TMI = Too much information.
I think it should be a real medical diagnosis for some pastors I’ve met over the years. Here’s how to tell if you’re a TMI pastor:
1. Do you chuck so much content into a sermon that it really should be three sermons? People will only remember so much. I like how Rick Warren says he wrote the Purpose Driven Life. He tried to use as few words as possible. He took paragraphs and made them sentences. He took 10 words and made them into five. Wordsmith your sermons. Many sermons could be half the length and be spot on (and not really lose a thing in the translation).
2. Another diagnosis for pastors could be PWLTHTT. This stands for ‘pastors who like to hear themselves talk’. Here, the problem isn’t too much content at all, it’s not an issue of content… it’s a matter of filling time and enjoying the sound of your own voice. Maybe you sermons are long, not because you have way too much content, but because you like the sound of your own voice. This is a question that only you can answer. If you think you’re the best thing since sliced bread, then I think a diagnosis of PWLTHTT is in order. Stop that.
3. The last diagnosis that I think many speakers and pastors could have is the RCR disease. This stands for Repeat, Circle around, Repeat. This is when you, as the speaker state your point, then rather than give great illustrations of your point, you just re-state your point using different words. Give some solid illustrations that give some meat to your point rather than just repeating it.
OK… so maybe this is a list of my pet peeves as I get to listen to a ton of different speakers (most of them really, really great speakers). But everyone once in a while, I’ll hear a TMI, PWLTHTT or RCR conflicted pastor.
Do a self-diagnosis for these conditions. Ask for some input from those you trust.
But as I like to say… don’t ask the question if you don’t want to hear the answer!
Thoughts?
 |
 |
Well Todd;
You’ve hit it out of the ballpark again! I used to be a TMI, until I honestly asked my wife one day. And lovely, yet firmly said, “DOn’t try to say everything your thinking. Leave some time and energy for people to ponder, think and reflect. When you do it all for them, they don’t have to think, research or reflect.”
Those were the wiset words I’d ever heard. Certainly not from a homeletics, or Bible class full of preachers.
I basically think preachers like to hear their own voice. Because it seems that most of them like to talk, talk, talk. That’s even when they’re off the platform.
Thanks Todd, good pet peaves, and now I share them about myself and guard my wind bag.
James
Hi Todd,
I am a missionary in Mexico. I think one of the simplest things is to plan your sermon into your time slot, not all your time to go free according to your material. In other words, start with, you want a sermon to last for how long? Let’s say for sake of example 45 minutes. Go back to a 3-4 old sermons that you have recorded, and look at how much time each element takes, i.e. an illustration, a major/minor outline point, the reading and explanation of a verse. Now go through your sermon and assign every element a standard time element. Introduction -3 minutes, conclusion 3-minutes, statement and elaboration of each main point 4 minutes x 3 main points. 4 illustrations = 4×7 minutes. 9 subpoints (3 under each main point) x 4 minutes to state, relate, and explain = 9×4= 36, A 3 verses under each subpoint read and explain =5 minutes each x 9 =45 minutes. As you can see, that will not work in a 45 minute sermon, so you must design into your sermon certain elements (or cull out certain elements). First of all, a 3 main/3 minor is a hard thing to get through in 45 minutes with 3 supporting verses under each one. Go for 2 x 2 instead. Reduce 3 verses under each subpoint into 1 good verse that really illustrates the point. Illustrations are time consumers, and unless they are absolutely essential and exactly explain Scripture should be scrapped. I have seen people get on an illustration and go for a half hour on a single illustration. Fun, but diseaster for a sermon.
Secondly, use an outline, pray that God gives you what to say before you enter the pulpit, pray and work to put all that down in your outline notes, and hardly ever leave your outline notes. Preach from what you prayed over and prepared, and stay away from rabbit trails. Skip items in an outline or simply mark those points and elements in another color and skip them in the sermon if your time is tight. Write down when you normally start, and then write down what time it should be when you start an element. If you are running tight, work quickly or skip elements of lesser importance.
Thirdly, stop “warming up” the congregation with half an hour of jokes and chit-chat. Get directly into the sermon. Give a 3 minute overview of the sermon. In education, they put it, tell them where you are going, tell them where you are, and tell them where you have been. Each element in the sermon outline is a ticker. When they hear a new ticker, the sermon progresses forward. In a typical sermon, no element should last longer than a few minutes (maybe 5). They need that ticker to trigger a progress signal. If they get that every 3-4 minutes, the 45 minute sermon will seem to last like 10 minutes. Personally, I usually make a sermon outline in the form of a tract, http://www.coxtracts.com, where it is something that they can take home with them, review, and give to friends. Everybody gets a tract at the beginning of the service, and some read it while I preach (it is not an outline but a tract, and I follow the tract). The tract has additional verses that I won’t read or mention, and basically after reading a bit, they get back into the sermon (hearing). But using the tract does two things, 1) it breaks the 3×3 mold nicely, where I can have 5 ot 8 sections with no subpoints, and a verse or two under each one. 2) It provides a progress meter through the sermon, i.e. I tell them where I am in the tract “Now turn the tract over and the first column on the left, heading xyz is where we are.” That gives a tremendous “ticker” experience. They hardly know they are “in a sermon”, because the structure is basically obvious but not forced on them. They can see everything I deal with immediately on receiving the tract, and I don’t have to lose time and energy trying to establish a sermon structure, yet it is very clearly there.
Yes I give “too much information” in some of these,but the overload of information is not really burdened on them in the sermon. My tracts with 40-50 verses have most as references “for reference”, and thus, I don’t read them nor speak of them in the sermon. We hit the main principle verses only, and I will typically deal with 6-8 verses in a 40-50 verse tract. Yet for the inquiring minds out there, they have abundant material to study at home.
Best of all, the sermon seems short, sweet, to the point, and clear. And they take the sermon home, and can review it over time in the future.
Consider that in the context of this blog article
Response to David;
Thanks for the dissertation on organizing a sermon. Been there done that.
All the tricks of the trade don’t work if basically you can’t exercise self-control and discipline.
I was an assoc. Pastor whom I worked under the Sr. Pastor (who incidentally taught Preachers how to preach at a University) who couldn’t preach his way out of a paper bag. And to him 45 min. was short. Needless to say he grew down the congregation very quickly. Here’s the kicker, he didn’t have anything to say either. You’d think after 45 – 50min. you would walk away with something useful. Nope! The congregation went from 1,400 down to about 600 or less today. Many tried to share lovingly and sensitively with the Sr. Pastor. But his pride just wouldn’t hear that perhaps he was the problem, not the dull, shallow, ignorant congregation (Who incidentally was filled with teachers, professors, Dr.’s, lawyers etc.) So it wasn’t about the intelligence or spiritual shallowness.
Old time preacher friend of mine, now in heaven, when candidating for his first pastorate sat down after delivering his first sermon. A little old patriarch of the church came over and pulled his ear down to whisper in his ear and said, “John, I like you and your sermon.” He asked why. She said, “YOu know when to shut up and sit down.” He became the Sr. Pastor of the fastest growing and largest Baptist church in Shawnee, Kansas in the Mid 1940′s. Good adivce!
I’ve learned my lesson, “Less is More”.
James
We’ve told our pastor before, “That was a great sermon SERIES you preached today!”
TO be truthful, I have been through both extremes (kind of) of the issue. Here in Mexico things are a little different than in the US. In the US everybody ABSOLUTELY HAS to be out by 12 noon in order to get a good place in line to eat at a favorite restaurant. We normally eat here between 2PM and 4 PM on all days, so we don’t have that pressure.
I have preached an hour and half sermon, but to be truthful, I stopped doing that because of the work involved. Some of our people come from 2 hours away (commute, 2 hours coming, and 2 hours going home). The Sunday AM service is the sum total of all their preaching all week.
Let me say though, to preach 1.5 hours, I used a projector with Powerpoint, and every point had visuals (including cute stupid cartoons and stuff), and I could keep attention of 90% of my people that length of time. (The norm during that phase of my preaching was between 45 minutes and 1 hour 20 minutes though. An hour and half was because something went wrong usually.) My wife and the other Sunday School teachers were organizing the lynching so I stopped it.
To do something like that and pull it off, you need a very clear course, and make the people feel the sermon is progressing fast. In those sermons I presented a lot of material, and I never inserted or ab libbed anything. Everything was in my notes, and on the projector. The outline would get tick marks as we progressed.
The 10% that didn’t like it at all were 1) experienced mature Christians who had been several churches before ours, and simply put, they wanted a short sermon. The shorter the better. A 10 minute sermon would have suited them just fine. I didn’t stop preaching long for them though. The real reason was that our new visitors got turned off and never came back. They came from other things, and didn’t want to return to a church where they would get out at close to 2PM.
So I speak with experience, and I would say that the majority of our people learned a lot from those long sermons. We really dealt with issues in depth. What I saw was a tremendous amount of preparation on my part, and once I had the sermon “finished”, I could expect another 6 hours to get it into Powerpoint, and presentable. The sermons were jewels (some), but they were more books than sermons. So I made them into Books, and printed them and put them on the back bookshelf by the exit where they should be.
The tract thing I mentioned above works well for us. Sunday PM we start at 6 and get out before 7 or at 7. Sunday AM, from 11AM (after Sunday School), and I get in the pulpit around 11:30, and preach to 12:15 to 12:30. Depending on the topic, I can go to 12:40, but usually I try to get out by 12:45. Many Mexican pastors here preach for 1-2 hours easily, and the Pentecostals preach 3-4 1 to 2 hour sermons, starting at 9:30AM and ending around 4 to 6 pm, so we are not so bad from our people’s point of view.
When I preach in the US, it seems like play preaching, 15-20 minutes. I have a sermon where I preach through the entire book of 1John verse by verse in under 1 hour. In the US, people don’t want to learn it seems like. I have preached my tract sermons in the US, and one pastor said afterwards “David, you gave us so much material in that sermon that I could preach a month off of it.” It was all on a single page tract (front and back) and was in under the 35 minute time limit he gave me. There was about 8-12 verses dealt with in it.
The problem is preachers don’t exposit Scripture, they wander. To really succeed at this, you have lose yourself and focus on the message God is trying to communicate to them FROM BEFORE YOU ENTER THE PULPIT! Get out of the way. Let God do it. Nobody likes to hear you talk, so accept it, get over it, and get to the job at hand!
Pastor David Cox
I find some of the long comments ironic given the original post
I find the lack of a serious study attitude among Christians that say they believe the Book but don’t know it, and don’t want to anybody to really teach it to them ironic also