Preacher's Block

This preaching tip was shared by Preacher’s Block co-founder, Hunter Bethea. If you’re interested in joining the most focused preachers in the world and getting these tips sent to your inbox every week, sign up here.

Last week, I shared about a lesson I learned from Jon Tyson—to make people laugh before dropping a bomb.

This week, I’m sharing a similar lesson I’ve learned about humor: address serious topics humorously. When I was in college, I was on my college’s speech team (I know, cool kid alert). One of the categories I competed in was After Dinner Speaking. An After Dinner Speech is a humorous speech about a serious topic; for example, one of my speeches was about the seriously low requirements to run a daycare in the US. The purpose of the humor is to make a serious topic (either one that’s boring or hard to talk about) more engaging.

We can do this in our sermons too. Granted, many serious topics should be talked about seriously—things like community crises, for example. But sometimes, you need to help people put their guard down to hear what you’re trying to say.

I did this in my most recent sermon. At our church, we just finished a series on “Faith With Feeling,” talking about how God invites us to use the emotions He has given us. I had the privilege of preaching about anxiety. I figured most people in our congregation would either brush off the sermon—thinking they don’t feel anxiety—or would be very guarded hearing about anxiety in church. So I decided to add a bit of humor: I wrote an original, humorous song entitled “That’s Anxiety” (to the tune of “That’s Amore”) to help people see that we all feel anxiety. It seemed to go really well and the congregation was open to hearing the rest of what I had to say.

Try it out! Be discerning, but also realize that even when you add humor to something you later think should’ve only been addressed seriously, there’s forgiveness and grace.