The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
We share personally, pastorally and professionally about how we can best fulfill Jesus' mission to save the lost and serve the saints.
The discussion is broadcast live on Facebook then available in video on our website <u><b><a href="http://www.thepastorsheart.net">http://www.thepastorsheart.net</a></u></b> and via audio podcast.
The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Getting high quality preaching from trainee ministers - with Toby Neal
How can a senior minister best train junior preachers (student ministers and assistant ministers) in preaching?
There’s a tension we all feel: we want to be a training church raising up the next generation of leaders and yet we also want to make sure that the quality of what happens in our gatherings is high.
We don’t want a Sunday morning ‘plane crash in the pulpit’, where people at church that day think‘I wish I had stayed home today’ or ‘I wish I had gone to St Bloggs down the road.’
Toby Neal is at Vine Church in Surry Hills in Sydney. Toby says there’s been days when he sat at the back of the church, head in hands thinking, “Oh dear - I hope we don’t have anyone new here today!”
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Assistant Minister role at Village Church Annandale, Sydney
Village Church is looking for an assistant minister. Perhaps it’s you or you know someone? Could you lead our mission outreach and the ministry aspect. Plus help set vision and in preaching and pastoral care. For more info or to have a coffee email dominic@villagechurch.sydney
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It is the pastor's heart and Dominic Steele, and today we're talking about training student ministers and assistant ministers in preaching. Toby Neal is our guest Now there is a tension. We want to be a training church, raising up the next generation of leaders, but we also want to make sure that the quality of what happens in the pulpit is high and that there isn't a plane crash in the sermon on Sunday morning. The people who come to church don't say in their hearts I wish I'd stayed home today or gone to some blogs down the road. My son-in-law has just finished up as a student minister with Toby Neal at Vine Church in Surrey Hills in Sydney and he was telling me about Toby's super helpful system for training student ministers before letting them loose in the pulpit. Toby, thanks for coming in. Have you sat back in church in the back row on a Sunday morning with your head in your hands thinking, oh dear, I hope we don't have anyone new this morning, not?
Speaker 2:just for new people. But every Sunday is this precious moment for our people and they're going through a thousand and one things. They need to hear from God, they need the comfort and challenge and it's just a wasted opportunity when the preaching's, you know, not giving them Christ.
Speaker 1:So that tension. I want to train people and I want the standard to be high. What do you do?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, a number of years ago I was sitting there head in hands, going I can't keep doing this. It's too damaging to our people and to our mission to reach people, the quality of particularly student ministers preaching, and I kind of made an agreement with myself never again.
Speaker 1:No more student ministers preaching.
Speaker 2:No more student ministers preaching no more student ministers preaching at church. And then I started talking to myself about that and I'm like, well, what if I just increased the amount of training that I was giving? I grew up in a situation where maybe someone would show you their manuscript before they got up to preach, maybe or maybe you'd sit down and plan the sermon with them, but it was, you know, always one meeting, and all of the training I've ever had was post-sermon feedback.
Speaker 1:That's the main motive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, critique. I find critique after sermon pretty useless. It's like I've done it, like I have no opportunity to change it now and learn from the feedback you're giving, like at a future point in time, when I'm preaching again, maybe I'll remember your feedback, but I'll be preaching on a different passage, so your feedback just lands flat. So I started thinking well, maybe I need to front load the feedback and I need to increase the amount of time I'm working with my students in helping them prepare to preach. Well, and for me now I think people are going to, you know, struggle with this, but I do four one to one-and-a-half-hour meetings with them in the lead-up to their preaching. It's incredibly time-consuming and so how many times?
Speaker 1:therefore, I mean that's a lot of preparation for them and a lot of preparation for you. Yeah, how many times do you have a student minister preach a year?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we only do twice a year.
Speaker 1:So each student minister twice a year.
Speaker 2:Each student minister twice a year, yeah, but you know, and for many that's significantly less preaching they'll get compared to other student minister gigs. But the promise I offer them is you will get better training when you're doing those two student minister preaching gigs than you will elsewhere, because you're spending four to eight hours with me in preparation.
Speaker 1:And okay, how do you? And so they sign on knowing that's the expectation. Yeah, all right, take us through session one.
Speaker 2:Session one I use. I expect them to have already got familiar with the text and so all their exegetical skills. I expect them to have utilised them before the meeting. And then we come and I use a modified preaching pyramid which David Cook has put in his book. What is that?
Speaker 1:How to Give a Bible Talk, or something like that We'll put it on the screen and we'll put a link to it in the notes here.
Speaker 2:I mean the pyramid. It's just a graphical way of envisaging what you know, all the Haddon Robertson's method and all of those. So you're getting to a big idea, big question, those kind of things. So I just go through that with them and that's session one. We spend a bit of time on application.
Speaker 1:Does that frustrate you? Do you feel like it should have been done at theological college before they get to you? Or why do you do that? Or do you think the ground is so important to establish you need to do it?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that step, I think your planning of the sermon, is so key to writing a good sermon, and I think getting precision on what your message is from the start is really important. And often kind of later on down the track, you know, the problems they get into is because they haven't been clear on what the passage is driving home at, and so I just I want to start with them planning what is the text saying and how do we turn that into a message, how do we preach that text? And so we start there and then the next couple of meetings you're iterating on from Well, let's do it more slowly than that.
Speaker 1:So, first time is the preaching pyramid and establishing the one, and do you actually get them to commit to a main point at that point?
Speaker 2:Pretty much. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, next meeting.
Speaker 2:Next meeting. I ask them to come with a one-page outline of the sermon they're planning to preach. Sometimes they'll come with more pages than one page, but I only expect one page. At that point we're looking at okay, what's the structure of your sermon? Where are you kind of going under each point? Do you have illustrations under each point and how you're introducing the sermon? Well, and I have a five-point introduction- which is really A five-point A five-point introduction, yeah, which is start with a human interest story.
Speaker 2:It's got to be a story about a real human being facing some kind of real issue that then leads into the fallen condition. So I think every passage exposes our need for Christ. So I think every passage exposes our need for Christ. Every passage is highlighting some kind of area. We need God's wisdom, we need Jesus' salvation, we need the work of the Spirit in our life. So we're driving to a fallen condition from a human interest story.
Speaker 2:So the story brings up that condition and then we start naming that condition and then we orient people to the text. We're in saying, hey, if that's your issue, we're coming to this text today and it's going to help us. And then you pose your big question, which everyone's asking, because we've been talking about the fallen condition that they're experiencing, and then we dive into the text from there. So I think, setting up the sermon well, with that introduction and then seeing the rest of the sermon, an answer to that big question, yeah, and just making sure there's a logical flow, making sure that they've structured in at some point they're preaching Christ, not just our work, what we need to do for God, but at some point. It's grounded in God's work for us, making sure they're teaching the text, making sure their application's fresh and real and grounded from the scriptures, rather than just that you know they're jumping out of the text. Yeah, those kind of things. So that's second meeting.
Speaker 1:Just one page outline do you find yourself tempted to get them to re-preach a talk that you've done in the past?
Speaker 2:passage. Um, fortunately, no. I mean, I, I get very excited when I do this with them and I often have to. I just find it such a well of ideas. It really inspires me sitting down with them, because they often have great ideas but they're not able to connect it completely. And they'll come up with an idea and I'm like, oh, that is genius, and then I'll show them how to implement that idea really well. And then I start getting angsty because I want to preach the passage. I mean, we've got the Bible open. We're thinking about people, god's people, how they need to hear this, the lost, how the scriptures are going to confront them and help them see the beauty of Jesus. And you know, in the midst of it I'm like, oh, I wish I was preaching this text.
Speaker 2:So no, yeah, I don't get to that point where you know I'm thinking about past sermons.
Speaker 2:Full draft presentation meeting three yeah, and so at that point I just read through the draft. I don't care whether it's bloated, missing things. I just say try and write as much as possible on everything. It doesn't have to be well-connected. And one other thing I'm a perfectionist, so I find it really hard to. I actually find it very hard to start writing because, um, I want the first thing I put on paper to be perfect, and that's. That's very counterproductive to writing anything. And so what I'm trying to teach the guys is just put something down, doesn't matter if it's good, it's bad.
Speaker 2:That's just the way you'll get to good at the end and so they come here's where I'm at, and then I'll go through that and that. That's really where, I guess, the craft of writing starts to take shape. You know, sometimes they'll say things in a way which they're not intending to impact people, in a way that the words will impact people.
Speaker 1:Give us an example.
Speaker 2:Yeah, on Sunday I had three student ministers preaching on Daniel 5, the writing on the wall judgment's coming and you know all the student ministers are very. They didn't lack the courage to tell people that they're under judgment.
Speaker 1:It was turn or burn at Plains Church last Sunday. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But you know, I quoted them. Charles Spurgeon, who says when you're entering into controversy, your arguments need to be hard. Make sure your arguments are hard but your words are soft. I think that's a beautiful statement that you know. I said to them look, your words are hard. They're coming across incredibly confrontational here. You are under judgment. I said if you really want to do that, that's fine with me, but I just want to make sure you know you are drawing very strong polarities here and you are headbutting them hard. It is a turn or burn. You know very stark sermon and if that's what they wanted to do, I mean that's interesting, though you haven't actually said.
Speaker 1:I don't want you to say that.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, because I don't want to be a coward and I don't want to be the one chickening out. And so if that's what God's calling them to, fine. But none of them, everyone realised, no, no one of the guys. He said this passage is about God's judgment drenched in grace. I said I'm not hearing it drenched in grace. And so I said make your arguments hard, like convince me of the need and the reality of God's judgment.
Speaker 2:I'm like so talk about there is a coming day when we will give an answer before God for the life we've lived, and then ask people can you honestly say you'll have nothing to answer for on that day? I'm like you know that's a strong argument, but the words are much softer than you are under judgment. And so you're getting them to the point where they've come to understand the judgment to come. But you're trying to bring them along and so that often at that draft phase you're seeing you know the way they're using language and you're just picking up things like that often they'll say things that is just um, not sensitive to outsiders present or people who are suffering. They'll they'll say things that is just not sensitive to outsiders present or people who are suffering. They'll make bold declarations about people suffering. You know, there's just a.
Speaker 1:When they haven't had the lived experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so there's things like that Often their applications wouldn't, and you just, oh no, you need to warm that up. You need to put yourself in the application rather than you know, speaking down on people.
Speaker 2:You're then seeing the connection, you're seeing repetition, which you know. Preaching, there is a lot of repetition, but sometimes it's just fluff, you know, and for many guys at Moore College at least, they are very underdeveloped at the illustration level. And the other thing there is, I think one of my critiques of our tribe's preaching is we tend to illustrate the explanation. But Brian Chappell says, says no, it's the application you need to illustrate, because that's where you need to make the application real, tangible, visible, felt. And so I'm always saying, okay, great, you've given me an example for the explanation.
Speaker 2:So in daniel five, you know, we had a great illustration which was you know, belshazzar takes the wine goblets from the temple of God and he's drinking from them in his palace and judgment comes on him. And one of our guys said you know, that would be like going to someone's house and seeing Donald Bradman's cricket bat on the wall and going and playing with that. And it was a great, it's a great illustration. But that's just another explanation. But when it comes to application, that's where I really want to see them, uh, illustrating well. So so another guy, similar type thing. He used the example of a church in surrey hills, which was turned into a uh.
Speaker 2:Gretel pinninger, a dominatrix, bought the church this was an old presbyterian church, I think, or a methodist church. She bought it and she ran sex like uh, burlesque shows and sex parties in there, and he's like that's what we do with god and sex parties in there. And he's like that's what we do with God. We take what God's given us, what should be devoted to him, and we just use it for ourselves.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I just felt that was a much. You know, he was illustrating the application there how we yeah.
Speaker 1:It's awesome, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Okay that's session three. What do you do? The fourth session? Well, session four. You know there's often a lot of feedback from the session three, so I'm just rereading their manuscript and just checking.
Speaker 1:They've implemented it.
Speaker 2:They've implemented it and what's going on there. I might make a couple of suggestions, but I try and hold back and just say, yep, this is good. And then, yeah, try and just say, mate, this is a great sermon, can't wait to hear it. It's going to. Yeah, that's good. That's good, this is working. This is why it's working, so you're building confidence. Trying to build confidence, but then I also get them up and get them to preach to me, which is the hardest thing in the world.
Speaker 2:I think it's way more stressful, preaching to an empty room with your senior pastor, with him scrutinizing your delivery, like it is so hard. And I say to them look, if you can, without anxiety, preach to me. You can preach to anyone, but at that point I'm giving them feedback. And I mean, we all know the preacher voice which young preachers put on, which is just so unnatural, it's like, and often they get up.
Speaker 1:Do you want to give it to me? I mean, I find the inflection going in an unnatural way at the end of the sentence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they don't know they're doing it. That's the problem. And so often I'll get them up and I'll get them to deliver and they'll speak for 30 seconds and I'll go stop and then I'll say, okay, turn your page over so that they're not looking at their notes. And I'm like just tell me what's in your opening, how do you open your sermon? Just tell me. And they'll start telling me their opening illustration in their natural voice and I'm like preach like that. Can you just preach like that? And so I'm like, okay, go turn the page over and preach like that, and then they'll start again and then they'll go back to preach your voice. And I'm like, no, no, no, you're just having a conversation with me here. Okay, just tell me what you're saying. And I work very hard at trying to break their preacher voice there and just to communicate. Naturally, some guys they are pretty natural up front, but then they're pretty quiet and they don't project enough.
Speaker 2:So I had a guy like that on Saturday. I'm like, you know, on a scale of zero to 10, where 10's completely intense, and you know where do you think you're at? And then I'm like, no, you're not. You know he was at a three or a four. And I'm like I want you to yell your sermon at me right now. And he yells it at me and I'm like, look, that was probably a seven or eight out of 10. And I, me, and I'm like, look, that was probably a seven or eight out of ten like you. And I'm like you could get to that in a sermon. That would be totally fine. He's like what? And I'm like, yeah, you could be that animated in a sermon. That's fine. I'm like that's not too much.
Speaker 2:And so I'm trying to recalibrate their vocal their emotional and vocal range range yeah, because I think they you know some guys they stay in a range like this yeah, some their range is way too big and you've got to restrain them. But he was quite narrowly restrained. I'm like you have more range there, mate. Let's just try that out.
Speaker 1:What impact has it made on the number of bad sermons at Vine Church?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a profound difference. It is very rare now that I'm sitting there going oh what have I done.
Speaker 2:No, we get great sermons and the guys walk away from time at Vine Church saying that was the best training I've ever had in preaching and that was the best experience I had at Vine Church. Painful, it is very painful for them. I think preaching it's an art and a science. I think the art part of it is you put yourself so much into it so it's very hard to get feedback because it's feedback on yourself, not just on your scientific exposition of the text.
Speaker 1:What happens when they don't do what you want? You said to me if they won't follow the process, I'll pull the sermon.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because that takes courage.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, these days we've got a couple of student ministers and I'm pairing them up now. So I'm usually doing two student ministers per Sunday and one will preach in the mornings and the other will preach in the other, and so if someone is not following the process and either they're like, oh, I can't make that meeting, at some point I'll probably say, look, you haven't been able to prepare, I'll just get this other student minister to cover for you. And yeah, I think that takes a pressure off me because, you know, often I'm like, if they're dragging and I'm like they're not giving this what it needs, I'm like, oh, I've got to write a sermon now and I'm like I don't have time for that. So doing the two at the same time has been very helpful because I'm like decreases the risk for me. If they're not honouring the process, then you know, I do have that other person that could cover for them.
Speaker 2:And I suppose if you have pulled them once in their two-year cycle they'll realise that you will next time and so they're going to respect you. I haven't, I don't even know whether I have pulled them. They yeah, although I haven't, I don't even know whether I have pulled them They've pulled themselves. They've realised life, college stress, you know, and it's actually given them more of a gentle way out that the pressure to pull out is way less because the other guy can cover for them. And I just think preaching is stressful and things happen. So I'm trying to take. The other thing is, I'm trying to take the pressure out of the preaching because I think when you're just a student, minister, you've got to preach in two weeks, three weeks, four weeks' time. It's like, where do I start? No one ever taught me how to write a sermon.
Speaker 2:And you're just scrambling and you're borrowing this from everyone, but you don't. And so I'm like like, okay, how do I actually go from start to finish with them and and and teach them all the different things they need to know in a sermon they're working on, and I just think they learn so much more on the job in that and along the way. It's just the opportunity to teach, like you know what you're doing here. This is why it's working.
Speaker 2:For these reasons, yeah, so actually on Sunday one of the guys preached, you know, a typical three point sermon through Daniel five, and I think that's what they're all familiar with, whereas another guy he said I want to try a narrative sermon, and so you know, as he's doing it. I had both guys in the room and like, okay, here's the key to a narrative sermon Just walk through the story, bring out the dramatic elements. You can make little asides here or there, but don't go on too many details when you're just walking through the text and draw out the narrative and then at the end go okay, here's three things we learned. And that was very helpful for him to hear. And the guy that was preaching just the typical three-point propositional sermon from the passage. So it gives you the opportunity to teach, because there's so much to teach in preaching.
Speaker 1:It's like yeah, sermon length for a student minister. Yeah yeah, how long do you preach?
Speaker 2:for. So I feel like such a hypocrite of this. I preach I'm trying to preach 35 minutes. These days it's usually 42. But that's a lot better than I used to do. Yeah, but for them I say 22. And I say, when you can nail a 22-minute sermon, we'll talk about 23. Well, no, I'll talk about 30. If you can nail the 22, I'll give you 30. But typically their discipline in getting to 22 is pretty low and so it does blow out to like 28 or 30. But I can cope with that. I cannot cope with a blowout to 40 minutes at all. For a student minister that is very rare. They're good enough to do 40 minutes. So, yeah, I typically go, you know 22. I tell them look, you can blow out plus two or minus two, but they do tend to blow out a bit more than that and I'm probably lacking the discipline to hold them accountable to that.
Speaker 1:In terms of leading the meeting when you've got a rookie preaching, what do you do there?
Speaker 2:I always introduce them to the church.
Speaker 1:I, you or I, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Sometimes my other pastors, but I want to show. So I get up and I say we are a training church, we believe in training the next generation of pastors, and I'm flagging to the members that change your expectations because we've got a guy in training about to preach and I'll ask them to give him a warm welcome because part of it is they need to deal with their own anxieties and actually hearing them welcomed.
Speaker 1:Well, that goes oh these people they want to listen to me.
Speaker 2:I interview them briefly to get them naturally talking and then I'll remind the congregation at the end of that. Hey, let's give the guy our full attention, let's encourage him. They're in training and God's going to speak to us, so let's us receive his word well, right now, and then I'll pray for him. But I'm doing two things there. I'm giving him a softer start, help him build rapport before he gets the sermon. But I'm also trying to reset the expectations of our church that, okay, this may not be what you expect of a sermon at Vine Church, but hey, gee, I'm glad we're a training church and we're training the next generation and that was good. Yeah, that was good.
Speaker 1:So, yeah. What about with your assistant ministers? Because somebody just out of college is not that different to a student minister. Yeah, somebody just out of college is not that different to a student minister. Yeah, how do you make sure that your head's not in your hand over an assistant minister's?
Speaker 2:sermon. Yeah, I think they do need the extra training and I think sometimes I've started out their position with the expectation here's what I'm going to do for the first two years with you. You're going to probably preach six or eight times this year and at least for four of those times I want to go through this process with you and over two years that's probably what I'd do. Sometimes I forget to start off their position that way and then I try and come in a bit later and say, hey, what I do for student ministers I want to do for you. And then I get, yeah, sometimes a negative reaction there.
Speaker 2:I do think they've got to sign up for it, because it's intense feedback and if they're not asking for it it's very hard to give it. And so I think you've got to. I mean, with student ministers I'm very upfront at the start. If you're preaching, this is the process. So if you don't want that process, go elsewhere. And I think with my assistants I need to make that clear. First, two years in the role I'm going to be coaching you on preaching, and then the goal is that they get to the point where they can use my method to coach others, and there's definitely guys that have come through and do that yeah.
Speaker 1:What about picking passages for student ministers and realising oh no, I've picked a passage that just raises an issue that is just too big for you to deal with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you've got to pay attention to that. Yeah, in the selection process earlier on. Yeah, but I gave them. I mean, I gave them Daniel 5 and I didn't realise until I got there. I'm like this is really strongly about judgment. Judgment's falling, the writing's on the wall, but they did a good job, yeah.
Speaker 1:Great. Thanks so much for coming in. Great to be here. Tabian Hill has been my guest. He's the senior pastor at Vine Church in Surrey Hills and thinking today about how we train our student and assistant ministers better in their public communication. My name's Dominic Steele. This has been the Pastor's Heart and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
