How can a pastor come up with captivating illustrations on a weekly basis?
What does it take to think up applications that actually lead toward change in your congregation? Where does that creativity come from? These topics are common in my sermon coaching conversations.
Interpreting the passage accurately is hard enough. But it is only half the battle. To pull the sermon out of Bible times and show its importance for today, you have to package it with contemporary illustrations and drive it home with challenging, non-cliché applications.
What does it take to come up with more creative sermon illustrations and applications?
John Cleese, member of Monty Python, has the answer.
This link takes you to a video of a talk Cleese gave on the topic of creativity in which he divulges five tips for being more creative. It’s not about how to be funny necessarily, but how to be creative. The whole thing is worth watching for preachers (what takes more creativity than communicating eternal things in finite words?), but I’d like to focus on just one of his points for the purpose of this post. Watch the video from the 17:46 to 21:47 mark, and I’ll catch up with you after you watch.
Cleese’s simple secret to improving creativity is to think longer about the problem that requires a creative solution. This is the secret to coming up with more creative illustrations and applications for your sermons: spend more time thinking about them.
But this solution reveals another problem, of course. How do you finagle more time to think about the illustration and application sections of your sermon? There are three ways you can do this.
1. Increase the amount of time you spend on sermon prep.
Do you start your sermon on Friday? On Saturday? Do you only spend less than 10 hours on your sermon? Less than five? If this is the case, you have little reason to expect to produce creative illustrations that captivate and creative applications that motivate. Spend more time studying for your sermon. Start earlier in the week and increase the number of total hours you put into your sermon.
In order to spend more studying for your sermon, you’ll have to cut time somewhere else. What can you delegate? What can you make a more streamlined process for? What can you eliminate?
Another way to log more hours thinking about illustrations and application is to use “dead space” better. If you set the habit of thinking these things in the shower and during your commute to the office, you could add one or two hours of sermon prep per week, depending on the intensity of your body odor and the distance you live from church.
If you’re thinking, “I already spend 15 hours on my sermon, and my applications and illustrations are still lame.” That’s why I included point #2.
