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.

People can’t write and listen to two different sets of information at the same time.

This matters for preachers who use slides. Occasionally, I see preachers put up words on a screen—a quote or something with a lot of information—and touch on the information from the slide but then move on to something else.

If you have some note-takers in your church who will write down what you put on the screen (which is likely if you use a screen in your sermon), you need to give them ample time to write it down before moving on to another topic; otherwise, you’ll lose them for a little while.

For example, I recently used the following quote from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrove in a sermon:

“‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver; ‘don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.’”

If I put that quote on the screen, it would take the average writer about 2 minutes to write down (30-word quote at 12-18 written words per minute), but it would only take me about 12 seconds to read.

If I read that quote and then moved on, I would lose people writing down the quote for over a minute and a half!

When you do put something on the screen that people might write, leave it on the screen for a while and talk about it for a while (about 10 times as long as it takes to read the quote) so that you don’t lose people for a while.