Listen to yourself preach
Listen to yourself.
The easiest thing that any preacher can do to improve their preaching is simply to listen to themselves preach. Not just once or twice, but habitually. You can have brilliant biblical interpretations and theological insights to offer your congregation, but if they can’t hear you, if they can’t understand you, if they are lulled to sleep by your monotone voice, or if they are constantly distracted by something that you are doing, then all of your excellent content (and hard work) will be for naught. Good content matters. It matters deeply. But part of the preacher’s job is getting that good content off of the page or out of their heads and into their listener’s ears. You need more than a microphone to make that happen. You need an understanding of how your voice works and of how you actually sound when you are preaching.
I know that many people don’t like to hear the sound of their own voice. I didn’t at first. All I can say is, get over it. Preaching is too important to let self-consciousness keep you from being the best preacher you can be. The only way to truly know how you are coming across to the members of your congregation is to sit in their pews for a while now and then. It’s true, you can’t fix last week’s sermon, but you can make next week’s better. And the great thing is, that much of the improvement is likely to happen automatically, just by making yourself aware of the distance between what you were trying to say and how what you actually said came across.
Sermons are not essays that you read out loud. Regardless of whether your sermon is preached from a written text or from content that you have organized in your head, the method of delivery and proclamation is still the same: the voice. And the method of reception is still the same: the ear. Now you may publish and distribute the written text of your sermon, and that’s lovely. I have been greatly blessed by reading sermons that were written long before the invention of the tape recorder or video camera, but still, reading a sermon is not the same thing as actually hearing it preached. There is just so much content that is conveyed by the voice that cannot be captured in the printed word alone.
At least once a month, take a few minutes and go and listen to one of your own sermons. It’s really not that hard. Given that so many of us now regularly broadcast or livestream our services post-pandemic, this should be easier than ever before. But even if you don’t broadcast your services, it is worth buying a mini voice recorder to record yourself regularly. When you start listening to yourself preach regularly, you will start composing your sermons for the ear and not the eye. This means that you will understand when words need to be repeated, or when your vocal tone or inflection needs to change. You will understand when you need to slow down and when you need to speed up, and when you need to take a long pause. You are also likely to learn that the microphone isn’t always your friend, and sometimes you just need to project your voice. You will learn how to convey the content of your sermon more effectively.
Preaching is sacred speech. It isn’t meant to be a show or a performance, but a good preacher still needs to know how to use the tool (the voice) that God has given him or her to proclaim the gospel with, and that takes practice and reflection. It takes listening as well as speaking.
Listen to yourself preach. It will make you a better preacher.
