John Bell is an elder at Red Cedar Evangelical Free Church in Okemos, MI, and Associate Professor of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education at Michigan State University.
we stand in the pulpit, you and I can see the people we’ve lost. They’re fidgeting or sleeping. They’re thumbing through the bulletin again. There may be blank stares on their faces. If we were to stop mid-thought and sit down, they would not be bothered at all by the incompleteness. They’d just be glad it was over (and to be honest, we might be too).
Yet we’ve also seen the people who are right there with us, who are hanging on each word. If we were to close our Bibles and walk away from the pulpit, they would object, calling out, “Wait! You haven’t finished yet! Tell me the rest!”
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We all know both of these experiences. So what is the difference? What is it that awakens the drive to learn in some sermons, while other sermons seem to leave that drive to learn in neutral?
Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the most important American philosophers, proposed a model of internally-motivated learning that directly addresses this difference. Applying this model to preaching will help us increase the ranks of our listeners who are anxiously waiting what we have to say next.
Jump starting internally-motivated learning
Peirce, who lived in America from 1839 to 1914, claimed that internally-motivated learning – which he called inquiry – begins with some doubt, surprise, or disharmony. As Peirce put it, “Every inquiry whatsoever takes its rise in the observation … of some surprising phenomenon, some experience which either disappoints an expectation or breaks in upon some habit of expectation.” That is, we work to figure out things that aren’t what we expect them to be.
This kind of learning, Peirce argued, is not externally imposed like an assignment in a class. We don’t do it because we feel guilty if we don’t, or we’re too polite to walk out of the room when someone is still speaking. Rather, it is motivated from within the learner when the world appears discordant. Our thinking, our effort to learn, is usually passive. In this way people are naturally disinclined to be active listeners of a sermon. They might listen actively out of self discipline, peer pressure, or commitment, but without that commitment or pressure, they’ll naturally be looking at their watches.
Of course, one way to engage people is to entertain them through jokes and interesting illustrations. While they’re listening, we hope to sneak in some truth – like hiding the medicine in a spoonful of sugar. But what Peirce described is a much better way. He said that when we notice “the wonderful phenomenon,” that thing that surprises us and makes us wonder what could be happening, our “usually docile understanding seems to hold the bit between its teeth and to have us at its mercy.”