Consider how you listen
June 16, 2010
While I was preaching in Birmingham, England recently, a colleague passed on a little booklet of 32 pages by Christopher Ash entitled Listen Up!: A practical guide to listening to sermons. What a gem it is! While there are many resources available about preparing and delivering sermons, I know of few which address the issue of how to listen to them. As Christopher Ash puts it, there is more involved than simply being present and staying awake. His 'seven ingredients' for healthy sermon listening are: 1) expect God to speak, 2) admit God knows better than you, 3) check the preacher says what the passage says, 4) hear the sermon in church, 5) be there week by week, 6) do what the Bible says, and 7) do what the Bible says today - and rejoice!
There is a section on 'how to listen to bad sermons' (which I should probably give my own congregation) - with discussion on 'how to listen to a dull sermon', 'how to listen to a biblically inadequate sermon', and 'how to listen to a heretical sermon'. The advice on the latter, by the way, is 'don't'.
The suggestions for encouraging good preaching - including things like 'pray for the preachers', 'be there' and 'be prepared to be constructively and supportively critical' - are as practical as they are profound.
Reading this booklet as a preacher was very instructive. Those of us who are privileged to engage in pulpit ministry on a regular basis need to be aware of our hearers - preaching is not simply monologue, it is monological engagement (my phrase, not Ash's), in which God himself is the dynamic between the speaking of the messenger and the hearing of those to whom the message is given. Both the reading of the Word and the preaching of it constitute God's voice to his people, and both the heralds and the hearers need to be aware of the practical issues involved both in the speaking and in the listening.
It's a terrific little volume - and I hope it has a wide circulation. More information here.
