Reach Everyone by Removing Preaching Assumptions

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. We must remove preaching assumptions.

Here are six questions I like to ask when writing a sermon to include everyone in the room:

1. What do I want the audience to eventually believe?

2. What does the audience currently believe?

3. Does my sermon idea have any Christian beliefs assumed?

4. How can I structure my message to build to beliefs rather than assume they exist?

5. If there are unavoidable assumptions, how can I help everyone understand the assumption and not disengage because of the assumption?

6. How can I ensure my internal assumptions don’t sneak into the message while I’m preaching the message?

Over time, this kind of thinking becomes natural, and developing content with this in mind will become not only easier, but way more fruitful for everyone in your audience. Of course, we can just continue preaching and ignoring our assumptions, but if we hope to reach those without Christian beliefs, we can’t afford to preach with assumptions that include those beliefs.

In the end, building a sermon based on your belief assumptions is cheap and easy. Everyone can do that, but not everyone is willing to dig deeper and build to beliefs rather than assume they exist. That’s better preaching. And that’s actually what Jesus displayed over and over again.

This article originally appeared here, and is used by permission.

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By Gavin Adams

Gavin Adams believes the local church is the most important organization on the planet, and he is helping to transform them into places unchurched people love to attend. As the Lead Pastor of Watermarke Church, (a campus of North Point Ministries), Watermarke has grown from 400 to 4000 attendees in five years. A student of leadership, communication, church and faith, Gavin shares his discoveries through speaking and consulting. Follow him on Twitter or at his blog.

HoosierConservative

And this is exactly why mature Christians are quitting church. Every sermon is an evangelistic baby bottle. Even in the home groups where you supposedly have the space to go deeper, it’s mostly the latest wave of newbies asking why Jesus hates gay people. Home group leaders dare not give politically incorrect answers, lest the group gets a bad reputation and the pastor takes it away from them. Once a Christian advances past the kindergarten stuff, church has nothing to offer.