Pastor, why is your preaching so boring?

Most pastors have at some time recognised that their preaching has become boring. Perhaps especially as they have had to put themselves on the internet, that sense of their sermons not being great has probably intensified. There is probably a long list of contributing factors, but I would want to suggest that the most important or perhaps the overarching reason is lack of time in preparation.

I was listening to an interview with John Cleese (of Fawlty Towers and Monty Python fame) on the radio a little while ago. He's written a book on creativity, which he was being interviewed about. Now clearly Cleese is not a pastor and nor does he preach (at least not in the sense we mean!). But while discussing writing comedy I thought he made an interesting point. He said that for creativity you need time. Then he went on to describe a situation where he couldn't work out how to finish a particular sketch. He went to bed, woke up the next morning and woke up with the answer. Sermon preparation is a creative activity and as time is squeezed we tend to produce formulaic and thus boring sermons. Let me explain.

An Honest Analysis

It's possible you have never been an interesting preacher. Perhaps you're incoherent or dull or both. There's a whole question here of what it means to be "able to teach" (1 Timothy 3:2), but broadly if people can't listen to you then it's pretty hard for you to teach them. If that's the case, there's probably not a lot to be done other than to concentrate instead on where God has gifted you.

But I'm writing more with the pastor in mind who is able to teach, but has become boring. We need an honest analysis of ourselves here. I think most of us know when we're being boring. You can feel it in the room as you speak - people are switching off rather than switching on. I will occasionally wistfully joke that even I was falling asleep in my sermon! But it may be that we're not the best people to judge our own preaching. If you're not sure about your preaching, it's always useful to have someone, or even more than one person, who listens to you regularly and will speak to you honestly about where  your preaching is up to.

If you or they have spotted a malaise, it's worth trying to analyse the problem. Is it ultimately a problem with content? Are you not really giving the time to wrestle with the Bible passages you're preaching until you understand them, so that your sermons are theologically formulaic or bland? Is it a problem with presentation? Have you not given time to being clear and understandable? Have you not put your sermon together in a thoughtful and even creative way that helps people engage and takes people with you through the text and into their own hearts and lives?

All of these kinds of things make us boring and I think they are usually rooted in a lack of time in preparation. At this point our analysis can only help us so much. Suppose your preparation is lacking in the area of presentation. The only way to fix that is to spend more time thinking about how to present your material. But if you have only got a fixed amount of time to work on your sermon then you will end up cutting corners somewhere else and will thus make the sermon boring in a different way.

A Realistic Assessment

I think that means we, perhaps along with other elders, church councils of whatever, need to make a realistic assessment of how we use our time. If we want less boring preaching we need to create more margin in our preparation.

However, this requires some realism. They're may be a number of reasons for lack of time in sermon preparation. Here are some of them in my experience:

1. I waste time. We live in an era of distraction rather than focus. It may be that I need to refocus my time usage. Engaging on Facebook and Twitter may not be the most productive thing. I may be spending too much time chatting with people - even if it is a pastoral visit. My meetings may be over-running because I or others like the sound of our own voices too much etc.
2. I am trying or am expected to do too much. I think this is extremely common in current circumstances. The root of the problem is that we don't value preaching enough, but the source of that value judgement can be complex. It may be a denominational issue. So where a denomination has decided that a pastor will serve over a number of churches, thus giving him a huge burden in teaching and pastoral care it simply isn't possible to give the attention necessary to preaching preparation. It can be a church issue, where a congregation expects the pastor to prepare too many teaching sessions as well as be at every meeting, complete pastoral care and not have his family fall apart. It can be a mismatch between pastor and church (this is really common in revitalising contexts), where the pastor wants more preaching and teaching and the church doesn't, so the pastor has to try and keep the church happy doing what they want him to do and squeeze preparation in around the edges.
3. I am not managing my preparation time properly. I actually have enough time, but I devote too much to certain areas of preparation and then run out of time in other areas. This may be a personality thing. Some love the deep down study, but never really get to thinking deeply about how to communicate. Some love thinking about how to communicate, but don't spend long enough in the text. Both actually ultimately lead to boring sermons. We might think the communicator will get away with it and I think there is an element of truth in that. We may get away with a well-presented, but superficial sermon, but longer-term people will begin to spot the superficiality and will drift off as they hear the same things repeatedly however well communicated.

Now again that's a useful assessment, but we do also need to do a realistic assessment. Unless you are part of a large church with a big staff team, you are not going to be able to generate the kind of time you might like to prepare your sermons. When you compare yourself to the online sermons of the guys at those churches you are likely to feel inadequate, but you shouldn't. You are doing a different job and that's OK.

I think that means that you have to accept that some weeks might not be your best work - circumstances can cause that and God is sovereign. I think you also have to realise that their may be a quality ceiling because of your circumstances. Even if you can analyse your reasons for not having enough time you can't necessarily fix all those reasons. If you have three churches to look after or 6  teaching events a week, you can't necessarily fix that this week! So be realistic. Don't just determine to find an extra couple of hours to prepare if you can't work out where those hours are coming from.

Some Possible Steps

So here's the basic problem with making the changes necessary if it is time that has become a problem. You've probably gradually drifted into to having your time for preparation squeezed, but you can't drift out of it. What's worse is that you are in the catch-22 situation of needing some time to work out how to get more time! That's not so easy to do.

I'm largely a fan of small steps in the right direction rather than trying to change everything (which often seems to be the route of productivity-type books). I would first try to identify the easy wins. If I can balance my preparation better, or deal with distraction better, or find an easy half-hour here or there then start there and devote the extra time to the identified weakness.

Second, I would aim to gradually get ahead of myself. If you finish preparing for the Sunday sermon on Saturday night, could you find a way to gradually pull that back to reduce the time pressure. Imagine if you could get a week ahead of yourself in your preparation. That can even out some of the weeks where things go wrong. One way might be to have a couple of guest preachers to share the load.

Third, I would try and give a bit of time to thinking where my specific problems are and what I could do to help that. If I'm not spending enough time on the text are there some hacks I could put in my life to help with that, like making part of my daily Bible reading be reading the passages I'm going to be preaching on a few weeks or months from now. If I struggle with always reverting to the same kind of introductions or illustrations or applications, could I spend a little bit of time mapping out alternative lines of attacking the problem, so that if I'm under pressure I can look over them and intentionally try something different without having to think it up on the spot.

Beyond that, I think it's taking time on the bigger stuff - what are my priorities with relation to preaching, how does that work out in my diary? What do I need to talk with the elders about in terms of their expectations? I think doing some timesheet work here can in general be helpful. How do I spend my days? Is this how I should be spending them etc.?

I think time has always been the main issue for me in when it comes to my preaching being boring or not. Fixing lack of time is one of the more tricky things in modern life, but if our preaching has fallen into a boring slump, then it will be of some urgency for the health of our church to address the time issue.