Enrichment Journal: Reaching With Our Preaching

If you are going to reach the unchurched, you must have a foundational understanding of your target audience and then make your preaching more effective and practical to them. Here is what you need to know about the unchurched and seven essential elements to reach them with your preaching.

A young man was faithful to his church. He considered his pastor warm, friendly, congenial, and a great spiritual leader. His only drawback was his preaching, which often seemed unfocused and went on endlessly. One Sunday the young man determined that if his pastor preached past noon again, he would slip out the door. Sure enough the pastor was still in high gear as noon struck. The young man proceeded to leave when the pastor observed him as he was halfway down the aisle. The pastor interrupted his sermon to call out to the young man.

“Hey, where are you going?”

“To get a haircut,” replied the young man.

“Couldn’t you have gotten a haircut before you came here?” asked the preacher.

“I didn’t need a haircut when I came in here,” responded the young man.

James Emery White points out in his book, Rethinking the Church, that the primary reasons people do not attend church include the following:

1. They find no value in attending (74 percent). Church does not do anything for them, and they do not get anything out of it, so why attend? Church has little to offer them in their spiritual pilgrimage.
2. Church services are usually boring (36 percent). There is little within the service that captures or holds their attention. Instead, they find sermons and services to be boring and lifeless.
3. Churches hold no relevance for the way they live (34 percent). These people feel the church is simply out of touch with life in the modern world. The topics and language make them feel as if God is buried in the past or removed from the world in which they live.

As a result, other activities — running errands, spending time with family, and pursuing recreational activities — take priority on Sunday.

For a majority of people in the United States, church has simply lost relevance to their lives despite the fact surveys indicate 75 percent of all adults say it would be desirable to have a close relationship with God. Spiritual fulfillment was more important than financial success, and interest in spiritual things has never been higher.

I believe rethinking how we do church, so we might connect with this large unchurched group starts with better preaching. Even the words preaching and sermon have negative connotations to our world. How often have you heard some version of the phrases, “Don’t preach to me,” or “I don’t need a sermon.”

If we are going to reach the unchurched, we must make our preaching more effective and practical, connecting with their daily lives. I devote the remainder of this article to that purpose. I examine preaching for the unchurched in two segments. First, I discuss the target audience. Who are the unchurched and what are their specific needs? Second, I consider practical ways our messages might communicate the Word more effectively to the unchurched. Read more