Understanding the psyche of a congregation
/By Andy Kind
In this article, Andy summarises the training he delivered in last year’s Preaching Workshop. He explores the nuances of preaching, focusing on the importance of understanding how the congregation may receive the message and what to take into account.
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The first demand placed on any public speaker by their audience is not ‘Help me learn,’ but ‘Make me care!’ Communication is about connection, not simply transmission.
For a good while there, Christianity was the dominant social voice. As recently as the 1990s, before smartphones and streaming services and influencers, our communal sense of morality and identity was significantly shaped by the church, while Sunday attendance was a viable option for many - as enjoyable at least as sitting watching the rain outside.
But that is not where we are. Attention spans are down to two minutes, entertainment beckons from every room of the house, and we no longer have the loudest voice in the public square. Instead, we find ourselves in a marketplace of ideas - and we are losing. Why? Because other people are telling their mediocre stories far better than we are telling our superlative one.
The gospel for the 21st century
The traditional preaching model of reading a passage and then going through it verse by verse is now, I believe, moribund and outdated. The gospel doesn’t need to modernise, but our ways of filtering the word of God into our cultural context certainly do.
This is not some mindless progressivism. As far back as the 4th Century, Augustine of Hippo said that preaching should do three things, one of which was delectare: to rivet and delight. Crushingly, I don’t know very many preachers who actually do rivet or delight with their preaching, whilst I know plenty who have inherited the belief that to do so would be somehow frivolous. But if it’s OK for old Gus, surely it’s OK for us? Augustine also called preachers to ‘plunder the treasure of the pagans’– to use the skills and techniques found outside the church to help build the church.
It shouldn’t be a recited essay
The problem for us is that most extant preaching methods have originated in academia, and so were devised and passed down from teachers and theologians, not storytellers or performers. What formal preaching training does exist tends to focus on content rather than style, which doesn’t make it wrong but puts it at odds with almost every other genre of public communication alive today. The result is that too many Sunday-morning sermons come across as, essentially, recited essays.
But preaching is a visual art. You do not have listeners– you have viewers. Somewhere between 75-85% of what we take in is visual, and here’s a trustworthy phrase that bears repeating: two weeks after watching you talk, a person will remember almost nothing that you said, but – and here’s the kicker –they will never forget how you made them feel. And as a culture we have become repulsed by boredom.
The best public speakers plying their trade today, however, know that there are three chemicals which need to be released in an audience to garner the optimum response: dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins.
Dopamine enriches focus and motivation. This happens whenever you tell a story. Stories are by their nature dopamine-inducing as we wait for the ending – where is she going with this? What’s going to happen? The start of every story sets up a natural cliffhanger.
Oxytocin, for its part, forms a bond of generosity and trust between speaker and audience and is achieved by the use of empathy – meeting the audience where they are at, not where we think they should be.
Finally, endorphins relax people and are generated when the audience laughs.
Manipulation or persuasion?
‘Isn’t that just manipulation, though?’ someone might ask, to which I’d want to say three things. Firstly, all public communication is about persuasion – you do want people to change their minds. Secondly, it’s not manipulation if you mean it. The reason why the caricature of the door-to-door salesman seems so smarmy and sly to us is that he doesn't really believe in what he’s selling – whereas we do. Thirdly, who is it you think invented these chemicals in the first place? This isn’t even plundering pagan treasures – it’s using what the Lord has left hidden in plain sight.
Preachers are missionaries on foreign soil. Our congregations aren’t there to be given a list of behavioural health-and-safety guidelines; they have come because they want more love, more joy, more hope and more peace. As I sometimes say: you don’t give the Amazonians an air fryer. It doesn’t matter how much I might love air fryers, or how much research I’ve done on their merits – these villagers wouldn’t know what it was for, why they should care, and besides, they wouldn’t have the requisite plug sockets.
Preaching is a service industry and we need to start with where people actually are. Everyone you’re speaking to likely has some area of their heart in which they have been deeply wounded, and so we meet them there. And point them out towards resurrection hope.
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Andy Kind is a comedian, preacher and writer. Andy had gone full-time as a comedian in 2005 and won comedy awards. He has written several books including Stand Up and Deliver: a nervous rookie on the comedy circuit (2011, Lion Hudson) and the recently published Hidden in Plain Sight. After his first preaching 'gig' in 20216, Andy says now his first love is preaching.