The C's of Preaching

Every summer, I hire college students to be my interns, and I always make my male interns teach at least one time. Since they typically haven't taught before, I attempt to teach them how to teach. As part of that effort, I tried to come up with as simple of an understanding of the parts of preaching as I could.

I'm not typically into alliteration, but in this case, it seemed to work. This week, I'll be writing about each of these individually.

CONTENT

At the foundation of preaching/teaching is the content. This is raw biblical information, theories, principles, etc. This involves the preacher/teacher correctly understand and interpret scripture. Depending on the nature of the sermon, it may involve exegesis, studying theology, or correcting integrating various principles or doctrines.

The "content" is all about the teacher having something biblical which they correctly understand.

CLEAR

This point involves the teacher presenting biblical truths which make them clear for the intended audience. The entire purpose of teaching is to bridge the gap between where the listener currently is at, and where you want them to be.

Clarity is all about taking raw biblical data and presenting it in a way that the audience understand and apply it.

CONNECT

Connecting is all about the relationship between the teacher and listener. Is the audience paying attention to the communicator? Countless factors can interfere with connection between the teacher and the listener. Some of them involve the way the information is communicated. Some of it relates to the environment. Sometimes, it involves the listener not caring about the content.

If the lister isn't paying attention and connecting with the teacher, there's no point in communicating.