How to Get Feedback On Your Messages

Among all the responsibilities you have in your life as a pastor, improving your sermon writing and delivery should be of high importance. One of the biggest contributor to improvement is the lack of critical feedback.

Because pastors preach the good news every week, improving and growing as a communicator is very important. 90% of people chose the church they attend based on the pastor’s preaching so your message needs to be biblical, clearing, interesting, and relevant and practical.  

This episode of Hello Church! explains why asking for feedback from members of your congregation is so crucial; being critiqued will help your sermons become more potent and more compelling than ever.

Chapter Markers

0:00 Welcome
4:21 Pastors Don’t Get Feedback on Their Sermons
8:45 Get the Ultimate Sermon Evaluation Form
9:01 Your Critiquer Should be in the Audience Listening to Your Sermon
10:06 Give the Form to Someone You Trust
12:01 Questions on the Form and Who to Ask
15:30 Final Thoughts

Resources Mentioned

Get the free Sermon Evaluation Form
http://hellochurchpodcast.com/critique

Full Transcript

Wade:
Welcome to Hello Church. We are in the middle of Season 2, we’re on episode 12. We’re talking about the sermon, Justin, and really kind of the ins and outs of how to create and improve in our sermon writing and delivery. And today we’re talking about critique.

Justin:
Yeah. And there are two reasons why pastors don’t get great critical feedback on their sermons. And we’re going to be talking about those two things-

Wade:
Yeah.

Justin:
… today’s podcast.

Wade:
So it’ll be fun. I was thinking Justin, in terms of critique, and it’s always funny when you ask somebody to critique themselves, and we’ve done this in job interviews.

Justin:
Sure, sure.

Wade:
Where you’re like, “Give us your strength.”

Justin:
Yeah. “What’s your weakness?”

Wade:
“Give us your weakness.”

Justin:
My weakness is I have lots of strengths.

Wade:
Is that how… It is so hard for us to critique this. One time we were interviewing someone and we’re like, “What’s your greatest strength?” And he was like, “I’m just loyal. I’m just so loyal.” And we’re like, “Man, that’s great.”

Justin:
Yeah. Loyal to a fault. That’s right.

Wade:
And then we said, “What’s your biggest weakness?” He said, “I’m just-

Justin:
Loyal.

Wade:
“I’m loyal to a fault. I’m just too loyal.”

Justin:
He said this while having a shirt on that had a Labrador.

Wade:
It’s hard. It is, yeah. It’s just really hard to give critique, to take critique. For me, I think it’s harder for me to give critique to people than to take critique. I feel like critique taking is fine. What do you think for you?

Justin:
We have a phrase around here at Ministry Pass in the sermon area that Wade is the king of soft landings. So, just gently lay you down. Just gently.

Wade:
I’ve just, I’m not the greatest at critiques. I try to take them, I try to take critique.

Justin:
I’m probably the opposite. I mean, as I’ve gotten older in life, I’ve gotten a little bit more, I have some battle scars. For instance, one scar, I was on staff at a church and the worship pastor… I had just joined the team and I knew everybody, I grew up at the church, but I just joined staff.

And the worship pastor came in and he said, “Justin, I really…” Because I had a background in leading worship, I’ve done conventions and camps and stuff. And he said, “I really want to get your input on our worship team. I want you to be brutally honest with me. I want you to give me your feedback on our worship team and how we can do better.” So me and my naive-

Wade:
The king of sting. The king of sting.

Justin:
Right. I was brutally honest because that’s what he asked for. Now today, if you were ask me to be brutally honest with you, I probably wouldn’t be brutally honest because that scar there, because I don’t know if he spoke to me for weeks after that. He was so upset with my feedback. I was like, “Well, he asked for it. I guess I’ll just get it.”

Wade:
Maybe as you’ve gotten older, you’ve learned the soft landing a little bit.

Justin:
Man, I’ve-

Wade:
The Wade technique, the Wade Soft landing.

Justin:
Just, yeah. I’ve gotten way too many moments in my life of these hurtful stares after giving feedback that was either unsolicited or, worse, solicited, and I just didn’t know any better.

Wade:
Yeah. Yeah. So we’re excited about this episode of Hello Church. You having a good week? It’s the beginning of the week.

Justin:
Yeah.

Wade:
This episode’s going to release after Easter, but Easter’s coming up, so it’s a shorter week. And preparing for Easter, just, I love the Easter season. I love Easter Sunday and it’s like the one Sunday out of the year where I actually think about what I’m going to wear before 10 minutes before I get ready.

Justin:
You wearing your fancy Easter hat or…

Wade:
I’m wearing a Easter hat. I got a cane.

Justin:
It’s like a Georgia Bulldogs but in pastels.

Wade:
No, I’m actually, I think I’m going to wear a suit this year. I haven’t worn a suit for Easter in a little while, so I think I’m going to pull out the suit. Or are you going to wear a black shirt, black slacks?

Justin:
I’m going to wear black shirt and jeans and crocs, baby. What are y’all thinking?

Wade:
They’re going to look at the black and they’re like, “It’s Easter. This is a good Friday outfit. You need an Easter outfit.”

Justin:
Right? I mean, yeah, we recorded the previous episode and we talked about how I’m wearing a green shirt today, but I always wear a black shirt.

Wade:
Now people know we record two episodes at once.

Justin:
Man. Secret is out. Let’s talk about this. Why do you think pastors don’t get critique or get feedback on their sermons? It’s two things, right?

Wade:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we did a poll. We did a poll and we asked pastors what they needed help with, and most pastors were like, “I really don’t need help with my sermon.”

Justin:
It was dead last, actually.

Wade:
It was dead last.

Justin:
36 choices.

Wade:
And I think when a person preaches, we understand the material in our mind. We know the logic and the flow of the sermons. We think our jokes are probably funnier than they are. And so we seem to, at least from personal experience, it’s easier to have a higher regard for our preaching than maybe everybody else. And that’s not for everybody because I’ve met people and they’re like, “Man, I’m not the best preacher.” But I think that’s one of the reasons. I think sometimes we don’t feel like we need the help or we don’t think that the people around us are positioned to give us that help, if that makes sense.

Justin:
Yeah.

Wade:
What do you think?

Justin:
I think the uncertainty of putting yourself out there, submitting. We’ve talked about this before. We talked about this I feel like every episode. The pastors spend an enormous amount of time preparing message. You spend 10 and a half hours on average. So you spend all this time in this message, and then you get up on stage and you have to present that message in an articulate, funny, compelling way to a diverse group of people. And then to get feedback on back from people or get critique, it really takes a special type of person to give you feedback that’s helpful.

Wade:
Yes. Yes. Because some people are just like, it’s possible for people to just either be too nice or just red herrings where it’s just too much critique and it just gets you off course.

Justin:
Well, it’s like, has anybody ever started a business and you come up with a logo and you’re sort of like, “I don’t.”

Wade:
You put it on Facebook.

Justin:
You don’t know if you like it and so you’ll send it to your 12 closest family and friends, none of which have any experience in branding or identity. And you get their feedback and oftentimes their feedback is far more confusing than helpful. Right? It doesn’t bring any clarity to the experience. It’s just confusing. It’s just noise. I think that uncertainty with trying to get feedback for your sermons, that trying to find the right type of person to get feedback from, I think it’s work, to be honest with you.

Wade:
Yeah. So here’s what I would say. I would say it doesn’t matter where you’re at, if Andy Stanley’s listening to this or Timothy Keller’s listening to this…

Justin:
I mean, if you are, Andy, what’s up?

Wade:
Whoever you are, I think it’s important that you constantly kind of evaluate and find ways to grow. I think in our culture, we can be overly obsessed with growth to where it kind of cripples us. But I think there’s a healthy way to do that where we say, “God has given me a really unique position. I am teaching people how to interpret God’s word. I am telling people what the Bible says and then saying, here’s how you apply it to your life.” That’s really big. There are going to be teenagers in your congregation who hear your messages and they’re going to remember them for the rest of your life.

That’s a heavy burden, so what we need to do is make sure we’re stewarding that well. And then at the same time, I think it’s easy to look down because we’ve seen pastors and communicators who are just all fluff and just try to be overly creative. And sometimes that can make us shy away from creativity. But Jesus was a very creative speaker. Look at his parables. I mean, we still talk about them today. They are just so rich. And there’s nothing bad with being creative or being a better communicator or wanting your people to pay attention to you, stay engaged.

Like I said, you can get unhealthy with that. But if God’s giving you this charge, then why not steward it well? So that would be my reason to you. Whether you feel like you’re a good communicator or not, it’s still important to get critique. And one of the ways that we do that is we’ve created a sermon area, have it here on my iPad. It’s called the Ultimate Sermon Evaluation Form. And this is something you can download for free in the show notes and you can give to people to critique your sermon.

Now, there’s a couple rules, and I’ll just go one and pass it to you, Justin. One is, I would say if you give this to somebody, they need to be critiquing in the audience while they’re watching the message. There’s a difference between listening to something after the fact while you’re driving, or we do this a lot of time, you’re working and it’s pulled up on YouTube. It’s very different being in the audience and listening to a sermon from beginning to end. So I would say you need somebody in the audience who has this form or will fill it out for you.

Justin:
And remember this, and this goes back to how this is so funny. This is not in my notes, but we’re talking about how the guy,-

Wade:
I’m worried.

Justin:
… the worship pastor asked for my opinion. One of my favorite passages in Proverbs is, I can’t say it with a straight face, is the passage where the Proverb says, “Wounds from a friend can be trusted.” And I guess, so-

Wade:
Maybe he didn’t think you were a friend. He was like, “After this, this guy’s my enemy. He’s coming for my job.”

Justin:
So give this to someone that you trust, right? This form.

Wade:
Yes.

Justin:
And know that they may say something that could wound you or hurt your ego, really, more than anything, right? It is a blow to the ego. But like Wade said, you’re communicating the good news to a diverse range of people, to teenagers who may remember something you said for the rest of their lives. They may feel the call of God on their life to go into ministry because of your sermons. That’s a great responsibility, a great burden. And so I think it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that as presenters of the good news, as presenters of the gospel, of the message every week, that we do our best to improve and to grow as communicators. And there’s a saying we say a lot around here, “You don’t always get what you expect. You get what you inspect.” I think it’s important. You don’t have to do this all the time. This episode, I should clarify, the caveat to this episode is you don’t have to do this every single Sunday.

Some people aren’t wired for that. But I do think you need to have seasons of inspection, seasons of evaluation to where you commit for eight weeks in a row with the same group of people, a finite, a small group of people to say, “Hey, can you evaluate my messages? Am I clear? Am I getting the point across? Did you understand these illustrations? Did everything work together?” And get them to evaluate your messages and give you that feedback knowing that it’s not going to feel great. It’s just like if you’ve ever seen yourself on video preaching, that doesn’t feel great. This isn’t going to feel great either.

Wade:
I’m not watching. I’m not going to watch this podcast episode for that reason. No, so a couple of points you mentioned. It doesn’t have to be every week. It needs to be with someone in the audience. We have this form, use this form. And there are four main questions. Was it biblical? Was it clear? Was it interesting? Was it relevant and practical? And under those are like subquestions, because if you say, was it biblical? That’s hard for them to fill out. This is easy because it gives you kind of leading questions under those categories.

And so you mentioned you’ve got a diverse set of people in the audience. So find people that are going to critique you in love and tell them and say, “Hey, you got to at least give me one or two, three critiques. Don’t hand this paper in unless you’re going to offer some critiques.” But then I would also say find a handful of different people. So maybe you give one to a teenager, maybe you give one in the audience to someone who’s a theologian or who’s interested in theology. And then maybe you give one to the person, you said, “Hey, the average age of our group is 35, and this and this, and this person fits that description. These two people.”

Give it to those people. And then what you might do is you might pay more attention when the theologian talks about the biblical aspect. You might pay more attention his critique. Whenever it’s clear it might be that you pay more attention to the average person because the theologian follows it a little bit easier. But does the average person understand it? Practical, all that stuff. So find a wide variety of people and ask them to do that.

Justin:
And I think, too, you can sort of frame it to this group as, “Hey, listen, I’m not asking you to say how great my preaching is, and I’m also not asking for you to beat me up every week. However, us together, with your feedback and me submitting this to you, I want the message of the gospel that is preached on this stage at our church every single week to improve. I want it to be more clear, more potent, more compelling than it’s ever been in the history of our church. And you guys are going to help us do that.”

I think that gives them some sort of self responsibility in this endeavor as well. It’s not just about you, but their feedback is important. So, yeah, you don’t want somebody on the team that’s just going to be real flippant about it, where their feedback is lazy. So again, you probably want to take the cut off the top as far as all the things that, “Oh Pastor, your sermon was perfect today. I loved it.” And take off the bottom. And somewhere in that middle, you’re going to find some nuggets every single week that you go, “You know what? I did walk to the left side of the stage most of the time.”

Wade:
Oh yeah, man, I used to walk so fast. And that was a critique. It’s like, “You got to slow down.” And what you might find too is if people are going to be critiquing you this Sunday, you might prepare your sermon a little bit differently and you might say, “Hey, this is something I need to do every week.” It kind of reminds me, Justin. So we have these all star comments, these people who comment on Sermonary Mystery Pass’ ads, and they’re just wild stuff. And it reminds me of someone tagged their pastor in a Sermonary post, I know where you’re, and said, “Hey, why don’t you check this out?” And the pastor responded and said, “Yeah, I know my sermons could use some work.” And the person responded to their pastor and said, “Yeah, I’m just hoping for a little more effort from you.” And the pastor was like, “What?”

And we were like, “Abort, abort, screenshot, and then delete.” Don’t get that person on your evaluation team, but make sure to make people in your church to critique you and evaluate you. So that is the big idea of this episode. Go to the show notes, download our evaluation form, and find a way to use it in the next couple of weeks. And then be open to that. There’re going to be some critiques where you’re like, “Well, I don’t know if that applies,” but be open to that. And a lot of times, too, I think your spouse can be helpful with this. They can say, “Hey, yeah, you do do that. What they said was right.” So just kind of be open to that. But that’s our one takeaway, our big takeaway for this episode this week.

So go to hellochurchpodcast.com. hellochurchpodcast.com/evaluation, and you can download the free form right there. And we hope this is going to help you improve as a communicator. I mean who was it? I think it was the Rocket Company, Preaching Rocket several years ago, had that study, or maybe they were quoting Barna. It was probably Barna. All roads lead back to Barna, right? And it was something to the effect of 90% of people will choose their church based on the pastor’s preaching. And we don’t want to obsess about that. But I think that’s also indicative of people will come if the message is great and compelling and impacts their hearts. They’ll come back and they’ll continue to come back. And we don’t want to obsess about that.

Justin:
Yeah. You don’t need to be the next Andy Stanley or Tim Kelly. You just want to be a better version of yourself.

Wade:
Yeah. You want to improve as a communicator yourself in your own way and in a way that that’s great for your community and great for your congregation. But we do have to improve. You mentioned before we get all kinds of comments on Facebook, and my least favorite comment of all time is, “Just preach the gospel.” If we post this evaluation form, they’ll say, “What about just preach the gospel?” And I’m like, well, anybody can get up and preach the gospel. But that doesn’t mean it is articulate, it is coherent, it is impactful, it is compelling. It’s-

Justin:
Understandable.

Wade:
Yes. That’s just like a lazy response. So don’t be that pastor that says, “I’m just going to get up and preach the gospel and I’ve done my part.” I think we do a disservice to ourselves and our people if we don’t have intentional growth as a communicator.

And if you’ve been preaching 20 years, you’ve got a lot of experience, right? You’ve grown a lot in the past 20 years. But there’s going to be something that you could do that could really, really turn up the volume a little bit on your skillset. And if you’re new to preaching, man, you’re going to grow so much in the next few years. So, again, wherever you’re at in that spectrum, the important thing is that we grow and that we take those intentional steps to grow as communicators.

Justin:
We mentioned some of our least favorite comments. One of my most favorite response to the emails. So emails will get sent out from Sermonary from me that we’ve put together and I get responses and I’ve had so many pastors are like, “Hey, I’m 66 years old, or I’ve been preaching for 20 years and I want to improve, so I’m going to try Sermonary.”

And whether Sermonary works for them or not, I love so much that these pastors are-

Wade:
That attitude.

Justin:
… okay, “I can get better. I really want to steward what God has given me, and I want to be true to the scripture and communicate the scripture with passion and with understanding.” And that’s incredible.

Wade:
And there’s people that like, “Oh, I’ve been preaching 20 years.” You don’t want to be that person that says, “Oh, I’ve been preaching 20 years.” But really you’ve had one year of the preaching growth 20 times, and you’ve been at the same spot for the past 20 years. You haven’t grown beyond that. So again.

Justin:
Whew.

Wade:
Whew. Yeah, listen here.

Justin:
It’s getting hot in here.

Wade:
Is the AC off?

Justin:
Listeners, subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. You can comment with any questions. We’d love to get your feedback. And we will be back next time on Hello Church. Got a lot of great things coming in the future.

Wade:
Yeah, we’ll see you next.