Preaching is one of the cherished skills of most pastors. Indeed, most of the training received in seminary, the core criterion evaluated during the candidating process, and a central factor in a church's evaluation of its pastor is the pastor's ability to use the pulpit as a platform from which acceptable information is broadcast to the body.

But just as organizational structures and fundraising practices must change with the times, effective communication also requires keeping in touch with the changing nature of the culture, the audience and the communication forum. As teachers of God's Word, the core of our message must never be compromised: God's truths and principles never change, no matter what the communication context may be. Those who alter the heart of His message may be communicating effectively, but they are not communicating God's message to the audience.

However, the styles used to convey God's message to His people must change over the course of time because culture and context are constantly changing. The apostle Paul was clear about the importance of contextualization. He taught of its significance (1 Corinthians 9:19-23); he also applied that principle in his epistles and recorded sermons.

Effective communication is an art, but is founded upon some core principles. First, effective communicators understand how an audience hears information. Second, they understand what an audience will listen to. Third, they convey a clear and meaningful message to the audience. Finally, they seek and evaluate feedback so that subsequent communications will continue to hit the mark and have the desired influence.

While writing The Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators (Word Books: Dallas, TX, 1996), several new insights struck me in relation to the art of preaching. Those have been borne out by a wealth of research we have conducted in recent times. Let me share some of these insights with you.

Who Is the Audience?

To a large extent, much of the preaching that takes place is designed for an older audience. That is because many preachers have yet to accept a critical reality: churches are now serving a new majority.

If you think of the population in terms of generations, anchored around the years of the Baby Boom generation, you can easily understand this reality. There are four adult generations in the U.S. today. The Seniors are the 27 million still alive who were born before 1927. The Builders are the 43 million born from 1927-1945. The Boomers are the nation's largest generation ever, currently 78 million strong, born between 1946 and 1964. The Baby Busters are America's second largest generation ever, the 70 million born between 1965 and 1983. To be consistent, though, you must divide the Busters into those who are adults (defined as 18 or older) and those who are pre-adult. That gives us 52 million Busters.

Applying our research data to those sums to determine who is sitting in the pews -- i.e. being exposed to preaching -- brings us to a conclusion which may startle you. Even though individuals from the Builder and Seniors segments are more likely to attend church services, they are so dramatically outnumbered by the younger generations that in the aggregate audience of church att-endance Busters and Boomers outnum-ber their elders by a three to two mar-gin. In other words, about 60% of the adults who are present to hear sermons in Christian churches on any given weekend are 50 or younger. Thus, the "old faithfuls" of the church, the stal-warts counted on to be the bedrock of the congregation, represent a shrinking force, numerically. You might call this chronological reality the emergence of the "new majority."