Preaching to make the brain fizz: connecting the known to the unknown

I’ve just come back from a really stimulating conference.  Really stimulating.

Like, “I-can’t-turn-on the-car-radio-because-my brain-is-fizzing-too-much” stimulating.

I don’t want to talk about what the conference was about (The Gospel, Creatives, and the Arts, roughly speaking). Instead I want to think about why it was so stimulating, outside the content itself.

Because many of us are in the business of communicating the gospel (which ought to be stimulating, right?), but we know from deadly experience, whether standing at the lectern or sitting in the seats, can be made crushingly dull.

So what makes the brain fizz?

As a younger pastor, I used to go to conferences where I could hardly get my head around everything I was being taught.  I listened to recordings of the talks where I had to pause them because I needed to process everything to that point.  Out loud – with somebody else, if possible.

Those happen less and less frequently.

Now you might argue I’m older, slower, and less easily excited.  I couldn’t possibly comment.

I would comment, though, that there’s been a change in supply.  Back then, to hear a world class speaker you had to wait until there was an occasional visit, or order tapes which might take weeks to arrive.  Now, if you want to hear one, you head to Youtube.  

Scarcity has been overcome.

But there is another reason, which is worth noting as a preacher.

Some of this stuff can only happen once. I remember a series of lectures on Ezekiel which opened my eyes to how that book works to show Jesus.  Now, I’ve heard many talks and read many books since then – but nothing can replicate that first explosion in my mind.

At the very least, I’ve read every Old Testament book around 50 times, and every New Testament book and the Psalms around 100, just in my Quiet Times.  Many of them, many more times than that.  The element of surprise has gone. Does it stay fresh?  Do I still notice things?  Of course!  But the macro-level, high viewpoint stuff has been done.

I can’t read Ezekiel for the first time ever again. Whatever new insights someone has to teach me (and they will!), I have some thoughts of my own to work with.

Translate that into preaching: most of the people in front of us have heard a gospel presentation before.  They’ve heard a bible overview before.  They’ve heard…. you get it.

So, what can we learn from that conference? Because as regular readers know, I can bore you silly on creativity, the arts and the gospel.

And yet my brain was in hyperdrive.

There were two good teaching practices on display, not consciously, I think, but there nonetheless.

The old and the new swapped places

Or as someone I read recently put it, to teach something new, make it familiar, but to teach something well-known, make it unfamiliar.  Our brains seem to be creatures of habit by lazy preference, but notice something new straightaway.  

If you want to test that, take something you know well, and experience it backwards.  Eat a meal starting with the dessert. Watch a football match in reverse. Hang a painting upside down. When the familiar becomes weird again, we notice stuff.

So, as a preacher.  What would happen if we took a logical section of Paul, full of ‘therefores’, and preached it from the conclusion backwards, ‘because, because, because’? What about preaching on the parable of the Prodigal Son where the elder son is delighted to have his brother back? 

When I think of the most engaging preachers I’ve sat under, it’s a common element, that they have sat and looked at the passage long enough that they have seen what’s going on, and then tried to work out how to get us to see it with fresh eyes as well.

They haven’t settled for three points beginning with P.

It happens the other way round as well.  New stuff can be difficult to access and learn.  Your body doesn’t have the muscle memory to learn to dance.  Your brain doesn’t have a way of remembering utterly remote Hebrew vocab. 

‘I can’t do this!!’

Good communicators identify what will be hardest for people to grasp, and explain it in terms that people know.  They ease that transition.  

Maybe we could teach Zechariah by way of the way the New Testament handles it. Work at the remoteness of Old Testament cultures and laws by way of as many bridging contexts as possible. 

In other words, where the material is easy and familiar, make the listeners work.  If it’s tough, you do the work and make it easy to access.

Familiar to unfamiliar

The conference I attended had both those elements.  There was stuff I didn’t know, put in terms I could access, both as skills and knowledge.  And there was stuff I was familiar which made me squint and look again.

All well and good.

But the magic happens when those processes are deliberately connected.

In other words, as an experiences lecturer once put it, you must proceed from the known to the unknown.  Stay with the known, you’re boring.  Stay with the unknown, you’re irrelevant.  Oscillate, and you’re confusing.

But to start with the known and gently move people to the unknown – that’s when the brain fizzes.  ‘I’ve never seen that before’. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’  ‘Well, in that case, what about…?’  And they’re off on their own, having brilliant new ideas.

That’s why I couldn’t put on the car radio last Weeknd, because my brain wasn’t just full, it was stimulated.

Don’t you long for the people listening to your next sermon to be in that state?

So here’s how to give it a chance.  As you settle in your mind what the structure of the sermon will be, draw a line down the middle of a piece of A4. One side label ‘known’, and the other ‘unknown’. And ask yourself these three simple questions.

• What can I safely assume people will know, and how can I stop that being boring?

• What can reasonably assume will be new, maybe strange, maybe even alienating, that I need to work to make accessible?

• And how and when do I dance between those two categories, back and forth, so that people leave entranced with God’s Word?