How much is a half an hour of undivided attention worth?
The most valuable half hour in our entire society is the half hour people spend on Sunday listening to a sermon. For those few moments, everyone in the room is (mostly) tuned in to hear a life-changing message.
We live in a culture saturated with quick, bite-sized signals. We watch six- to eight-minute segments of shows, followed by multiple 15- to 30-second commercials. We peruse our social media newsfeeds and timelines, scanning and skipping to something that grabs us and then we move on in a matter of seconds.
On Sunday, a group of people assembles at your local church and agrees to pay attention for roughly a half an hour to a speaker share truth and observations.
Granted, this doesn’t mean everyone is actually, literally paying attention to the entire sermon. Our phones are still too close for that. But generally speaking, we have the opportunity to engage people with the truth of God’s Word.
That’s extremely valuable time!
And here is the question that we preachers, teachers, and communicators face: Are we stewarding that half an hour as well as we possibly can?
During that crucial half an hour, we need to build into our communication at least five major elements to steward the time well.
1. Information
Content matters a lot! When you’ve finished one full year of preaching as the pastor of a church, you’ve done enough research, writing, and speaking to produce several books. And some books are more valuable than others.
How do you gauge a book’s value? What stays on your shelf long-term? What books do you generally recommend and pass along to others? I can almost guarantee that you keep and share books that you know have valuable, usable content inside.
While we don’t want people to attend church simply for what they can get out of it, we do want people to get something out of attending church. I think we generally want people to leave knowing more than they knew walking in.
2. Inspiration
Effective preaching doesn’t just inform. It inspires. That is, high quality preaching engages not only the minds of the audience, but also the heart. Emotion isn’t everything, and the goal of preaching is never merely to move someone emotionally. But the goal also isn’t to be unemotoinal.
The very same people who get excited at a sports event, cry at sad movie, or laugh at a comedy show are sitting before us ready to engage our content on an emotional level.
3. Instruction
There is a reason how-to messages work so well. Most Christians already sitting in our pews already know what to do. They just don’t know how to do it.
Paul spoke specifically in 2 Timothy 3:16 about the instructive role of preaching. Instructing involves equipping people with the knowledge, skills, and perspectives they need to go and live out, under grace, the wisdom they’ve heard in our sermons.
When James pointed out that we tend to be hearers of the word and not doers, he might have inadvertently left a clue for modern proclaimers of the gospel about the kind of preaching we need to be offering.
Every message has the opportunity to carry within it a brief tutorial on life.
4. Invitation
Every message sets up an invitation for people to come into the family of God, into the church family, and into a discipling relationship with Jesus.
Every sermon says, in some effect, this is who we are.. this is what we believe… this is what we’re about… come join us!
It’s poor stewardship to spend a half an hour trying to engage the minds and hearts of people but never opening the door for people to make some kind of commitment.
This doesn’t mean there must be a traditional altar call. It just means that people must leave knowing that they were invited and welcomed to become a part of the family of God.
5. Instigation
If an invitation invites people into real community, then instigation is a matter of sending people forth to share and to act out what they’ve just been taught.
However people felt about Jesus, they couldn’t really ignore him. He incited the crowds around him to act. He gave them specific challenges to go and to forgive, to restore, to serve, etc. He often went so far as to say, stop listening, go DO this, then come back…
Jesus was an instigator, in a good and holy sense. And the world is different because of it.
He used his time with people to offer them ageless content, clear instruction, monumental inspiration, a gracious invitation, and an instigation to action.
This weekend, you’ll get (roughly) a half hour of (mostly) undivided attention from a crowd of people. They’ll file in, find seats, silence their cell phones, and turn their faces toward you.
You get a half an hour, and it might just change a life. How will you steward that moment?
