Many churches, especially those that publish worship bulletins, provide aids for listeners in the form of sermon outlines and spaces for writing sermon notes. Some churches have sermon note pads provided in the pews. On other occasions preachers ask specific questions which they expect to be written down while they are preaching and in some cases small groups use these at a later occasion to follow up the sermon.
Morreale and Bovee give six strategies to improve active listening which can be applied to preaching. Improve your concentration recognizes how easy it is to be distracted and calls for a conscious focusing on speaker and following through what is said, anticipating the next point and testing what has been said so far. For sermon listening, this means holding the Scripture passage open, listening for assumptions, questions and surprises in the passage so that time and energy are invested while the preaching proceeds. Focus on verbal and nonverbal cues looks at a speaker's face, posture and gestures and asks whether it reinforces or contradicts the message. Withhold your judgment stresses the need to listen to the whole and compare conclusions. Manage personal reaction disciplines prejudice from past experiences about certain people, clothing styles, accents, words and topics. Take notes not only of central idea and main points but an overview of the whole listening experience. Share the responsibility for successful communication emphasizes the quality of feedback that hearers give nonverbally. Listeners who slump with heads down are not an encouraging sign. (1998,76-82).
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3. Listen with all your heart
Clearly, it is false to distinguish sharply between head and heart responses. Preachers who use conceptual language would claim to change hearts through changed thinking. However, symbolic language is characterized much more by participation, immersion, intuitive and imagination and evolves "by thresholds rather than by linear accomplishment" (see fig 1). The more symbolic language is used, the less satisfactory is the taking of notes.
Preaching to the heart is more often stressed in black preaching than in white. In many white congregations conceptual language focuses on content and critical responses. A white colleague of mine, in a highly liturgical tradition, commented recently how distressing he found it that people gave so little response, even facially. In black congregations, however, there can be empathetic and appreciative listening with highly vocal dialogue. Some black preachers invite responses not only directly: "Do I have a witness? Do I hear Amen?" but by their whole approach to holistic preaching from which we can all learn.
Mitchell in Celebration and Experience in Preaching (1990) emphasizes how preaching should be to the whole person, cognitively and emotionally. "Every sermon must make sense; it must be manifestly reasonable . . . otherwise the subsection of the rational mind that monitors such things will shut down one's receptivity. However, although reason . . . opens the gate to the intuitive, it does not itself beget faith . . . faith invades our lives through the intuitive and emotive sectors of consciousness . . . experiential encounter (his italics) (19-22). Mitchell has much to say to preachers about moving in sermon design from outline as "flow of ideas" to outlines as "flow in consciousness"(49). The implications for listeners are very significant too. As "Jesus required "clients" to take some part in the healing. . .no healing at the church can take place without the cooperation of the person in need . . . to have openness to and confidence in the healer. So seeds come to life." (149). Symbolic language seeks a personal commitment from a listener to be sensitive to the spiritual possibilities of God acting in the present tense.