The Secret to Great Preaching

The secret of great preaching, according to Charley Reeb, is to engage your listeners. Stop thinking about what would impress your seminary professors, he says, and instead focus on sermons that will make a difference to people’s real-life circumstances and challenges.

Many preachers prepare sermons designed to reach the crowd at a seminary chapel service. They imagine their seminary professors sitting in the back pew critiquing their sermons. Other preachers sound like they have just come from a creative writing retreat. They have read everything Barbara Brown Taylor and Fred Craddock have written and seek to imitate it. If you are preaching every week to other preachers and professors, stick with this approach. However, if it is your goal to reach the majority of listeners in churches you must change your approach.

Engage your listeners

So, what is the secret to great preaching? It is three simple words: Engage your listeners! You know, those people you are talking to in worship — the ones who chose not to do a thousand other things on a weekend so they might hear a relevant word from God for their lives. Many preachers assume their listeners will be engaged regardless of what they say and how they say it. This is a fatal mistake.

“Engaging your listeners is not pandering to them or entertaining them; it’s respecting them and caring about them.”

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Author: Charley Reeb