Preaching Through Their Defenses: An Interview with John Ortberg

Preaching: Hearing goes so far, but experience...

Ortberg: And tying them together—that's one of the great things about preaching. You can lead people to experience, but I have to remind myself of that because otherwise I'm apt to think, If I could just tell it in a powerful way, that's going to make changes that this by itself won't.

Preaching: You mentioned the use of the ladders, the visual images and the story. How important are those kinds rhetorical tools to communicate with today's listeners?

Ortberg: Part of what we wrestle with is that attention spans keep getting shorter. On television and in movies, the editing cuts keep getting briefer. The sound keeps getting louder because people are losing the capacity to focus their attention. The ancient Greeks had no word for boredom. And even in the English language it's a fairly recent word with the concept that it has now.

I would have thought that people living 2,000 years ago would have been bored out of their minds. What did they do? There were no computers. There were no podcasts, no movies, nothing. But precisely because of that fact they were able to focus their attention on streams of thought for long periods of time. They did not require external stimulation to carry their attention. The whole dynamic of boredom is a fairly recent occurrence precisely because we have gotten so used to offloading the marshaling of our attention to television, movies, radio, podcasts, computers—whatever it is. Our attention muscles, if you want to think of it that way, have gotten really, really flabby.

So as a preacher I have to be aware of that, and I have to try to find ways that I can use visual cues—anything that can help. Like last weekend at our church, we were talking about saying "yes" to God. So I just had a big easy chair put up on a platform. I got a volunteer to come up from the crowd and put slippers on his feet, gave him Ovaltine and a Twinkie and a remote control. We had one of our vocalists sing a lullaby to him, put the lights down and then just asked everybody, "Does this look like a man who's ready to spring into action? If God comes along and asks him to do something really hard, does he look like he's ready to sacrifice?" And that image of life in a chair is such a strong one. For a lot of us, that's what we're really after—comfort, safety, security. But you were meant for something more than life in this chair. Then it becomes a short-hand way of referring to a way of life that enables preaching to pack a much stronger punch than if you just tried to describe it with words.

Preaching: You preached at Willow Creek for years, and now you're in California. I'm sure you had some culture shock when you made that transition. Was there any pulpit shock?

Ortberg: Yes, there was. You know, at Willow Creek the messages were probably typically 40 or 45 minutes. Menlo Park was kind of a typically Presbyterian church in that the sermons were typically 20 minutes. Well, that's not even an introduction. So we kind of compromised, and I usually preach 30 or 35 minutes there. But a piece of it was to kind of walk the church through "this is my understanding of how preaching works, and this amount of time would be helpful for folks" and to have to think about it myself.