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4 Facets of Emotional Awareness

What to consider when you're preaching with feeling.
4 Facets of Emotional Awareness

Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said that rock-star preacher George Whitefield's gift was so strong, he could reduce masses of crowds to tears simply by saying the word "Mesopotamia." This raises the question of what kind of sermons Whitefield was preaching that the word "Mesopotamia" came up at all. But beyond that, it raises a critical question about preaching and emotions. The Great Awakening itself—in which Whitefield was a central figure—featured people fainting and weeping in response to sermons. It was controversial among church leaders in its day. (Has anything ever not been controversial among church leaders?)

Feelings get to have a word—but not the last word.

The first sermon preached at Pentecost resulted in people being "cut to the heart," as Luke puts it in Acts 2, which seems to indicate a strong emotional response. It's hard to imagine a life-changing sermon that does not move our feelings. Jesus' stories themselves are filled with emotionally charged characters—runaway sons, grieved fathers, beaten-up travelers, and lost little sheep. Yet we've all experienced the damage that comes when manipulative preachers learn to play on our heartstrings like they're cheap guitars. What should govern our preaching when it comes to sermons and the emotional life?

When I think of preaching with feeling, four facets of emotional awareness help me.

Emotions and spiritual formation

Ultimately, the purpose of preaching is to help Christ be formed in people. It's not simply biblical literacy, nor is it to try to hold people's attention, to impress them, or even to gain a response. If Christ is formed in those I preach to on a regular basis, I am pursuing my calling.

Emotions play a critically important role in the process of spiritual formation. They are a great blessing and a great curse in human life. They are so central to us that we typically inquire of them when we're interested in one another: "How are you feeling?" (We rarely ask, "How are you thinking?")

In many ways, our feelings are our lives: or at least they are what we're most aware of. Feelings are what move us to action—they are "e-motions." To lack feeling is to lack life. The hallmark of depression is not so much sad feelings as a lack of feelings altogether.

Sometimes approaches to the Christian life have assumed we can simply fill people full of Christian information in our preaching and then appeal to their wills to make right choices, teaching them to treat emotions like the irrelevant caboose that trails behind. But emotions are like Baby in the movie Dirty Dancing: No one puts them in a corner. Healthy feelings, properly ordered among themselves, are essential to good life. Unhealthy or wrongly ordered emotions will eat willpower for breakfast.

Feelings, wrote Dallas Willard, are good servants, but bad masters. Much of spiritual formation involves training our emotions to serve us, rather than us serving them (what Paul calls "their god is their stomach" in Philippians 3:19).

So in preaching, I want always to be aware of the emotions that may be invoked in people. However, I'm also aware that invoking emotion is generally an extremely temporary experience, and that people's emotional states will revert to normal when they leave. Transformation of emotional health involves change at the level of core beliefs and embodied habits, and I must use preaching to give people a vision and a means toward that end.

The emotion of the text

Often people who teach preaching will speak of two helpful questions: "As a result of this sermon, what do I want people to understand? And what do I want people to do?" But a third question helps as well: "What do I want people to feel?" Aristotle said life-changing communication involves logos (thinking), ethos (doing), but also pathos (feeling). Many communicators can answer the first two questions; communicators with a strong spiritual gift of teaching tend to excel at the third, as well.

All texts in Scripture carry with them an emotional thread. This is actually true of thought in general. Every thought or bit of information carries a little emotional charge with it. Some thoughts come with strong charges; psychologists sometimes call these "hot cognitions." When emotions come into our awareness, they do so first as either positive or negative, and then we sort them into more discreet categories like resentment, gratitude, or joy.

One key step in interpreting a text might be called "emotional exegesis": what emotions did this text evoke in its author? What emotion did the author intend to evoke in the audience? You can try it right now with a few lines from Scripture:

— "Hear this word, you cows of Bashan … "
— "Since you are precious and honored in my sight, and because I love you … "
— "As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly."
— "Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision!"
— "Jesus wept."
— "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."
— "a friend of tax collectors and sinners"
— "The Lord has done it this very day; let us rejoice … "
— "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth … "

The Bible is an intensely emotionally charged piece of literature. Too often, those of us who preach it have read commentaries, checked atlases, and sought to place the text in its historical and geographical and theological context. But we've failed to ask what emotions it would have evoked in the one who wrote it and what emotions it was expected to evoke in those who first read it. So I'll seek to ask questions to help in this:

— Does this text naturally lead people to experience longing for God's tender mercies?
— … or conviction for their injustice or apathy to the poor?
— … or hunger for love?
— … or unfulfilled longing because "God has set eternity in the hearts of men?"
— … or inspiration to lead a more noble life?
— … or determination to persevere?
— … or deep admiration and love for the person of Jesus?

Emotional exegesis of the text is key for any good interpretation, but it's especially key for the craft of preaching. I believe high awareness of this is one of the reasons for the tremendous popularity and helpfulness of The Message Bible by (preacher) Eugene Peterson.

Emotional awareness of myself

There's a line in King Lear that I love, although it scares me sometimes: "He hath ever but slenderly known himself." If I lack emotional self-awareness, it can cripple my preaching in ways I never see.

I grew up in the church, and my parents tell me that one of my first questions was: "Why is the preacher always mad at us?" I doubt that was his intent. Often we grow up in church traditions that (sometimes unconsciously) train us to exude certain emotions.

Emotions are as contagious as a cold. In one experiment, two subjects sat across from each other in a room and were silent for 10 minutes and then left. If one of the two was depressed, the other became significantly more depressed at the end of 10 minutes than they'd been going in. So if I'm feeling something deeply, there's a good chance the people listening to this will pick it up in me. I need to be aware of that so my emotions don't get in the way of my own message.

Sometimes, self-awareness may mean I need to let my congregation know something of my own inner state. Occasionally I've had to preach on a date very close to the death of someone I care about or a difficult family crisis. I find it can be helpful then to let the congregation know: "This has been a tough week for me—I'm doing okay and have people to journey with, but I just want you to know."

On the Meyers-Briggs temperament type indicator, I'm a pretty big feeler. This can be helpful for preaching. I will naturally tend to experience internally the poetry and drama of the Prodigal Son or the wilderness temptation or a call to repentance. But there's a danger in it—preaching with emotion can easily bleed over into preaching for emotion. Then I'm in manipulation territory. That's always dangerous.

Of course, no preacher should ever deliberately seek to manipulate emotions: theirs or others. We've all heard stories about preachers who choke up at exactly the same time when giving the same sermon over again.

I don't remember ever consciously thinking, I'm going to try to force emotion now. But I've become aware of a more subtle temptation. Looking back on messages, I can remember times when there has been a kind of thought process in my mind that is seeking to self-consciously dwell on emotional material. If I could give that thought a voice, it would be saying to me something like this: "Think how sad these words are. Think how much emotional connection there can be between you and your listeners if they can see how sad you are, if they can feel your sadness. You must have a deep heart if you can experience such strong emotion over this material … "

It may be you've never experienced a temptation like this, and it's a little embarrassing to put it in print. (If you could see how embarrassed and chagrined I am right now, you'd be impressed.) I've actually adopted a non-preacher as a model for me in this regard. I love to read Lincoln's speeches and letters, and it's striking how deeply he seeks to appeal to the mind through logic and clear thought—and yet how precisely, in doing this, his words can strike the deepest emotional chords. I'm trying more and more to let the words do the work: to be emotionally present, but to be careful not to be "emotionally indulgent."

One more word here: It's worth listening to and watching video of yourself to pick up on patterns. I know, I'd rather watch videos of old congregational meetings or paint drying or episodes of The Bachelor. But there's a reason professional athletes watch videos of themselves in order to improve, and what we do matters far more. I think of one preacher I know who, when he gets to material that involves tender words about God, prayer, or guilt, will automatically begin to speak in a "catch-in-my-throat" mode; he has learned to speak as though he's fighting back the tears so that it has now simply become habit, and it gets in the way of letting the words do the work.

Emotional awareness of the congregation

Effective preaching means awareness of the congregation. Are they paying attention? Is the room unusually quiet? What are their faces telling me—is there warmth, resistance, conviction, sadness, or inspiration? Just as people with high emotional intelligence become masters of reading their conversational partners, so great preachers master the art of reaching the heart of their congregations.

Over time, this is a kind of radar that becomes built-in. And as this skill develops, it leads to real-time adjustments in preaching. If I sense the congregation is drifting or becoming bored, I might need to speed up my pace for a few lines or add some emotional color. Or I might need to slow down. I might need to allow a moment's space to include a tender statement of God's love.

However, responding to the congregation's emotion doesn't mean their emotional response is the ultimate litmus test for how a sermon is going. Sometimes I know I need to teach out a complicated point or call for a difficult commitment, and it's not going to be a warm-and-fuzzy moment that will create lots of downloads. Sometimes, for the sake of honoring my call, I need to turn off my radar and tolerate shuffling or resistance because I know these are words that need to be said. Jesus experienced resistance when he taught, including at least one time when—at the end of a message—people tried to him throw off a cliff. Didn't see that one coming.

Post-preaching emotion

Preaching is, at least for me, one of the most emotionally intense and emotionally demanding activities in my life. It can be as exhilarating as anything I do. When a sermon seems to go well, I can feel a fierce joy and meaning to my core. It can also be as defeating as anything I do. When a sermon seems to miss its mark, I feel something like shame that I've let people down in such a public way.

In those times, it's helpful to remember that feelings are good servants, but bad masters. I serve another master who promises a better reward. Feelings get to have a word—but not the last word.

John Ortberg is pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.

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