Resonate: How to Preach for Deep Connection

Introduction

It was a nerve-wracking preaching moment. I was auditioning for a job as I preached, though few people in the church that day knew that. The search committee was divided, so their members would be listening for vastly different things. A well-meaning friend said, You have to knock it out of the park! Though I was tempted to try to dazzle them, I chose instead to bring a simple, faithful word that flowed from the passage of Scripture. Afterward, an older man approached me. He was a Bible scholar who was steeped like tea in its words. He smiled affectionately and slowly spoke six words. "Your sermon resonated with the text." I probably heard other kind words that day; I do not remember them. His words landed deep in my spirit as a blessing and a gift. They gave me a goal I pursue every time I preach—resonance.

When two musical notes vibrate together pleasingly, their resonance draws out the beauty of each note and delights our ears. When companions are wholly at ease with each other, conversing with deep trust and affection, we say they have resonance. The more poetic among us might say their heartstrings resonate. When a wise friend speaks back to you—with utmost empathy and insight—the pain you just disjointedly narrated, you say, Yes! That resonates.

When we preach, we aim to sound a true note that echoes faithfully with Scripture’s first words, enlivening the hearts of our listeners, connecting them with God as it names their pain and awakening hope as it sounds new possibilities. We dare to voice an authentic note that exposes our own struggle, letting that link us to the suffering of our listeners. But how can we know what will hit home and what will fall flat?

The question haunts us every Saturday night for those of us who preach weekly. Does it resonate? Will it connect? We sweated over the sermon, pressing the words out of our keyboards like the last slow steps of an uphill run. We wrestled hard with our Scripture text, coaxing it to speak its truth so we could convey that to our listeners. We attempted a clear, logical flow, a catchy introduction, and a compelling conclusion, all toward the goal of saying something true and beautiful about the gospel to people we love. It seems finished—we certainly feel done with working on it! But could it be missing a dimension that would let it land with transforming impact? We sigh. How can I tell? It seems impossible to know with any certainty, like guessing the perpetrator in a murder mystery when we are three chapters into it.

But might there be telltale clues in plain sight if we only had the right magnifying glass with which to see them? On one level, preaching is indeed a mysterious endeavor. We never know what will hit and what will miss. This uncertainty makes us feel vulnerable, and rightly so. Our incapacity to make something happen when we preach turns us to God in humble and prayerful dependence. The Holy Spirit is the One who empowers our words and moves in the minds and hearts of listeners. Lydia’s experience is paradigmatic for all hearers: "The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message (Acts 16:14). This truth both thrills and frustrates every pastor every Sunday. One week, it seems clear from listeners’ feedback that the sermon spoke powerfully. Why? It’s a mystery, we say to ourselves. The following week, all indications are that the sermon we felt just as confident about flopped. Fizzled. Fell short. Why? It’s a mystery."

This response can seem to be a faithful, leave-it-to-the-Lord approach. And it is, in part. But what if there were a way to test a sermon’s strength—its potential to resonate—before we flung it out there, the way we test a ship for seaworthiness before we unleash it to cross a turbulent sea? Can we foresee what by God’s grace will touch and energize a community and what will miss them entirely? I believe there is such a way. I want to teach you a simple, practical method of testing the crucial connection points that too often go missing in our preaching. We’ll get to that method shortly; first, let’s notice how preaching is changing and why making a connection is so essential today.

Resonance arguably happens best in person and in real time. The global pandemic we have endured has played with our conceptions of what it means to be in person, as presence has been mediated through screens. Pastors gamely added the verb pivot to their vocabulary and set to work recording, editing, and uploading content, Zooming, streaming live, or trying various hybrid combinations. Many things went surprisingly well. But every preacher has struggled with presence and connection. We have felt the lack or reduction of it as an aching void.

If we did not know it before, we learned at a visceral level that being there and being with matter immensely to us humans. From the gripping photos of elderly couples smooching through glass to the poignant air hugs we gave old friends out on their lawns to the silly hearts my son and daughter-in-law and I make with our arms as we say goodbye across thousands of miles, we have seen that we are wired to connect with others. And we are also wired to respond together to good news. At its essence, the definition of a preacher is one who brings good news from God’s Word to persons they love.

The sermon is not fading in relevance or importance, much as some church pundits lament—and a few celebrate—its demise. However, its shape and the venues in which it happens may morph dramatically. If the church is to flourish in the coming decades, I predict that it will need many, many more people who conceive of themselves as preachers, at least in part. Preaching itself will be redefined and reinvigorated. As we feel our way forward, navigating new spaces and modes of coming together as faith communities, be assured that, whether at a distance or in person, preaching will continue to be one of a pastoral leader’s most potent tools of influence. More than ever, it will matter that we see it as a way of intentionally being present with the people we love and lead. We are hungry to connect.

As you seek to preach sermons that rebuild those bonds, I invite you to pay attention to your verbs. The verbs tell the story every time. If you look closely, they even have stories to tell about you. The verb forms you use and the ones you avoid may reveal a deep and persistent weariness, a deficit of hope, or a fraying of confidence in your capacity to lead as you emerge from this hard season. You are on a journey with your congregation, and your sermons are one indicator of where you are, what fuel or rest you need, and when a course correction may be needed. Pay attention.

Harnessing the power of the full range of verb forms can spark moments of deep resonance—uniting listeners to God and each other and linking preachers with listeners. Conversely, our overuse or neglect of certain verb forms can be the source of a tragic failure to connect. To understand how that works, we will need to get under the hood of the language engine ever so briefly and pick apart the forms of verbs. That sounds a bit daunting—some of us barely remember words like subjunctive from school. Let me share the moment I came to love conjugating (labeling the parts of) verbs.

My earnest high school Latin teacher strode up and down our rows of desks, arms flapping like a crazed cheerleader, coaxing us to shout out the categories of the verbs on the board. I wondered, Why is she so excited about this? At first, it felt tedious, then oddly satisfying, then weirdly exhilarating. As we dissected those ancient verbs, we were solving a mystery, dusting for the fingerprints, the intent, and motives of long-dead Roman authors. We labeled every verb with our secret-spy-club code: Person. Number. Tense. Mode. Voice. Above each verb, we jotted esoteric labels like 3P-Pl-F-I-A (third-person plural, future tense, indicative mode, active voice), deciphering until the sentences made sense. (We had to do some crazy stuff to the nouns, too—we will decline to do that here.) The verb categories became familiar friends like they never had in English classes. Our own language is so intuitive that we sometimes only see its internal logic when cracking the code of another one. With my decoder ring in hand, I could tackle whatever messy sentences ancient authors like Livy or Catullus threw my way.

As a preaching professor, I have listened to thousands of sermons. As a pastor, I have preached my share. When I tease out the flat sides and the disconnects in otherwise strong sermons, I find myself using the code of the verb forms. They stand out to me for a good reason. Preaching is a dynamic speech act. It trades in verbs as it promises, declares, warns, and inspires. It plays furtively with tense and time, asserting that events from centuries ago carry meaning for today. It claims that events yet to happen can exert shaping force on us this week. It nimbly shifts mode as it describes, invites, and even commands. It names the passive and active dimensions of transformation into the image of Jesus Christ.

Preaching asserts a lively God who is active in the world and the heart of every listener. So, it makes sense that we attend to language’s sprightliest part of speech, the verb. Sermons do not just want to look pretty on a page or be doctrinally precise; they want to do something—to catalyze transformation. Verbs are literally where the action is, and how we use, neglect, or misuse them reveals our theology, heart, and capacity to be present with our listeners. Well chosen verbs connect us with our listeners, and poorly chosen ones alienate us from them. Dexterous verb-craft lets us navigate four essential aspects of pastoral leadership:

Identity and Presence: We pay attention to the dominant person of our verbs as their use or absence reveals whether we are present with our people and offering ourselves to them.

Marking Time: A pastoral leader keeps time for the church, sounding the past, present, and future tense to enable listeners to look back, around, and ahead together.

¹

Influence: A verb’s mode gives us tools of influence—we describe reality, imagine change, and compel listeners to respond.

Transformation: We will designate the active and passive voice as the realm where we consider the interplay of our human effort and God’s work in change processes. We welcome and receive the transformative work of the Holy Spirit to bring about what we never could accomplish alone, but we also embrace the agency we possess to participate in that work.

Some of us need these broken down a bit more. The concept of verb forms makes more intuitive, immediate sense to native speakers of inflected languages.

²

In English, we work our verbs hard. Some languages let their verbs alone, not asking them to do the heavy lifting of encoding oodles of meaning within a single word.

³

Inflected languages are in no way superior to non-inflected ones, but they give us a vocabulary for analyzing what a verb is up to in a sentence. If your first language is not an inflected one, or if you (understandably) fell asleep in grammar class, here is a quick review. When we analyze a verb, we ask questions about:

Person

⁴

First Person: I thirst.

Second Person: You are the light of the world.

Third Person: He, too, is a son of Abraham.

Tense

⁵

Past: I found my lost sheep.

Future: You will deny me three times.

Present: It is finished.

Mode

⁶

Indicative Mode describes reality: Jesus Christ offers us grace.

Imperative Mode commands: Receive the grace of Christ today!

Subjunctive Mode imagines: "What if we were to let Jesus’ grace transform us?"

Voice

Active Voice: The subject does the action. They hear the word with joy.

Passive Voice: The subject receives the action. Her sins are forgiven.

That’s it. You will do essentially everything you do in a sermon with these eleven verbal forms. Like the tools in a tool kit, each does a few specific tasks well and fails when attempting to do others. Preachers who learn this paradigm will know how and when to activate each verbal form. They will be able to look at a sermon and readily notice which ones are weak or altogether missing and what that will mean for the sermon’s tone and reach. Of course, not every sermon needs to employ every form, but it does need to answer why not and avoid overreliance on any one mode.

This book is not about concocting the perfect verbal blend, cunningly calculated to strum listeners’ heartstrings. Of course, we want our preaching to touch hearts, but only in the service of letting God transform those hearts, not for some feel-good result that earns us accolades. Nor is this book primarily about how to write better. You will not hear me counseling you to use more active verbs—the drumbeat of every writing improvement blog. It is excellent advice. It should be endeavored. (Just kidding.) That is not this book’s topic. Instead, the verb forms are, in part, metaphors for dimensions within preaching, starting points for conversations about frequently missed opportunities for resonance. For example, in this book, the active and passive voice becomes a code for exploring the language we use to study human and divine agency and participation in the transformation process, even though the process does not align precisely with that grammatical form.

Any paradigm risks rigidity or a focus on mechanically ticking boxes. My goal is not that you work your way through this paradigm as a perfunctory checklist each week, but instead that it would drive you to a deeper pursuit of God-honoring excellence in your proclamation, rooted in love for the people who listen. I hope this process will compel you to become wiser and more joyful as you live into your vocation to speak good news in a new season where we all desperately need to hear it. That, in turn, will foster a more profound sense of presence and connection with the people you love. I believe that honors and delights the heart of God.

1

. Lundblad develops the concept of sermons marking time in her book, Marking Time.

2

. An inflected language changes the form or ending of some words when the way in which they are used in sentences changes.

3

. For example, in Malay, makan means eat, ate, or will eat, and I, we, or they eat, as other markers of time and person are added around it.

4

. Here we are folding in the category of Number, whether a verb is singular or plural.

5

. Many languages have a few variations within the past tense, such as perfect or imperfect, but we will keep it simple.

6

. Mode is sometimes referred to as mood, but I find this confuses listeners who (rightly) think of moods as emotional states.

1

Preacher as Witness and Host

The Power of First-Person Speech

"If preachers decide to preach about hope,

let them preach out of what they themselves hope for."

—Frederick Buechner

It can seem irreverent to start our verb-craft survey with ourselves. Shouldn’t we start with God or with Scripture?

¹

We begin here in part because every verb conjugation chart begins here.

²

But we also do so because of the inevitably personal and embodied nature of preaching. This chapter looks at how we use first-person-singular speech to bring ourselves as witnesses and how we use first-person plural (we language) to lead as hosts who welcome every listener to feast upon the word.

First-Person Singular: The Witness

I was not thrilled to tell the story of the C-minus I received on a midterm in my first semester of seminary when I preached in chapel at that same school years later. In my defense, there was a brutal set of extenuating circumstances the week before the midterm. Still, it did not exactly portray me as a stellar scholar to the fellow faculty who would be present. But the story kept pawing at me like a puppy begging to go out. It was a perfect fit for the theme of resilience after failure in my Scripture passage, and I could not shake the sense that it would encourage the students who heard it. Reluctantly, I threw it in. I had not predicted how much it would spark a connection between my students and me, a former fellow struggling student. That moment let me speak credible and convincing words of hope straight into their hearts as their midterms were fast approaching. This chapter will dive into the power of speaking from the first-person singular and plural—how sentences or phrases that begin with I allow us to witness and ones that begin with We help us to welcome and host those who gather to hear the word with us.

There is no escaping that preaching puts you, the preacher, near the center of the endeavor. Writers can fling their creations into the world from the safety of their homes and even write under cover of pseudonyms if they desire. Actors risk in ways that are more