Expect Listening, Get Listening

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 by Ken Langley

Christ Community Church, Zion, Illinois

Teachers know that sometimes they can elicit exceptional performance simply by treating students as if they were exceptionally bright.  Preachers, too, can sometimes elicit good listening simply by treating listeners in such a way that they live up to our high expectations.

In a widely reported experiment, school teachers were told that a particular group of students were unusually bright and could therefor be expected to excel in their studies.  The students were, in fact, only average, but their teachers' high expectations elicited superior academic performance from them.  This self-fulfilling prophecy is known in educational and managerial circles as the pygmalion effect, after the Greek myth and a George Bernard Shaw play.  In Shaw's version of the story, a Cockney flower girl is transformed into "my fair lady" largely by being treated like a lady.

Might there be a kind of preaching that elicits good listening by treating people like good listeners?  By good listeners I mean attentive, active, thinking listeners -- people who, even though they can think a lot faster than we can talk, are at least thinking about what we're talking about.  Can we encourage listeners to listen this way partly by treating them as though we expect them to do so?

I don't mean the kind of warm, personal preaching in which listeners know that their pastor loves them, and so are disposed to give him a hearing.  (Paul expressed loving confidence in his people, and they strove to live up to his high expectations; see, for example, Rom. 15:14; 1 Cor.1:4-9; Phil.1:3-6; 1 Thess.1:2-10).  Nor am I talking about the  preacher's confidence in the life-changing power of God's Word.  (Spurgeon said we should so preach that if there are no conversions we will be utterly amazed; see Isaiah 55:10-11; 1 Thess. 1:4-5; 2 Tim.3:16-17; Heb. 4:12).  I'm talking about something logically and temporally prior to this.  Before the Word can convert and transform, it must be heard.  It must be listened to.  Can we elicit good listening by expecting good listening?

Robin Meyers thinks so.  He coined the term "pygmalion rhetoric" to describe a style of preaching that respects listeners, treating them as indispensable partners in the communicative act, and so earns a hearing (Meyers, 1993, p.128).  I want to expand on Meyers's idea, and suggest some homiletical strategies that might add up to an effective pygmalion preaching.  I'll begin with a strategy Meyers proposes.

Compliment your listeners for listening

Skilled communicators often pepper their speeches with indirect compliments on their listeners' intelligence: "You're probably way ahead of me on this . . ." or "If you're anything like me, your mind is already raising objections to this story," or "You may be thinking, �All right, preacher, what about . . . .'"  Asides like these not only give monologues a dialogical feel -- a worthy accomplishment even if they did nothing else -- they also praise people for listening which may or may not be actually taking place -- yet!  When I say, "I know what you're all thinking. . ." I don't in fact know what they're all thinking, or even that they're all thinking!  But I might get them to think, simply by expressing such confidence in them. 

This, Meyers, writes, is "the rhetoric of regard." (p.130)  It respects listeners, gives them something to live up to, and draws them into a conversation with preacher and text almost despite themselves. If the preacher thinks they're good listeners, who are they to argue?

Ask questions 

Questions, too, give a sermon a dialogical feel.  They pointedly invite -- and take for granted -- listener response, even if that response is not expressed orally.  Rhetorical questions -- "What else could we have done?" "Don't you agree?" "Who hasn't walked down that road?" "To whom will you compare God?" -- prompt listeners to enter momentarily into dialogue with the speaker.  Genuine questions -- "Have you ever felt that way?" "Do you know what I mean?" "Where do we encounter Pharisees today?" "Does this story surprise you?" "Who was neighbor to the man on the road?" -- make listeners into conversation partners more directly than declarative sentences.

Biblical prophets and apostles peppered their preaching with questions. So did Jesus.  By one count, Scripture records 153 questions Jesus asked his listeners (Lewis and Lewis, 1983, p.69).  Some of these questions came in the midst of dialogue and expected an oral response, but others came in the middle of a monologue. Ralph Lewis surveyed the 411 sermons in Twenty Centuries of Great Preaching, and discovered that the ninety-six premier preachers featured there asked numerous questions in their preaching, sometimes twenty or thirty questions in a single sermon (Lewis and Lewis, pp. 197ff.). 

Why?  What rhetorical function do these questions play?  Is it simply to get listeners to think? Or is it, more subtly and perhaps more powerfully, to signal the assumption that listeners are thinking?  Without interviewing the preachers themselves (most of whom are dead) about their intentions, it's difficult to be certain.  However, it seems to me that when a preacher piles up question after question, he's practicing a pygmalion rhetoric whether he knows it or not.  A single, isolated question might indicate an awareness that the congregation's attention is flagging and that one needs to draw people back into the sermon.  But when a preacher asks one question after another, he seems to be assuming that an active conversation is in progress.  This assumption can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Don't dumb down

The dumbing down of sermon content, documented by Postman (1985), Wells (1993), Dawn (1995), and others, is not the primary concern of this paper.  The cute stories, jokes, pop psychology, and testimonies from athletes that have replaced exposition in too many pulpits represent a loss of confidence in both God's Word and God's people.  Respect for our listeners, not to mention reverence for God, would demand a meatier sermon diet in hundreds of churches.

What I want to consider is a corresponding dumbing down of rhetoric. The bar has been lowered not only for what we talk about, but for how.  Preachers want to sound informal, casual, friendly, folksy, anything but "preachy."  To suggest that there might be an appropriate pulpit rhetoric different from the rhetoric of the ball park, or that the weighty matters we speak of in preaching call for the best words and most thoughtful structure of which we're capable is to earn labels like "snobbish," "old-school," or -- worst of all -- "irrelevant."   Unfortunately, as Meyers notes, "Sometimes preachers who want to be relevant succeed only in being hip.  ...Jesus and the boys were whooping it up one day down by the sea of Galilee' is heard once too often the first time it's heard."  (Meyers, 1993, p.33)

Respect for the matter of preaching, the occasion of preaching, and the congregation to whom we preach, calls for intelligent, ennobling speech.   Let's choose words carefully, correct poor grammatical habits, speak the king's English.  We don't have to cite Shakespeare every week.  Big words, esoteric poetry, and Ugaritic roots won't earn us points with God or with listeners.  We're not trying to impress people with our vocabularies (recall that the koine Greek of the New Testament uses only about five thousand words).  But people should at least be able to tell that we think before we speak,.  Then, maybe, they'll think as we speak.  If we honor them and their investment of time in the sermon by speaking intelligently, perhaps they will rise to the occasion and give it their best, even as we have.

One way in which we may unintentionally dumb down is by over-explaining or stating the obvious.  Recently I preached on Isaiah 25:6-7:  "On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all people, a banquet of aged wine -- the best of meats and the finest of wines."  After the service a listener thanked me for not getting sidetracked on the subject of wine and reminding the congregation that they're  not supposed to get drunk.  "I can't stand it," he said, "when preachers think we're so dumb we can't figure out the obvious."  The opposite of thinking they're dumb is thinking they're capable of figuring out the obvious -- which is pygmalion preaching.

When William Hendricks interviewed scores of people who had quit attending church, he didn't meet a single person who dropped out because worship was too deep.  Some, however, did leave because the preaching they heard was not intellectually challenging (Hendricks, 1993, p. 252).   Pygmalion preaching respects listeners too much to talk down to them.

Leave some work for the listener to do

If the preacher leaves nothing unsaid, there's nothing for the listener to say in the ongoing dialogue we hope and pray is taking place inside her head.  Meyers says, "Our efforts in the pulpit must be more like courtroom sketches than photographs.  Leaving the listener with lines to draw and profiles to be sketched into whole faces is more than desirable -- it is the objective.  Given everything, the listener is literally left with nothing." (p.81)

Use too many adjectives and you do the listener's thinking for her.  Supply every detail in an illustration and you leave no room for her imagination.  Clarify the ambiguity in every metaphor and you say to your listeners, "I'm in charge of what you think here, not you."    Finish every story, tidy up every loose end, leave no gaps to be filled by active listening and you invite lazy listening.

One way in which we sometimes do too much of our listeners' work for them is by multiplying illustrations.  We fear that because our congregation is made up of so many different types of people from so many backgrounds, a single illustration will leave too many people out.  We add two or three more to make sure we cover everybody.  David Buttrick laments this practice (Buttrick, 1987, pp.135-136).  While I don't share Buttrick's dogmatism -- he insists we should never use more than one illustration per move -- I think he's right that we should credit our listeners with more imaginative savvy   than we typically do:  ". . . congregational imagination is astonishing.  If an illustration is vividly phrased, congregations will imagine and relate.  They will relate quite readily even to somewhat unfamiliar material." (p.136)  A single good illustration, invites the listener to translate the principle or make appropriate application for himself, even recalling a couple illustrations of his own.

Even at the very basic levels of word choice and sentence structure there are strategies that leave room for listeners to contribute something.  Certain "schemes" and "tropes," to use the terminology of classical rhetoric, demand more of listeners than others (Corbett, 1990, pp.424-460).  Hyperbole and understatement, for example, require listeners to make a mental adjustment to the claim being made.  Periphrasis (substituting a proper name for a quality or vice versa), synecdoche (substituting a part for the whole), personification and other artfully unusual uses of words demand more from listeners than more prosaic modes of expression.  Schemes of omission, especially, may invite hearers to supply something of their own to the rhetorical act: ellipsis (omission of a word or words which are implied by the context), and asyndeton (omission of conjunctions between a series of related clauses).  These and other figures of speech not only make prose sparkle, they draw listeners into partnership in the discovery of meaning by giving them some of the responsibility for completing thoughts. 

Perhaps we would do our listeners a service by paying more attention to word choice. (Langley, 1997)   We don't have to memorize the dozens of technical terms for figures of speech; but reviewing them in a rhetoric text may heighten our awareness of what we unconsciously do when speaking well and enable us to speak well more often and more intentionally.

Sometimes, when you're trying to persuade, less is more.  This is so because, as Meyers argues, persuasion is located in the response of the listener: preachers don't persuade listeners, listeners persuade themselves of the truth of our propositions or the rightness of our cause or the beauty of our vision.  For this to happen, they have to do some of the work and so own some of the responsibility for what transpires in the communicative event (Meyers, p.77).

Make no mistake about it, though, to share the work of the sermon with listeners is to take some risks.

Take risks

"The rogue never hazards a metaphor," Samuel Johnson once complained about another writer (Hughes and Duhamel, 1966, p.148). Do you?  Do I? There are risks involved in using figurative language. We can't guarantee that listeners will grasp what we intend.  But the biblical writes apparently thought that the benefits of metaphor -- imaginative, affective, aesthetic punch -- outweigh the risks, for Scripture teems with metaphors.  Even though Jesus' hearers were incredibly dull at times (including the disciples, at least in John's gospel), and took the Master too literally, he still used metaphors (John 2:31-38; 6:53-60; 10:6; 16:17-18; 16:29).

Pygmalion preaching trusts listeners to interpret metaphors and to supply appropriate qualifiers for striking sentences and vivid images.  Jesus, for instance, doesn't soften his rhetoric about hating one's parents by hastening to explain it as mere hyperbole; he lets the sentence shock, as intended, and then expects his audience to reflect on this figure of speech.  He doesn't blunt the parable of the unjust judge by adding, "Of course, I'm not implying that God is unjust; I'm only telling you this made-up story to make a point about prayer."  No, he trusts listeners to figure this out for themselves (Adams, 1991, p.49).  In fact, Jesus takes risks with nearly every parable he tells.  His willingness to do so puts some of the responsibility for discovering meaning on the shoulders of his listeners.

John Piper gets our attention and provokes thoughtful listening when he says, "The Son of Man did not come to be served.  If you're trying to serve Jesus, stop it!  He doesn't want to be served."  Now, for any Christian who's been told her whole life that she's supposed to serve Jesus, that's a provocative statement, and Piper knows it.  He's making a point about the all-sufficiency of God and the implications of that self-sufficiency for the manner in which we serve God.  But the point would be dulled if with his next breath  Piper said, "Of course there's a sense in which we should serve Jesus." 

If we qualify every provocative statement with "On the other hand," if we soften the shock of every vivid metaphor, if we say too often things like, "Fearing God doesn't really mean fearing God," if we insist on balancing hard texts with others that speak to the other side of the issue, we make preaching insipid and insult our listeners.  Better to risk temporary misunderstanding, even hostility toward our idea and in the process invite listeners to think.  Then if they embrace what we say, it will be because they've wrestled with its persuasiveness for themselves.  Make it too easy and there's no wrestling to be done.

Are listeners willing to wrestle?  Lori Carrell thinks so.  Her research for The Great American Sermon Survey (Carrell, 2000) encountered many church attenders who want to be engaged actively as partners in the sermon dialogue.  One respondent was representative:  "In a good sermon, the preacher is talking with the audience, including them in the message so they have opportunity to mentally participate." (p.39)  God's people want to be fed, not spoon fed.

Preserve tension

One invaluable contribution of the narrative preaching movement, even for those of us who aren't convinced that every sermon needs to take the form of a story, is the reminder that every sermon needs to maintain some kind of unresolved tension until the end.  Whether this tension comes from a plot complication or an unanswered question or a series of inadequate solutions, there must be some kind of work for speaker and listener to do together or the preacher may as well just pronounce the benediction.

If week after week " I tell 'em what I'm going to tell 'em, then tell 'em, then tell 'em what I told 'em," why on earth should anyone listen longer than five minutes?  The only time we ought to follow this dubious homiletical counsel is when "what I'm going to tell 'em" is so counterintuitive the congregation can't help but listen just to make sure they heard right.  "This morning I hope to convince you that God is the most self-centered person in the universe." To start a sermon in this way is to dare people to stay tuned.  But if I say up front, "There are three reasons why we all ought to witness more," my listeners will probably drift off to count the panes in the stained glass window or study the backs of their cardboard fans.

Respect for listeners implies that we'll give them good reason to listen until we're done talking. 

Conclusion

I haven't discussed dozens of sound practices that encourage good listening -- induction, clear structure, eye contact, passion, to name a few -- but a more limited repertoire of homiletical strategies that we might expect to work in a particular way -- by assuming what they seek to achieve.  These strategies aim to elicit listening by treating people as good listeners.  I've learned much from Robin Meyers, who is worth quoting one more time:

The idea that rhetorical style not only produces something worth listening to but also contributes to the listening itself is worth pondering.  The clever teacher projects a confidence in students that is invariably rewarded.  A gifted preacher can accomplish the same thing by projecting high listening standards upon the congregation until those standards are adopted unaware.  (p.129)

Back around 1910, a horse named Clever Hans mystified audiences by his apparent ability to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and even spell by tapping his hoof.  He could answer questions for anyone, not just his master.

However, if Hans couldn't see the questioner or if the questioner himself didn't know the answer to the question, Hans wasn't so clever.  It turns out that he had learned to start or stop tapping on subtle cues from his questioners.  A slight tilt of the head when the question was posed might be enough to get Hans tapping.  A raised eyebrow might stop him.  Even the dilation of a questioner's nostrils might be enough to signal Hans he'd tapped long enough.

In other words, people were signaling their expectations to Hans, unconsciously giving him the correct answers.  He was clever because people expected him to be clever.

What rhetorical signals are we sending that tell people we expect them to listen?

SOURCES

 Adams, Jay E.  (1991)  A Consumer�s Guide to Preaching.  Wheaton: Scripture Press. 

Buttrick, David.  (1987)  Homiletic.  Philadelphia: Fortress. 

Carrell, Lori.  (2000)  The Great American Sermon Survey.  Wheaton: Mainstay Church Resources. 

Corbett, Edward P.J.  (1990)  Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 3^rd ed.  Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Dawn, Marva.  (1995)  Reaching Out without Dumbing Down.  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 

Hendricks, William.  (1993)  Exit Interviews.  Chicago:  Moody Press. 

Hughes, Richard E.  and P. Albert Duhamel.  (1966)  "Rhetorical Qualities of Words," in Selected Readings in Public Speaking, Jane Blankenship and Robert Wilhoit, eds.  Belmont, CA: Dickenson Publishing. 

Langley, Ken.  (1997)  "Let There Be Lightning: a Realistic Plan for Improving Sermon Word Choice,"Preaching (March/April 1997), pp.10-12. 

Lewis, Ralph, and Gregg Lewis.  (1983)  Inductive Preaching.  Westchester, IL: Crossway Books. 

Meyers, Robin R.  (1993)  With Ears to Hear: Preaching as Self-Persuasion.  Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press. 

Postman, Neil.  (1985)  Amusing Ourselves to Death.  New York: Penguin. 

Wells, David.  (1993)  No Place for Truth.  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.