Preaching Through Their Defenses: An Interview with John Ortberg

The other piece probably was that there's a bigger age range at Menlo Park. We have folks from 106 all the way down the ladder. So probably the easiest place to preach nowadays is to start a church and have everybody be exactly the same age because then you can know that your references—not just biblical references but culture references or more often pop culture references—will be picked up by everybody. And that can be kind of fun, but you can also exclude folks who are not part of that pop culture.

Willow intended to be a boomer church, although it's 30-plus years old now, so the split there now is much bigger than it was. When it started in 1975 you could safely assume everybody had watched "Saturday Night Live" the night before, and everybody knew what Chevy Chase or Dan Akroyd had said. Even at Willow that's changed a fair amount now, and at Menlo the change is that much broader.

Preaching: That's interesting because a lot of the newer churches, the new church plants, are more narrow demographically. They are niches, whereas the typical pastor of a traditional church doesn't have that focus. Are there some intentional things you do to be sure you include the broad range of listeners?

Ortberg: Well, one of them is you have to not assume. Like you can't assume biblical literacy, you also cannot assume pop culture literacy. So if I'm going to talk about a movie—let's say I did something out of Princess Bride—I will work to explain that and not assume that everybody knows it. Whereas if I was at a different context I might assume that almost everybody knows it. So I think you can still use a lot of material, but you just have to do it without assuming that everybody's familiar with it and give it enough context so that somebody who wasn't familiar with it before can get on board.

The other piece is that every congregation has stuff that it will resonate with. You don't know for sure until you preach with that congregation for awhile. It may be a football team, or it may be stories that you tell about your kids. It may be that in a particular congregation something that's tender touches their heart in a unique way. It will be different in every place. Part of what a preacher has to do is to have a radar to be watching for that all the time.

Preaching: You write some excellent books that have great insights for the Christian life. Do most of your books come out of sermon series?

Ortberg: It's a funny thing. The short answer is "no." I've always wished they did. I've always kind of envied some people who'll do a sermon series and turn it into a book. For me, they inform the books; but the books are much more a cut-and-paste job from other stuff. Actually for the first time now I'm working on a book on faith and doubt. I did a sermon series on faith and doubt, and it's not like each sermon becomes a chapter. But it's the first time I've done a whole series where I was able to think, research and then move from that into the book. It's been a great experience—very stimulating.