Making Eye Contact (for groups of about 12):
The purpose of this exercise is to help train you to make good eye contact with others while you are speaking.
The group should be seated in a semi-circle with their hands in their laps. Have someone start by standing up at the front and start talking about anything at all (tell a joke, recite a poem, relay a personal story, it doesn't matter). While speaking, the other members of the group slowly and silently count to ten, raising their hands a little for every number until their hand is fully up at the count of 10, as if they were asking a question. When the person speaking makes good eye contact with a person seated in the circle, that person should put their hand all the way down and start counting from the beginning. When someone does reach the number 10 and has her or his hand fully up, they should make a loud sound like a bell (ding!). The "bell-ringer" then stands up and starts speaking and the previous speaker sits down.
Micro-Sermons (for small groups):
Purpose: to grow more comfortable speaking extemporaneously from your heart.
Preparation: Copy out single bible verses onto little slips of paper. The
more obscure the verse is, the better. Have enough of these for all the
participants.
Put the bible verses in a hat. Nominate someone to be the time keeper. Have the first person choose a verse and look at it for 30 seconds. Then he or she should start speaking about what that verse means to them. They are to keep speaking for two minutes. The time keeper's responsibility is to cut people off at exactly two minutes. A good micro-sermon doesn't have to be clever or witty, just honest. Micro sermons can: guess what the meaning of the text is, tell a story the verse reminds you of, raise questions that you don't have answers to, or wonder aloud if there are a couple of different ways to interpret the text.
Practice in Sermon Delivery (in a group or alone):
Purpose: to experiment with the different sounds of your preaching voice.
Congregations pay attention to everything. The preacher’s voice uses pitch (high and low), rhythm (fast and slow), timbre, articulation, repetition, emphasis, silence, gesture, movement, and props (sometimes), to engage the ears, bodies, and emotions of the hearers. Here is a segment of a sermon preached in 1929 by C. C. Lovelace in rural Florida. (But you can use any good sermon text or story. Children's poems and fables are excellent for this exercise). Read it aloud. Taste the words with your tongue. Feel the rhythm of the speech and how your breath flows out and in again at the end of each line. Get a tape recorder and read it aloud in several different ways. Then listen to the tape and get a sense of how others hear your voice.
And one of de disciples called Jesus
“Master!! Carest thou not that we perish?”
And He arose
And de storm was in its pitch
And de lightnin played on His raiments as he stood on the
prow of the boat
And placed His foot upon the neck of the storm
And spoke to the howlin winds
And de sea fell at His feet like a marble floor
And de thunders went back in their vault
Then He set down on de rim of de ship
And took de hooks of his power
And lifted de billows in his lap
And rocked de winds to sleep on His arm
And said, “Peace, be still.”
And de Bible says there was a calm. [American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Literary Classics of the United States/The Library of America, 1999), 805.]
Now read it again, louder this time, pouring yourself into it. Recreate the experience of the storm and the drama of the way Jesus calms it with your voice and your body. A religion researcher was doing fieldwork in Florida in 1929 when she heard this sermon. It convinced her that the preacher is a true poet.
For more practice, do the same exercise using Psalm 29, Ezekiel 37:1-14, or Revelation 22:7-21.
Preacher's
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