1. Use visual aids. A rear-projected slide or a huge poster of a hungry child as a backdrop for a sermon on world hunger may stay with your hearers longer than any words you speak. Liturgical colors, crosses, banners, stained glass windows, an open Bible, a lifted cup, the breaking of bread, the bending of knees -- all of these communicate in eloquent silence.
2. Speak the language of metaphor. If you are going to preach on the hypostatic union, then by all means take the time to think about what the hypostatic union is like. Think about what grace is like, or redemption, or the moral response theory. Help your hearers see what you're talking about.
3. Learn sign language and use it to expand your repertoire of gestures. The signs for "love," "praise," "understanding," speak volumes by themselves.
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4. Show, as well as tell. When you say something like, "It was early morning. Jesus walked down the road near Caesarea Philippi with His disciples, some of them still rubbing the sleep from their eyes," you create a visual context that supports the verbal content of your sermon. Talk about people and places, and not just ideas.
5. Help your hearers move from one way of thinking to another by using verbal clues such as "Once upon a time," or "Imagine if you will." These clues give them permission to engage the right side of the brain, and allow them to experience things they otherwise could not.
6. Explore the absurd. Fred Craddock says that the use of absurdity in preaching (having a conversation with a bottle of wine about the doctrine of transubstantiation, for instance) can break down some of the barriers that prevent people from hearing the truth. The language of the absurd is language the right brain understands.
7. Leave things open-ended.
1. Information for the introductory section of this article was gleaned from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1979), pp. 26-43.
2. Edwards, Drawing, pp. 30-31.
3. Questions like "Do you see what I'm talking about?" appear to be ways of ascertaining whether or not left-brain knowledge has been received by the visual right-brain. Complete understanding seems to rely on this reception by both sides of the brain.
4. From a recorded interview broadcast on National Public Radio, January 3, 1994.
