From time to time, we’ll offer some practical tips for those engaged in teaching or preaching God’s Word. Our hope is to provide helpful insights on how teachers/preachers can grow in their effectiveness in communicating God’s Word to others.
Here’s a pithy saying that all teachers should remember: Tension holds attention.
That’s important because holding our listeners attention is not easy or automatic. Any of us who’ve taught for any length of time has seen a dreaded glazed-over look on some of our listener’s faces. Worse yet, we’ve seen people go from dazed to dozing as they close their eyes. And we’re pretty sure they aren’t praying!
So how do we help people stay engaged as we teach or preach? Part of the answer is in the pithy saying I began with today: Tension holds attention. Tension in a message helps people stay attentive to the lesson.
How do we maintain tension to retain the attention of our hearers? Let me highlight two ways we can use tension to hold attention:
Unanswered questions
What I mean here is that you raise a question that you don’t answer right away.
Say you are teaching a lesson or preaching a sermon on Philippians 4: 1-6. In your introduction, you raise the issue of finding peace when life is full of conflict and turmoil. That’s a problem that most people readily admit they have. So you ask the question, “How do you find peace when life is not peaceful?”
Then, instead of giving an answer, you say, “We’ll find an answer to that question in passage we will look at today.”
That unanswered question helps people stay engaged. It’s like an itch that needs to be scratched.
As you proceed through the lesson, you gradually unfold an answer to the question, a bit at a time. By the time you finish verse 6, you’ve revealed the answer to your opening question. When you do, it’s like you’ve scratched the itch. You’ve also helped your listeners stay engaged from beginning to end.
Here’s a second way to use tension to hold attention:
Unseen Objectors
In this case, you intentionally voice the objections that a listener might raise to the truth you are teaching. You speak out the silent objections some of your hearers might have (but wouldn’t dare verbalize in class).
I’m sure you’ve discovered that a disagreement or quarrel always grabs attention; so here you start a bit of quarrel with yourself.
The apostle Paul did this as he wrote the book of Romans. He uses an unseen objector as he writes chapters 6-7. For example in the opening of chapter 6, Paul writes, “What shall we say then, are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?”(6:1). Later, in chapter 7, he does the same thing: “What then shall we say? That the law is sin?” (7:7).
Do you see what Paul is doing? He’s grabbing our attention by raising an objection.
Let’s say you’ve been teaching from Matthew 18 where Jesus uses a parable to make the point we need to forgive others since God has forgiven us. You’ve made that point, but then you say something like this, “You may hear this and be thinking, I know I should forgive but I don’t think I can. What’s happened to me is too awful to just forgive it.” Or you say, “I know I should forgive but I don’t want to forgive.”
By raising that objection, you raise tension—And tension grabs attention. You also gain credibility for being willing to deal with hard questions rather than simply ignoring them.
Remember: Tension is the teacher’s friend because “Tension grabs and holds attention.”
Rick and Linda Reed 