Clergy Public Speaking Guide: Improve What You Already Do Well

By John Zehring

The Clergy Public Speaking Guide is written by a senior pastor who also served as a professor of public speaking at a university. It designed for experienced clergy who desire to improve their delivery of sermons and their ability to connect with their people. Many clergy excel at the content of their messages but may need to gain tools to affect their delivery of the message. Included in the eBook are “The Ten Commandments of Public Speaking” which provide useful delivery tips for clergy as well as the “Self-Evaluation Checklist” to aid clergy to identify areas of strength as well as those in need of work. The emphasis of any presentation is equally content and delivery. However, surpassing even those two pillars towers the importance of connecting with your listeners. That may be the most important contribution of the book: to aid clergy to build rapport and connect with their people so that their message is well-received, appreciated and remembered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Zehring
• Release date: Jul 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310365515

John Zehring

John Zehring has served United Church of Christ congregations as Senior Pastor in Massachusetts (Andover), Rhode Island (Kingston), and Maine (Augusta) and as an Interim Pastor in Massachusetts (Arlington, Harvard). Prior to parish ministry, he served in higher education, primarily in development and institutional advancement. He worked as a dean of students, director of career planning and placement, adjunct professor of public speaking and as a vice president at a seminary and at a college. He is the author of more than sixty books and is a regular writer for The Christian Citizen, an American Baptist social justice publication. He has taught Public Speaking, Creative Writing, Educational Psychology and Church Administration. John was the founding editor of the publication Seminary Development News, a publication for seminary presidents, vice presidents and trustees (published by the Association of Theological Schools, funded by a grant from Lilly Endowment). He graduated from Eastern University and holds graduate degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary, Rider University, and the Earlham School of Religion. He is listed in Marquis' WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA and is a recipient of their Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. John and his wife Donna live in two places, in central Massachusetts and by the sea in Maine.

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Clergy Public Speaking Guide

Improve What You Already Do Well

John Zehring

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 John Zehring

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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INTRODUCTION

There are two parts to speeches and sermons: CONTENT and DELIVERY. What is wrought in the one must be woven into the fabric of the other. A pastor whom I admire prepares well, researches, wrestles with the texts, connects the message to his people, and helps to relate the bible to everyday needs and contemporary issues. For his content, he gets an A+. His delivery, on the other hand, ranks about a C-. He does not make eye contact; listeners to not feel seen by him. He does not even peek at you when he speaks, let alone linger in a gaze that causes you to feel like you and he are engaged in a conversation. He reads most of his sermon. Perhaps ninety percent of the time his eyes are affixed upon the paper on the pulpit. He stares out the side window as though watching the traffic. If you can see behind the pulpit, he is making a few hand gestures, but they are mostly to himself, not to aid in the delivery. I still like him and his messages. I would rather have great content with inadequate delivery than the other way around. Who would favor all sizzle and no steak?

Why not master both content and delivery? One seminary from which I graduated is known for producing outstanding preachers. They have a multi-staff speech department. When I first arrived, I was chafing at the bit to take a preaching course. But first, I was required to take speech. I discovered some of my bad habits. I learned the art of public speaking. Only then was I prepared to begin the journey of learning to preach.

This eBook is for preachers, even seasoned preachers, who desire to improve public speaking skills. Its aim is to provide you with increased ability to connect with your audience and your congregation. It will help you to self-evaluate the pieces and parts of your content and delivery so that you might identify where more attention is needed. Included is a self-evaluation checklist which you can apply to your messages, which is adapted from the checklist I used when teaching public speaking at a university. The entire class used the checklist to evaluate each speaker. How would you like to preach to a congregation filled with listeners rating each aspect of your content and delivery? Each speaker used the checklist to evaluate him/herself. As the professor, I used the checklist (along with the checklists from the class members), to determine a grade. Later, as a Senior Pastor, I used the checklist to evaluate myself – painful as that was.

Pastors receive feedback after each message. Almost always, it is positive in some way. It is rare for members to give a critical analysis of your work. So, you and I can be fooled into grading our work more highly than we should, based upon the number of people who say Good sermon. This eBook is for preachers who are motivated to want more, to want to be A+ speakers in both content and delivery.

Sermons. Preachers. Preach. Preachy. Preached at. That is the flow of thinking for some listeners. Nobody likes to be preached AT. So the word preach and sermon can be loaded terms with negative connotations. That is why I never called them sermons. In the churches I served, I called them messages. People are familiar with messages. That is a term without the negative downside. Messages contain information, usually from knowledgeable experts, that listeners lean forward to hear and receive. In this work, I will use the terms sermon and message interchangeably. Clergy engage in public speaking in many settings, in the congregation as well as in the wider community and in professional settings. So, for brevity, I will refer to these as speeches, even though they might not be speeches in a formal sense.

Our storyteller knows us

An anthropologist, visiting a small village in Africa, discovered a collection of television sets stacked high in a hut at the edge of the village. The village had been wired for electricity, so she was curious why they were not in use.

She asked the village chief Why don’t your people use the television sets?

He replied, We have our storyteller.

She probed further: "Maybe so, but the television has the