Reading: Introduction to Ministry Speaking

Outline of "So You've Been Asked to Speak" Course Introduction by Bruce Ballast

Introduction

• Bruce Ballast introduces himself as the course leader with significant experience in ministry and preaching.
• He sets the context for the course, which is designed for individuals asked to speak in various capacities within a church setting.

Assumptions of the Course

• The course assumes that participants have been asked to engage in roles like preaching, leading devotions, or conducting Bible studies.
• It is aimed at helping participants construct effective, impactful messages.

Content Overview

• The course material Bruce presents is a subset of a more extensive 36-session course on preaching available at Christian Leaders Institute (CLI).
• He encourages further exploration of CLI's offerings for those interested in deeper learning.

Focus on Preaching

• Bruce acknowledges his background in preaching and confirms that while he will focus on preaching, the principles taught are applicable to any form of public speaking within religious contexts.

Personal Experience and Motivation

• Bruce shares his early experiences in preaching, highlighting a pivotal moment with a mentor who helped him focus on audience engagement and effective communication.
• This mentorship sparked his lifelong interest in refining the art of preaching.

Effective Communication

• He emphasizes that the effectiveness of a message often depends on the Holy Spirit's influence, but certain skills and strategies can enhance a speaker's impact.
• Bruce advocates for crafting messages with the listener in mind, ensuring clarity and engagement.

Source of Messages

• Messages can originate from divine inspiration as experienced by the prophets who felt directly compelled by God to deliver specific communications.
• Personal conviction or a strong impulse to convey a particular message can also drive the content of speeches.

Developing Messages

• Bruce discusses the process of message development, starting from a divine or inner urge, through scriptural insights, to personal or observed experiences.
• He explains how messages can also arise from connections made between the speaker’s insights and the audience’s needs or contexts.

Methodologies and Tools

• The course will explore different methodologies for message development, ensuring participants can create resonant and meaningful content.
• Future sessions will delve deeper into where messages come from and how to structure them effectively.

Conclusion and Invitation

• Bruce concludes the introduction by inviting participants to return for the next session, promising to continue exploring effective strategies for public speaking within a religious framework.

Summary

• The course introduction sets the stage for understanding the essentials of public speaking in a religious context, emphasizing the need for speakers to be engaging, thoughtful, and sensitive to the spiritual dynamics of their audience.

Welcome to this short course entitled "So You've Been Asked to Speak." My name is Bruce Ballast, and I have the privilege of leading this course for you. I just want to give a caveat here on "So You've Been Asked to Speak." Now I'm going to assume several things. One, that you are somebody who's been asked, maybe to preach in your church, or perhaps you've been asked to give devotions. Or maybe you've been asked to lead a Bible study and be the main speaker in that Bible study. I'm going to assume that you, in some way or another, have been asked to speak. This course is intended to help you put together your talk, your sermon, your message in such a way that it will be effective, impactful, and helpful to the people to whom you speak. Now, a couple of caveats about that. One is that I am somebody who is a preacher, and I teach preaching at CLI. 

What you're going to get in this class is a small section of a much larger course, a 36-session course that exists in CLI on preaching. I encourage you, if you're interested in what's here, to explore that, and you will learn more. But for now, what I want to remind you of is that I am a preacher, so much of what I say in this class will apply to preaching. I'm going to refer to preaching and sermons. However, the principles that I'm going to give you will fit into any kind of talk that you might want to give. With that in mind, we are going to talk about "So You've Been Asked to Speak." Now, one thing I want you to take note of as we begin is, of course, who's speaking to you. Just a brief word of introduction. First of all, I'm somebody who was in ministry for, I still am in some respects, for 40 plus years. During that time, I got to serve three churches as pastor, and I began to look at speaking and the art of speaking and effectively it's known as rhetoric very early on when I was still in seminary. I had the privilege of working with an older man who was just six months from retirement and a good preacher. My first Sunday working with him in Tucson, Arizona, I got up and preached one of my seminary messages. Then on Monday, we got together to talk about that message. He looked at me on Monday with a sense of disappointment but hope. He said, "You know what, everything you said was right biblically, it was true," he said, "but nobody was listening after the first five minutes." Talk about crushing to a seminary student who's trying to do his best in preaching. I've been stabbed here, I don't understand what's happening. But then he said to me, "Let's go back and reconstruct that message with the hearer in mind." 

So we did that, and we did that each week during the 10 weeks I worked with him during a summer. That was so helpful to me, and that began me on a search for what is effective preaching and teaching. As I have read voluminously on the subject, I have practiced what I am going to share with you and preach to you today, and in the coming sessions. I have looked at this stuff carefully to find out what is effective. Now a caveat again, what is effective is often what the Holy Spirit does with it, not necessarily what you are intended to get done. But still, there are some skill secrets to know that will help you be more effective for having people tune into you when you are talking somewhere. So let's begin today by just asking the question, where do messages come from? Messages can come from a variety of places. I guess, messages may come from God. When you look back at the Old Testament, you'll find that those prophets in the Old Testament received messages from God. God said to them, "Now you go and say this to the other people." It was a message direct from God. The prophets wouldn't say, "I am saying this," they would say, "God says this," "Jehovah Yahweh says this." It was a message directly from God. Sometimes when you have those kinds of messages, oh, man, that is exciting. I've had that happen a few times in my life where I just felt like this was God's message for this people at this time in this place. One of them was when I was a guest at a church that was considering calling me as pastor. On Saturday night at a dinner, some people from the church, one of the elders of the church suggested that I talk about something other than what I had planned to in preaching. I said, "No, I can't do that." I said, "I can't do that because if I do that, the people are going to be distracted, and they won't listen to the message that I've come to bring. I have a message for this church that I believe is direct from God." Those are great moments for me. They happen with occasional kind of frequency. They didn't happen all the time, but I knew occasionally that I had a message from God. 

Sometimes you may have that feeling, this burden, and you feel like there's something you just have to share with somebody. I'm preaching in a couple of weeks in a church as a guest pastor, and I sent in my scripture passage to the worship director there, added my title, and just a summary of my sermon so that she can plan worship effectively. She sent an email back saying, "Whoa, this is something," she says, "We had a woman share just two weeks ago in our church, she's a member of our church, and she was reading the same passage you've given me to preach on." She just said she had to share this because she felt it was a message from God for the church. She said, "I feel like God must be saying something if you're going to preach on that passage too." Sometimes God does that. You're reading the scriptures, you're planning something, it's just this overwhelming sense of, "I've got to share this message." Paul says it, you know, "Woe to me if I don't preach, I'm compelled to preach because I have this incredible message from God." Messages come from God. Secondly, messages from the Bible, especially if you're preaching, this is where you will all of a sudden get a message. We're going to talk about some of the ways that happens, but you may be reading a passage and say, "Oh, that will preach, that will be something meaningful for the people to whom I'm speaking." So you will begin to form a message in your mind based on what you find in the Bible. 

The Bible, as your preaching, should be the source of every message that you have in one way, shape, or form. Messages come from the Bible. A third place they come from are what I'm going to call connections. Where do messages come from? Connections, connections that are made in our hearts and minds. That's the picture there in our heart that all of a sudden we have a conviction about something. So we say this has to be, I have to give this message. I was reading somebody recently who wrote a book, it was a book that was a basic Bible study. But this person had been in Nepal and had been up in the mountains there and found out the reality of slavery, people who are going in purchasing young girls for prostitution down in the main country, the main capital of the country. Her heart was so burdened that she began studying the Bible. So what did I have to say to this? What is the responsibility for my church back in the United States? It was a connection that was made in her heart. Sometimes it's made in your mind, sometimes it's a connection of something you hear, something you see, something you read, or maybe you listen to a sermon or read a sermon, and you think that is something that, you know, in the vernacular of us preachers, we say, "That will preach," that is something that I will preach. Messages can come from all of these different sources. They are from these places, might come from a sermon that you've listened to or read. You know, I read other people's sermons with quite a bit of frequency. Sometimes I will look at that, and I'll say, "You know what, I know that this is going to make an impact." So I borrow, and we're going to talk about plagiarism at some point here, that you can't just take somebody else's message and use it without first checking the accuracy, according to accuracy of assigning credit where credit is due. Messages come from all of these kinds of places. We're going to look at how when you get a message like that, what do you do with it? In the next session, we're going to check that out a little more carefully, where messages come from, but the kinds of messages that can be developed as you think about you've been asked to speak somewhere. There are basically two different kinds. If you want to know more about that, you can check out the class Christian Leaders Institute that will lead on preaching, where we talk about various kinds of sermons. But we're going to look at two different approaches to Scripture. I invite you to come back for the next session, and we'll resume this. Thank you.