular and peripheral. Macular vision focuses on one thing to examine its details. Peripheral vision takes in the larger context. We use both every day; in fact, the two taken together allow us to see more fully what is there.
Barnhouse likens macular vision, focus, to the masculine way of thinking. Men tend to analyze problems, figure out their parts, and choose among the options. She compares peripheral vision to feminine thinking. Women tend to consider the context, trying to keep all issues in view. This makes arrival at a "right" answer more complex.
For example, when a couple talks about buying a car, he may check several models and compare prices, horsepower, extras included, and so on. The decision looks pretty straightforward. When he brings up the subject at dinner, his wife asks a new set of questions he may consider irrelevant: What impression would the neighbors have if we start driving such an expensive car? Could Aunt Maude get in and out of the car easily when we take her grocery shopping? Would the pastor think we should increase our giving to the church if we're able to drive such a nice car? He looks at the car; she looks at the context in which the car will be used.
From birth, girl babies respond faster to human contact and are relatively uninterested in things. Boy babies like things from the start. Carol Gilligan underlined the female tendency to put relationships before other values. In studies of children at play, researchers found that boys' games last longer because they settle disputes by elaborating rules. Girls, on the other hand, end the game when disputes break out; relationships are more important than continuing the game.
Roy McCloughry concludes, "Men and women live in different cultures: he in a world characterized by independence, and she in a world characterized by intimacy."
What are the implications of this for preaching? What types of texts or illustrations are most likely to resonate with female listeners? What emphases are they most or least likely to hear?
Caring enough to speak our language
During the years my husband and I worked as missionaries in Europe, I often served as an interpreter. With practice I could do that without thinking. One time I caught myself "translating" a French sentence into other French words. That was not my job! I was supposed to carry meaning from one language into another.
A woman in the pew goes through that process almost every time she listens to a man preach. Most of the time she isn't aware she is doing it. If she has been active in church, she has developed such skill in translating; it has become second nature to her. But she is still translating. By attending to three areas, a skilled preacher can learn to speak in a woman's "native tongue" and thus reach the entire congregation.
Translate masculine images into feminine images
While reworking a series of Bible studies for women, I chatted with Haddon Robinson about the project. He helpfully suggested illustrations for points I wanted to make. One was about a football player, another was a quote from a baseball player. Gratefully, I included them.
But before the book went to the publisher, I took those illustrations out. They just didn't fit. While some women follow sports, others feel that competitive sports violate the values they hold for relationships. The idea of winning is connected with somebody losing. And the violence of sports such as football or hockey does not communicate positively for many women. Unless a woman can translate illustrations from sports or business into relational values and experience, she may not connect emotionally with the point.
Several years ago a large Bible church invited me to speak at their Sunday services. During the first service, I used an illustration from my sewing machine. When I was about halfway through, I stopped and said gently, "I know that this baffles some of you men, but you need to know that this is my sweet revenge for all the sports illustrations I've had to listen to all of my life." There was a titter, and then a roar of laughter, and then applause. Afterward, women came up to me and said, "Thank you for talking about the sewing machine. That connected with me." The experience underscored for me that men and women live in different worlds. But the two worlds can be bridged.
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