What if the Congregation Doesn’t Like Your Preaching?

Hosts: TJ Freeman, Joe Wagner, and Josh MacClaren

Summary: In this episode of Rural Church Renewal, Pastor TJ Freeman addresses the challenge of disengaged congregations. Sharing personal experiences from his ministry in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, TJ offers practical advice for pastors on making sermons more engaging and accessible. He emphasizes understanding both the biblical text and the congregation's needs, providing strategies for using effective introductions, relatable illustrations, and persuasive arguments. TJ also highlights the importance of pastoral relationships and prayer in enhancing sermon impact. He encourages pastors to adapt and rethink their preaching methods for the spiritual growth and engagement of their congregation.

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Transcript

Has anybody ever said to you, pastor, your preaching is just a little over my head? Or Pastor, could you tell some more stories or use some more illustrations? Or have they just kind of mumbled along like, Hey Pastor, good sermon. Or, Hey pastor, when are we gonna move on from this book that we're currently studying?

What do you do when you start to get a sense that the people might not be clicking with your preaching? Stay tuned on this episode of Rural Church Renewal. Well, hello, my name is TJ Freeman and I am one of the pastors at Christ Church in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. We are a church in a place that most of the world thinks of as the middle of nowhere, and I am delighted to be able to say the Lord has brought renewal in our church.

A little over a decade ago, the church was in decline and really struggling. And even out here in the middle of nowhere, God was kind to revitalize a church that's actually making a difference in the community, and it has been one of the greatest joys and honors of my life to be a part of that. And I am delighted also to be a part of this episode where we are talking about preaching.

I remember one time a guy came up to me after a sermon and said, pastor, you are the most monotone preacher i've ever heard, and you're boring me to death. I have O had other times where people have just kind of been like, oh, good sermon, but you know that that is not what they mean on the inside. I've even had somebody say, oh, bless your heart.

It is tough when it feels like people just aren't clicking with your sermon. Maybe you've had the experience of looking out while you're preaching and you're like, oof, they're going to sleep, or, Ooh, I've lost them, or, Ooh, you know, I, I don't, I feel like I'm not making sense and I'm not sure what to do.

That's a really tough place to be. Now there's a danger that I think a lot of us face, and that is to start blaming the congregation. It's so easy to do. You start thinking, man, I'm just preaching the the gospel. How come they're not interested in the gospel? Or I'm preaching word by word through the word of God.

If they really wanted God's word, they'd stop demanding that I break it down more than that, or that I go topical or whatever. Or you start thinking they shouldn't need me to give an illustration, that's the Holy Spirit's job. It's my job just to proclaim the truth and let the spirit do with it what he will.

I mean, all kinds of things happen where we start to blame the congregation and we're not willing to take an honest look into the effectiveness of our preaching. And I wanna kind of build this off from one Peter five, which I think we need to think much more carefully about. But we're told in that passage to shepherd the flock of God.

That's among us, and we're supposed to do it in a way that's not under compulsion, but something that we do eagerly and you need to understand God has not given you the perfect congregation. The perfect congregation, at the end of the book of Revelation, where everyone's standing around the throne worshiping Christ, the Chief Shepherd, that's gonna be the perfect moment.

Until that day, we are all going to have imperfect congregations, and those congregations are led by imperfect pastor. Mr I should look in the mirror more and that includes me. That includes all of us. We're all lousy pastors, trying to get a little bit better. That's the truth. And we would do really well to realize that and then go, Hey, I'm nothing special and I've been called by God.

To shepherd this congregation with his help. So that's what I'm gonna do. So I'm not gonna take my list of what I learned in seminary. You know, I gotta do it this way, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or I'm not gonna take my preference that this is how I like to prep sermons, and this is how I come up with illustrations or whatever.

You're gonna look at two things. Number one, you're gonna look at the text, and two, you're gonna look at the congregation. Most of us are decent with looking at the text. Now, I don't wanna undersell or understate the importance of this way before you go toward your congregation, you need to make sure you get the text right.

Your exegetical work should be divorced from the work you're doing to make sure you get it across to your congregation at first. Meaning you need to understand the text in context and how it relates to the original audience. By the intent of the original author. You gotta get that down. Then you've gotta do your spiritual reflection and understand where is Christ in this?

How does the gospel get demonstrated through this text? Then you start thinking about your congregation, and I think a lot of us go wonky here. For a lot of reasons we don't think about our congregations well. Sometimes we might get mad at 'em for ways that they're not being what they should be.

Sometimes we might get discouraged and feel like they're never gonna really grow. Sometimes we might wish we had a different congregation than the congregation we have. You don't. You have your congregation. And you've gotta find a way to get your sermon across in a way that actually. I'm gonna use a dumb buzz phrase, but meet them where they're at.

I don't, I'm not telling you to dumb down things. So don't take what I'm saying out of context, but I am saying you have the people who are in front of you and it's your job to make the word of God plain for them so that they understand it, and so that they have some sense of what it means for them today based on the original author's intent for his original audience.

And it's kinda like, well, if this was true. For that original audience, then in what way is it true for us today? That's a huge part of your job and there's no like formula that says exactly how you do something like this. It's you knowing your people really well, getting into their lives, being in their homes, spending time crying with them, and laughing with them and understanding them and thinking about where they're at and figuring out how to communicate.

In a way that they understand. So if you're hearing somebody say something like, pastor. This is just over my head. What they mean is you're born the ever love and snot out of 'em, okay? And you need to stop doing that. And there are some ways you can stop doing that. Like when you give your intro, if you just cannonball into the sermon and you're like, Hey, the text this, and this is written to these people and this is why you have not given them any reason at all to listen to you.

Unless they're super spiritually, you know, engaged and aligned, they're not gonna care to keep listening to you. You have a responsibility to give them a reason to care. They've given you their time. You need to show them why they should care. And yeah, in a perfect world, they're just gonna love the Bible so much that they just wanna know more.

We don't live in the perfect world that is coming. Christ will return and it'll be awesome and you won't have to do this job anymore. Until then, you're gonna have to think of a way in your introduction to your sermon to engage the people so that they wanna lean in and hear more. Set it up in a way that draws them into the thing.

And then as you read the text and as you begin to make an argument, from the text, that argument needs to be held together in a cohesive way that they can follow. They can understand the logic you're using based on the logic that's made visible in the text. You gotta realize the biblical authors didn't write just to inform, they wrote to persuade, and it's our responsibility as preachers, not just to inform.

But to persuade, and we need to persuade them of things that the scripture calls them to, but in a framework that makes sense in their mind so that they can see that they need to be persuaded to this thing. That's a huge part of what we need to do. So forming an argument, and then supporting that argument from scripture, will increase the engagement, but it needs to be then said in a way that connects with the lives of the people in front of you.

You're in a rural church, you might have a lot of blue collar workers. You might have a lot of farmers, you might have a lot of people who are doing their own business, whatever. You need to think about those frameworks. You have people who maybe are living in poverty, people who are struggling with addiction, people who don't have the best schools, people who don't have the best healthcare.

Think about these kinds of things as you're thinking about how to shepherd this flock, and then it's your job, partially through the preaching, to mobilize them. To show a better way to show what the Kingdom of Heaven is like, to show the world around them that they actually need Christ. They need salvation because of their sin and Christ, not politics.

Christ, not moralism Christ, not anything else is the thing they actually need. And he's enough. He is more than a solution. He is the point of all things, and you need as a congregation to be demonstrating Christ so that his glory is ma made known in your small community in a way that displaces the darkness that's there.

It becomes a bright, shining light that testifies all the way to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. So your sermon plays a critical role in that. So if people are sleeping, I mean that's gonna happen every Sunday. Don't take that personally, but if you notice consistently people are not with you.

You've got work to do, brother. And let's just be honest, we all have that work to do. By the way, if you don't even know if people are engaged or not, or you've lied to yourself and thought, man, everybody was really into it or whatever, learn to pay more attention. Look people in the eyes. Try to figure out are they tracking or are they not?

Are they engaged or are they not? What can I do to help them be engaged? And listen to them. Maybe you've been in the Book of John for 27 years and they're like, Hey, I'd kinda like to know like some stuff from the Old Testament, or wouldn't it be neat to hear a pastoral epistle, something like that.

Proverbs, you know, I just, I want some practical wisdom. People are gonna start to feel like that over time, and you might be exasperating them by spending so much time in a book. And I know it's like, well, they should love it. Yeah. Again, it's not a perfect world and you might be part of the problem. It might not be all on the congregation.

And their lack of a desire to hear long books of the Bible taught in sequence. Break that thing up for 'em. Summertime, give 'em some Psalms. That's glorious. Take a break halfway through Genesis and go into something from the New Testament. Give them that. I mean, they're New Testament Saints. Give 'em that kind of stuff.

Don't feel like you have to be rigid and just poking through. And then also understand like going verse by verse. That doesn't mean that you're explaining every detail of every verse that will bore anybody. That would bore you. Let's just be honest. So go through it in a way that's faithful to the overarching message of that text.

You should be able to preach a whole book of the Bible in a sermon. You should be able to preach a chapter in a sermon, several chapters. You're reducing what that text is saying to the contours you know of, of the text. You're bringing your sermon down to that, no matter how long or how short your text is, making good arguments, those kinds of things, you'll go a long way.

Now, a lot of your preaching though, doesn't come from behind the pulpit. The relationships that you build with people as you're in their lives throughout the week play massively into this. In fact, there are people who will listen much more carefully because they like you. And they know that you like them. And they've seen that you're not just the guy who shows up for hospital visits and whatever, but you're actually thinking about 'em.

When you start using examples that show the people you understand their culture and their community and all those kinds of things, that just goes so far. So your investment in the people throughout the week is so significant as well, and so much of your preaching hinges on your praying. Spend way more time than you think you need to with the Lord in prayer, pleading that the congregation will have a heart, but also praying that God will give you eyes to see. That he'll give you the right words to say, that your pride would be just stripped completely out of the whole scenario, so that Christ is exalted as you shepherd the flock of God that's among you.

Don't lose your congregation because you're unwilling to make radical changes in your preaching, for the sake of God's glory, in the life of your church really matters. If you ever wanna talk more about this, I would love to sit down and have a conversation with you. You can reach out to me through my email address, tj@brainerdinstitute.com.

Love to follow up with you there. For now, though. Thanks for listening to this episode of Rural Church Renewal, and we'll see you next time.