Have you stood up in front of the congregation and five minutes into your message, asked for a mulligan? Hopefully not. Still, there is a good chance you’ve preached a sermon and wished you could go back and start over.
A strong introduction sets the tone for your entire message. It is what draws people in and tells them, “what I am about to share is relevant to you.”
The best way to craft an introduction that captures attention is to wait until the very end of writing your sermon after you’ve completed come up with your applications, illustrations, speaking points, and conclusion. With your message drafted you can focus your attention on writing a rich introduction with depth, informed by the entirety of your sermon.
In this episode of Hello Church! we talk about how to take advantage of your sermon introduction and give you several questions to answer prior to taking the stage so that your congregation is waiting with bated breath, with anticipation.
CHAPTER MARKERS
0:10 Introduction
1:12 Thanks for listening
2:40 Don’t waste your introduction
6:45 Questions to ask yourself before you preach
6:53 Does this reinforce my conclusion?
7:58 Does this grab people’s attention
11:00 Does this raise the need?
12:24 Does this serve the message?
Full Transcript
Justin Trapp:
Hey everyone, welcome to episode 82 of Hello Church. Today we’re going to be talking about how you can start your sermons with a powerful, engaging introduction. My name’s Justin Trapp.
Wade Bearden:
I’m Wade Bearden. And here’s the thing. Ironically, we have had to restart the introduction to this episode multiple times. We’re talking about sermon introductions. We just can’t seem to get this down, but this is it.
Justin Trapp:
This is the one.
Wade Bearden:
This is the winner. We are in episode two or sorry, season two of Hello Church. We’re talking about the sermon last week on the podcast. We discussed the conclusion, how to have a good conclusion. And we said, “Hey, there’s a reason we’re doing introduction afterwards.” And that’s because your introduction needs to be one of the last things that you actually work on in your message, because you’ve got to know where you’re going before you introduce where you’re going. So you need a map. You need a destination before you start out. We’re going to be talking about the introduction of sermons and how you can have a strong introduction week in and week out.
Justin Trapp:
Yeah, so we’ve had a few people recently, before we get into that, we’ve had some people comment, leave us reviews on YouTube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We had Anthony, Rafael, Steve, Danielle we’ve had Kim leave us comments and tweet us.
Wade Bearden:
Someone with the YouTube screen named Babe Ruth
Justin Trapp:
Man, the big Bambino,
Wade Bearden:
Bambino. Thank y’all so much for providing feedback. Even some of y’all that provide mean feedback. You, leave us mean comments. It’s okay.
Justin Trapp:
Like Georgia Bulldogs.
Wade Bearden:
No, it’d be like Alabama Crimson Tide 75. That type of person.
Justin Trapp:
That thing, okay.
Wade Bearden:
Thank y’all for your comments. We really appreciate that. And you know something that would really help us? Is if you rated and reviewed us on Apple iTunes. That’s huge for our podcast. It helps it to get to more people. So if you haven’t done that yet it is super easy. Right? All you have to do is just hit the five star and just say “Best podcast ever.” That’s it. Copy, paste. We could even leave that in show notes. Just copy and paste. Best podcast in the history of podcasts. Super simple.
Justin Trapp:
Yeah, so let’s dive into our content.
Wade Bearden:
I love it. You didn’t even acknowledge it. You’re like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what it needs to be done.”
Justin Trapp:
Well, I was thinking in my head, our next point really goes against everything that we just did. It’s sort of like do as I say, not as I do. But the first point in having a great engaging introduction is don’t waste your introduction. And here’s what I mean by that. I made the mistake early on in ministry. And I was, because I always felt like I was the most comfortable on stage and we didn’t have what I felt like was a person that was decent on the mic, so to speak, outside of singing and leading worship. And so I would introduce the service and then the worship would come up and then the worship pastor or leader would pray at the end of the worship set, and then we’d have a video and then I’d come up and I’d do the offering.
Justin Trapp:
And maybe I might even do the announcements, whether there’s a video separating the offering, then announcements. And then I would get to my sermon. And finally, someone pulled me aside and said, “Hey, listen, Justin. We get it. You like to talk.” But the more that you talk before your sermon, whether it be the offering or you’re doing announcements, or you’re doing housekeeping items, the less effective you are when you begin your sermon, because you’ve already been talking for 12 minutes collectively.
Justin Trapp:
It’d be better for you to have other volunteers. They may not be as good as you, but it’s going to make you more effective when you actually do speak. And so, don’t waste your introduction before you get up there. Try to delegate that stuff to other team members. Let other people have the mic, even if they’re not as sharp as you, they’re not as eloquent as you they’ll get better, they’ll improve just like you have improved as well. And then when you finally get to your introduction, it’s the first word you say, people will be waiting with bated breath. With anticipation.
Wade Bearden:
Now, this is like a big pet peeve of mine is when people get up there and they do the announcements, or they take up offering. If you need to do that, maybe find a way to break it up. So maybe have like a bumper video or something. Just really kind of start fresh. And then here’s, this is my thing too. And I know some people might disagree. I’m not really a fan of whenever a preacher gets on stage and says, “Hey everybody, this is week four of our series, Renegade. And here’s what we’ve talked about.” And they spend five minutes recapping their sermon series. At that point, you’ve kind of lost the attention of the audience. So I love it when a pastor gets up there and the first words out of their mouth is, “I’m going to tell you about the time I almost died on a mountain.”
Wade Bearden:
You have everybody’s attention. And then when you finish that introduction and you go to your text, you could say, “Hey, turn with me to your Bibles to 2 Corinthians,” and whatever book of the Bible you’re preaching from. And while people are turning, then maybe do a quick recap. Say, “Hey, this is the second week in our series. We’ve talked about this. And now we’re going to jump into this topic.” So just utilize the introduction. Because if not, if you imagine this, if you do offering, announcements, a long recap of the message, you’ve been talking for maybe 10 minutes before you even start your message. And you’ve already lost a lot of people.
Justin Trapp:
If you’ve ever worked with an evangelist or you’ve hired in a guest speaker, someone that does this for a living, a lot of times, what they’ll do is they’ll send you their bio for you to make, for you to introduce them so that when they get on the stage, they’re not having to do all the small talk. They’re like, “Hey, my name’s Justin. It’s an honor to be here pastor. Pastor Brett and Pastor Lisa, they’ve just been such good friends of mine. And we just go way back and glory to God. It’s a blessing to be here.” Literally, don’t start your message like that.
Wade Bearden:
And if you do say, “Hey, I’m so excited to be here. Thank you, pastor. I’m going to jump in.” Or, like I said, when people are turning in their Bibles, say, “Hey, we’re going to continue. But I just want to say, it’s an honor to be here. Thanks for inviting me.” And then maybe say something at the end. But really get in because you’ve got everybody’s attention for that brief moment. Maybe for the first time, all service, everybody’s looking at this new person on stage who’s about to start talking. Everybody’s paying attention and-
Justin Trapp:
For the moment.
Wade Bearden:
For two seconds. So you want to utilize that. You want to harness that.
Justin Trapp:
We have questions.
Wade Bearden:
Yeah, questions. Questions to ask yourself before you preach your introduction.
Justin Trapp:
Yeah, and so I’ll, let you dive into this first one.
Wade Bearden:
Okay. So, here are questions to really think through, as you are formulating your introduction. The first one is, does this reinforce my conclusion? And we talked about this in our previous episode. You need to make sure you have that very specific objective. You say, “This is where I’m going. This is the big idea of my message. This is what I want people to do as a result of hearing this message.” This is the conclusion and your introduction gets you there.
Wade Bearden:
Imagine you are driving from, we’re in Houston, so I’m going to say you’re driving from Houston to Dallas. You wouldn’t want to start driving on the freeway towards Galveston and then turn around and head to Dallas. No, you want to start in that direction. With your introduction, you don’t want to start going in a different direction and then you get to your message and say, “Oh, we’re going to go back to this subject.” You want to start in that direction. You want to get people thinking about where you’re going, raising those questions. Does this reinforce my conclusion? You got to ask yourself that question first.
Justin Trapp:
The next question that we like to ask, and I think we actually have two questions here that could be combined maybe. Does this grab attention? And does this peak the interest of the listener? Are you starting, like you said, with an interesting story? Maybe you’re creating a lot of great movies or TV episodes. Every CSI episode starts with the murder and you don’t, you never see the person’s face, right? You see their shoulders and below, and it starts with a tension and you work your way back towards the end of towards the episode, towards the end, trying to figure out who done it. Why? They start with tension. They start with mystery. You could do that. You could say, let’s say, you’re going to be doing a sermon on forgiveness that morning you could start and it could be serious.
Justin Trapp:
You could say, “Listen, many of you,” or you can even start with a question. Have you ever been turned on by a close friend? Caught you completely off guard. You, you didn’t expect it. They sort of stabbed you in the back you might say. You felt like they, you thought they were a loyal friend and they ended up not being loyal at all. They ended up being the one that was most vicious and toxic towards you and you’ve spent the past few years really resenting them. Maybe not forgiving them. And today I’m going to be talking about forgiveness. And if, when you don’t forgive, how that impacts your heart. How that impacts your soul. So you could start with something serious, right? Create tension. And they begin to think about that person. That person becomes very tangible and on the front of their mind throughout the sermon, thus making the rest of your content a little bit more effective, because they’re thinking about that particular situation. You could start with something funny like Joel Osteen.
Wade Bearden:
Yeah. So here’s kind of some ideas, interesting story, a shocking fact or statistic. You could pull something from current events, an interesting question, or a strong or bold opening statement. It’s super important because God’s word is so interesting. It’s so powerful. But a lot of times I think we take that power out. We make the Bible feel boring when it’s not. And so you want to grab the attention of the audience and say, “Hey, this applies to you. This applies to our world. This is really important.” Because people come in and whether they realize it or not, they’re constantly kind of asking themselves, “Is this worth listening to?” And if you don’t grab their attention or point to a felt need, then what’s going to happen is internally, like I said, they might not even realize it, they’ll say, “I don’t really need to know this,” or “I don’t need to pay full attention to it so I can pull out my phone.”
Justin Trapp:
Well, Andy Stanley says, “Adults learn on a need to know basis.” And to your point, they’ll ask themselves, “Why do I need to know this?” And I think you’ve got to answer the question. You’ve got to create that tension in the beginning of your introduction, why the next 30 minutes of what you’re about to say is important. And so that’s how you can start. Another question that you can ask when formulating or crafting your introduction is, does this, does it raise the need?
Wade Bearden:
Yeah. Does it raise the need of the text? So, you want to grab attention, but you also have to push people towards that big idea or the passage. Let me give you the example, and this happens to all of us, this is just an example that I remember. I remember somebody preaching on the Lord’s Supper, on Communion, and they began with this illustration about how much they loved food. And they talked about good food that they enjoyed. And it was very attention grabbing. It’s one of those introductions that kind of makes you really hungry. And I thought that was really fascinating. And then they said, “Okay, well today we’re going to talk about food. We’re going to talk about the Lord’s Supper.” And then what they didn’t do is they didn’t push to the meat of that text.
Wade Bearden:
So something that they could have done is they could have said, “Hey, right now, your stomach might be grumbling. You might be like, I wasn’t hungry at the start of this message, now I’m hungry. We have these needs. And here’s the thing, just like we have physical needs, we get hungry and thirsty, we also have spiritual needs and those needs can only be met in Christ. And that’s really what the Lord’s Supper is about. Let’s jump in.” So you’ve got to raise the need and not just grab attention. You’ve got to do both.
Justin Trapp:
And finally, the last question that we have for you, and this kind of goes back to the first question, right? First question was, does this reinforce my conclusion? The last question for you to ask, does this serve the message? Does this serve the overall theme or the big idea of what you’re trying to accomplish or what you’re trying to communicate? And I’ve made the mistake too, where something happened. That was funny
Wade Bearden:
That week.
Justin Trapp:
And you thought, “Oh, this would be a great sermon illustration.” But then it has nothing to do with the rest of the content. We’ve not really served the people listening. We’ve not served the message.
Wade Bearden:
You just bend over backwards to try to get it to work. And it would be better if you just wrote it down and came back to it in a month whenever it did work.
Justin Trapp:
Totally.
Wade Bearden:
I think that’s super important. So, does this serve the message? Your message should be concentrated on that passage of scripture, that big idea. So your introduction has to serve the communication of that big idea and where you want your people to go, your specific objective. That’s super important.
Wade Bearden:
I’d love to hear more about your introductions. Do you have a great introduction story? An introduction that was fantastic or one that wasn’t so good? Where do you get ideas for your introduction? And then do you do your introduction first? Do you write it first or do you wait to the end? And I think it’s really important, like you said, to do it at the end, but maybe have a different process. You should let us know on our Instagram or Twitter account for Hello Church Pod, or you can leave us a comment here on YouTube.
Justin Trapp:
Yeah, I agree with all of everything you said today, Wade. One of the best ways to create a great introduction is to make sure that you have the conclusion done first. So, if you haven’t listened to a previous episode of Hello Church, where we talk about how to have a strong, how to end the sermon strong, how to land the plane, make sure you go and check that out. We’ll see you next time on the next episode of Hello Church.