6 Questions That Will Help Your Next Sermon Reach Everyone
This is about removing assumptions in our preaching and sermon content, so ironically, we need to begin with a few assumptions.
When you preach, I assume your hope is to reach every person in your audience, connect them all to a new way of thinking, and lead them all to apply a new way of living. That’s the basic idea preaching, right? Provide true information that compels helpful application.
If we hope to lead everyone in the room to the truth of our message, we must start by connecting everyone in the room to us and our message. That’s not a simple task.
For instance, if you only had an audience of one, developing a message that will accomplish your connecting goal would be relatively simple. To grasp where one person is in their faith, understanding of God, and engagement in a Christian worldview is likely. Not necessarily easy, but certainly possible.
With an audience of 10, the task gets more complicated — potentially 10 times more complicated in fact. A larger audience brings a larger diversity of backgrounds, understandings, willingness to believe, and willingness to apply ideas or new truths.
Grow the audience to 100, or 1,000, or 10,000, and the task gets exponentially more complex.
In the face of this complexity, there is one preaching mistake I see more than any other: