Preachtube

Go Brian!

Is a picture worth a thousand words?

That's a video made entirely on an iPhone, with about 20 minutes work. Neat, eh?
This week we're thinking about ways multimedia can help (or hinder) our communication. We're covering print design, powerpoint and video... it's a crash course with some useful pointers if you're a beginner.
Class notes are here with some extra goodies here.

There are heaps of tips online for editing video. Here's a sample.
If you're interested in visual design, take a look at design4church. (It's inactive at the moment, but there's a big archive of good material in the back links.)

Tell Me a Story - The Art of Preaching Narrative

There's nothing like a good story - especially when there's a point to it. There's an art to narrative preaching - both Old Testament and New Testament - that lets good preachers bring ancient stories to life, and does justice to the original purpose of the narrative. We'll be exploring it it class this week, and here are the notes!

If you were at the lecture (which was lots of fun), you'll notice I've added a few points to the list below...

GENERAL TIPS FOR NARRATIVE PREACHING

1. Don’t turn narrative into dry assertions of principle or fact. Keep the story alive.
2. Work on your storytelling skills. Retelling in the present tense can help!
3. Look for repetition of words or ideas. They usually help find the main point!
4. Look for hints of a future state or a desired state that take the narrative forward. Highlight them in your storytelling, but don’t defuse too much of the tension.
5. Look for answers to unresolved questions in the rest of the narrative. Be aware of the answers in advance, but don’t necessarily answer them immediately for your listeners. Again, respect the tension and resolution rhythms created by the narrative.
6. Look for things that don’t fit, or are jarring or surprising. They’re often important.
7. Be careful not to over embellish. It’s good to recreate a scene, but try to stick with the props and scenery provided by the text where possible. Otherwise you might be creating a distraction. Usually, if you need to know something you’ll be told. 

As a bonus, here's an article from Doug Green, Westminster Seminary Philadelphia, who makes some of the same points - but much more fluently!

Apply or Die

This week we talked about applying the Bible with equal amounts of boldness and grace. It's a difficult balance! Take a look at the class notes here.

TODAY WE ALSO SCHEDULED the final preaching exercises over weeks 10, 11 and 12. If you need a reminder of when you'll be presenting in class, Michelle has summarised the schedule here.

Nice work...

Here's Rob Davey's submission for the video assignment. Nice work! By the way, they're due this week.

Preaching Asssessment Sheet

For those who have been waiting for the Preaching Assessment Sheet (which you'll give to selected listeners when you're delivering a talk at your church... here it is at last. Sorry about the delay.

Assessment - clarification

A few people are asking 'how many words' they need to submit for the five minute transcription exercise. Well... it really depends on how fast the person you're transcribing is speaking... ;-p
And yes, you'll need to add a 300 word analysis to however many words you've managed to capture. If you've chosen someone who speaks slowly, it's a piece of cake.

Turning on a pin

When it comes to sermon delivery, it's not just your range of volume and tone that counts - it's how agile you are in changing. The drama in your delivery is all about in-flight dynamics...

This week we talked about delivering a sermon. And already class members have been listening to some of the greats, like Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller, trying to figure out what makes them so interesting to listen to. To be honest, I still can't quite figure it out. In class, we experimented with the idea of a big 3-D space defined by the axes of pitch, speed and volume. How much of that space can you occupy when you're speaking to a crowd? How much of the space can you occupy without sounding like a lunatic or a chipmunk? Most of us don't use nearly enough of the 'delivery sphere.' But here's the thing. The pitch-speed-volume space is only part of the story. I'm wondering if agility in moving around the space is one of the defining marks of a great natural communicator. That's when I started thinking about quadrotor robotic helicopters... as you do in these circumstances. If you've got the time to watch Vijay Kumar in the TED talk below, at around the 6:12 mark he gets into some interesting stuff about agile navigation. Differentiate distance and you get speed... the differential of that (in other words, the rate of change of speed) is acceleration. The differential of that (here's where it gets interesting, because we usually stop thinking about it at this point) is called 'jerk' or 'jolt'. And the differential of that is called 'snap'. They're busy programming 'snap trajectories' for these cool little 'copters, and finding the can pilot them around 3-D space with incredible agility. In other words, they're tinkering with the rate of change of the rate of change of acceleration! (Roller Coaster designers work with similar equations to make sure they won't snap your neck on a tight turn.)
It all got me thinking... maybe the best natural communicators are working on that level. And it's not just fine tuning our delivery pitch or pace or volume, but the way we move from one to another... the snap, the jerk, the dynamic agility of delivery, that really makes it zing. Just as long as you can do it without actually sounding like a jerk. Class notes are here.

Gracious Engagement - Ten Top Tips from Tim Keller

Herman Who?

Hermen Neutics, of course. According to Wikipedia, "In religious studies and social philosophy, hermeneutics (English pronunciation: /hɜrməˈn(j)uːtɨks/) is the study of the theory and practice of interpretation.

Traditional hermeneutics is the study of the interpretation of written texts, especially texts in the areas of literature, religion and law. A type of traditional hermeneutic isBiblical hermeneutics which concerns the study of the interpretation of The Bible. Modern hermeneutics encompasses everything in the interpretative process including verbal and non-verbal forms of communication as well as prior aspects that affect communication, such as presuppositions, preunderstandings, the meaning and philosophy of language, and semiotics.^[1]"

^{Sound complicated? So are our class notes! Grab a preview copy here, and get ready to hang on for your life!}

What's the Big Idea?

This week we talked about getting the big idea - and what to do with it when you've got it. In summary, the 'big idea of a talk' = 'the big idea of the passage' + 'what you want people to do about it.' The class notes are here in PDF format.

Intro Preaching 2012 - Week 2

Ready for some action and excitement? Sorry. It's only a preaching class. But this week we recap in more detail the ten communication tips I previewed last week. They won't make you brilliant. But they can make you a lot less bad! Hit the link and download this week's notes here.

Welcome to the class of 2012!

Hi folks, and welcome to Preaching Class at QTC. If you work back through this blog you'll find class notes from the last few years - a nice way to get ahead of the game, but week by week, the old notes will be updated and will appear in fresh updates. Please FOLLOW this blog by doing what you need to do in the sidebar. That way you'll automatically get updates in your inbox. Comments and discussion are warmly encouraged.  This week's powerpoint is here. The 2012 Course Outline (Microsoft Word format) is here.