Experts tips from a expert in all matters of the oral arts

Lovely post here about the reading preparation and performance of a famous actress who is a regular lector in her congregation in Paris.

The challenge of preaching

Working on tomorrow's sermon. Do not think I have the force and flow of ideas I seek. Turn to various reputable internet sites for possible catalysing assistance. No. Worthy thoughts, standard recitations of history of life and times of the text. But good news is what I seek. Where is it?!

The preacher got it

Yesterday, perchance, I heard a preacher preaching whom I did not expect to hear preach and who did not expect me to turn up to hear him preaching. The self-confession of the preacher during the sermon is that he did not preach often (and it was a bit scary having a person listening, me, who made a full-time living out of preaching).

In a way it put a bit of acid on me: what would I say at the end of the sermon? With a set up like that, even saying nothing would be, so to speak, saying something. To have said nothing would be, I sensed, to have implied I did not think much of the sermon.

So I listened more intently than usual.

Fortunately for me, to say nothing of the preacher, the sermon was very good.

Why was it a good sermon? I thought it would give more substance to me saying 'That was a good sermon' if I could tell the preacher why I thought it was good. This is what I said:

1. There was a message and he stuck to it, kept coming back to it, and didn't lose track of it.

2. The opening of the sermon was touched on in the closing of the sermon.

3. The sermon connected with the passage of Scripture read before the sermon.

I have no reason to think the preacher ever reads this particular blog, but he could well have done, because the sermon, effectively, followed frequently repeated advice here.

The best Christmas sermon ever preached by an atheist?

Memorable lines in a sermon

From this morning's excellent (encouraging, inspiring, moving, pointing to God's power in our lives) sermon, I can just about report word for word these lines:

The rugby rules of life,

Always feed your backs,

Never go down the blindside on your own,

When in trouble, always kick for touch.

Worth thinking about why I can recall these so well. Here is my thinking:

- I am interested in rugby and could relate to each rule.

- A connection was made between 'rugby' and 'life' which made me listen intently ('what has the game to do with real life?' was the curiosity value in this part of the sermon).

- Just three rules (four and I might not remember them all!)

- The last rule has a lovely touch of humour: the rule applied on the rugby field is excellent; the rule applied to life is questionable as it sounds like being advised to run away from a problem, or to hand it over to someone else to deal with. The difference between the two contexts provides both subtle humour and food for thought: thinking about this rule meant ending this exercise in listening in the same frame of intensity as at the beginning.

I could over analyse this! But the point for preachers is straightforward: we can find words to say things in such a way that they are memorable and we can avoid doing that with the effect that our words are less effective.

Ten Steps To Better Preaching

Couldn't say this better than it is said here. So read it and do it!

The liturgy of Jesus

Prompted by an excellent post at Liturgy, itself stimulated by other posts on the internet, I have been thinking a little about worship and where we are going in our services as Anglicans, given that we do indeed want to achieve a lot from our liturgies: advance in mission, teaching the faith, mini-parish meetings (as sometimes our "notices" become), incorporating families (perhaps especially aiming at children, at youth, at young adults, at parents), evolving ourselves into deeper alignment with Anglicanism or (sub-)consciously moving away from that form of Christian life, as well as, lest we clergy forget, collecting the offertories to maintain stipend payments, dispensing pieces of paper, themselves sent by church and para-church officials with ambitions about what they will achieve from our congregations, building fellowship, offering hospitality. Quite a list! Oh, and had better mention the aim of worshipping God.

Rather than slate or promote this or these aims beside worshipping God, I think it useful to reflect a little on what a liturgy of Jesus might look like, i.e. if he were both the vicar and the chair of the worship committee.

We could think, for instance, of the way in which Jesus was at ease among groups and crowds of people, readily imbibed food and offered hospitality, never lost an opportunity to teach, often looked up to the Father to praise and to pray, quoted Scriptures frequently, often the Psalms, was regular at the synagogue, and at temple festivities.

Which makes me think whether one question about liturgy is wrongly framed: rather than ask whether we expect too much of liturgy, could we be expecting too little of ourselves as a fellowship of believers?

That is, make liturgy the reason primarily why we gather together, then tack various things on to the liturgy, then we may grumble that we are losing sight of what liturgy is primarily about.

What if we met together Sunday by Sunday (indeed more frequently than that) because we think meeting together is important in its own right. Then in the course of our meeting together we could talk, discuss, eat, drink, plan, prepare for other activities, and, yes, intentionally worship God through liturgy.