Have you ever noticed that people often find good preachers where they happen to like people? If someone doesn’t particularly like somebody – whether for reasons that are understandable or entirely perverse and unfair – they almost never seem to like their preaching. When people do like somebody – again, whether for solid or questionable reasons – even objectively bang average preacher’s sermons are lauded as pretty good. I think this is a genuine phenomenon.

It rarely surprises me, when I have heard a sub-optimal sermon from someone I otherwise don’t know and afterwards someone tells me that they thought it was brilliant, to find out the person who thought it was great happens to be mates with the guy preaching or to have been really helped by them in some way. It equally doesn’t surprise me, when I hear what I think is a pretty good sermon from someone I otherwise don’t know and afterwards someone tells me they thought it was a bit rubbish, to learn that there is some history or a perception about the person that colours the how the preaching is received. I’d love to say I am totally objective and above this sort of thinking, taking sermons on their own merits just as they are, but we all know such things always colour our interpretation of everything. It can be very hard to divorce our feelings about the messenger from the content of their message, whether our feelings are legitimate or not.

Tim Keller once said, ‘While in a larger church people will let you pastor them if you are a good
preacher, in a smaller church the reverse is true: people will listen to your sermons if you are a good pastor.’ That seems to be broadly in line with this principle. People will judge your preaching by how they perceive you to be in person. It is not an altogether unbiblical insight either. Repeatedly in scripture we are told to identify false teachers, in large part, through their character and lifestyle not merely their teaching. Similarly, genuine bible teachers are identified by the faithfulness of their message and their lifestyle that accords with what they preach. There is biblical warrant for judging the content, at least on some level, by the character of the one delivering the message.

But I suppose my observation is going a bit further than that. Whether we like it or not, some (even many) people will judge our sermons by whether they like us or not. That isn’t always because they’re godly, assessing our character, and seeing if what we practice matches up to what we preach (though that may be at play). Often, it is just whether they take a liking to our personality, whether they get on with us, whether they feel (irrespective of the reality of the matter) that we love them or not, whether they sense (again, irrespective of the truth of the matter) that we have their interests at heart or not. Sometimes people won’t hear us when they should because they don’t like us. Sometimes people will hear us when we don’t deserve a hearing because they do.

There is a limit to what we can do about our personalities. There is often more we can do than we often care to admit, but that is another post for another day. Sometimes people don’t like us and that is that. But if the efficacy of our preaching is tied up with how people perceive us, the bottom line here is we have to do all we can to remove those barriers. We have to do our best – recognising that there will be times we cannot do anything to change some people’s perception of us – to make sure we are seeking to overcome whatever negative perceptions exist so that our preaching will be most effective.

There will, inevitably, be a limit to what we can do. Some people will not like us and nothing we do is going to change that fact. At the end of the day, we don’t stand or fall before our maker based on their perception of us. But we should try to make sure that their perception is, so far as we can, not based on fact. If people don’t listen to us because we’re obnoxious, the obvious solution is to stop acting like a pillock. But if we’re doing our utmost on that front and some people still perceive it to be the case, there is little we can do about it. We obviously carry on doing our best to care for them, love them and preaching the Word to them, but in the end, our aim is to do our best to make sure the perception is not true in actuality.

In any church, I am convinced there is a group of people who will back the pastor and hang on his every word – regardless of what he says – just because he’s the pastor. There are usually a group of people at the other end of the spectrum who will never accept anything he says and will fight him tooth and nail, come what may, just because he is the pastor too. There will be 80 or 90% of the church somewhere in the middle there to be won, who can be swayed and influenced – who will (hopefully) hear the good and leave the bad – because they are fair-minded and want to think the best whilst not taking a position a priori just because of who said it. But those fair-minded individuals will still, inevitably, be coloured by how they perceive us. Being fair-minded, they aren’t going to let themselves be coloured in their perceptions just because they’ve taken against us for no reason (which is good). So, if we want our preaching to connect, we are going to have to do what we can to ensure our perception among such people is that we love them, we care for them and we are serving their interests lest we find most, because of how they perceive us, do not get very much out of our preaching.

By the same token, I think this means if we want to get as much out of sermons as we might – as those who listen to preaching – we need to be cultivating a broadly positive attitude towards those who preach. Whilst that may be harder in some cases than others – and may be for credible or entirely baseless reasons – there is some necessity on our part to listen with good will. If we know that what we hear is bound up with how we perceive the messenger, having a cynical a priori disdain for the person preaching is not going to help us engage with their sermon, no matter how good it is. Having a critical spirit towards everyone who steps into the pulpit is not going to be helpful for us when it comes to engaging with the Word. Doing our utmost to cultivate a generous attitude to those who step into the pulpit is likely to serve us better than assuming the worst of the messenger and engaging more critically than we might otherwise with his message. It is not only preachers who must work hard to address perceptions that will get in the way of their message, listeners have to work hard not to allow critical perceptions cloud their listening either. Such a critical spirit may well close us off to what the Lord would say to us, not because the preaching is poor, but because we have allowed ourselves to perceive the preacher badly and we colour his message accordingly, which is really only hurting ourselves.