Congregant Feedback Can Improve Pastors’ Sermons

By Bob Wells

With a structured program of feedback from parishioners, peers and outside experts, pastors can become transformative preachers, delivering sermons that more effectively challenge listeners to make real changes in their lives, according to preliminary results from an SPE-affiliated sermon study.

Directed by Lori Carrell, a communication professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, the study isn’t about homiletics, exegesis, or particular preaching styles or traditions. Instead, drawing on listeners’ expectation that sermons be grounded in scripture, it is looking at preaching as a form of communication connecting pastors and listeners. The study builds on earlier research by Carrell, The Great American Sermon Survey, which found that the overwhelming majority of churchgoers—78 percent—never give their pastors any feedback about their sermons. 

“In the discipline of communication, it’s just not helpful when you don’t know what the people you are communicating with are thinking or how they are reacting,” Carrell said. “When we begin to bring in listener response as a critical component, we can have a communication perspective that crosses homiletical traditions. It allows us to say to pastors, ‘Whatever your tradition, whatever your preaching style, here’s how your people are responding. Now argue with that.’”

The study, conducted in cooperation with the Center for Excellence in Congregational Leadership (CECL), an SPE project at Green Lake Conference Center in Wisconsin, is examining sermons by more than 70 SPE pastors and their congregation members.

Before the pastors received feedback, the study found, most of their sermons reinforced listeners’ beliefs rather than inspiring them to put their beliefs into action. Listeners also reported that Power Point slides were distracting rather than a helpful communication tool.

After the pastors received feedback and changed their sermon preparation practices, almost all listeners—95 percent—reported they would think about the sermon and expected spiritual growth.

Underlying all of the results is the confirmation that preaching matters deeply to listeners — something pastors might not realize. Indeed, for pastors, much about church life today suggests the opposite. With virtually no feedback from parishioners and schedules filled with meetings, hospital visits and pastoral counseling sessions, pastors can easily lose sight of the important role their sermons can play. 

“To many pastors, it doesn’t look like the church honors the centrality of preaching,” Carrell said. “It’s a system that can keep pastors from knowing that preaching matters.” 

In the CECL program, pastors visit Green Lake for a series of five, week-long training retreats over two-and-a-half years. Each session is focused on strengthening a particular aspect of the pastors’ lives and ministry. The first four sessions address such topics as spiritual and physical health; balancing the demands of ministry and family life; working with lay leaders; and creating and implementing a vision for church and ministry.

The fifth and final session is devoted entirely to sermon communication and serves as the laboratory for Carrell’s study. Before visiting Green Lake for the final session, each pastor videotapes a sermon in his or her home church. That same Sunday, immediately after the sermon, those in attendance complete a survey to measure their response, both as they listened to the sermon and any actions they might take as a result.

Carrell analyzes each sermon and the congregation’s response to prepare a report for each pastor, identifying his or her “unique excellence” and evaluating the sermon’s content, organization and delivery. So far, 73 pastors and more than 10,000 listeners have participated in the study.

The pastors spend their final week at Green Lake receiving a personal consultation that includes their congregation’s survey results and Carrell’s analysis. The pastors meet in their peer groups, watch their sermon videos together and offer one another feedback. 

“Though they were watching their video sermons with other pastors, people who were now their close friends, it was still a jolt for some pastors,” Carrell said. “It was like, ‘Wow. I didn’t realize I was putting people through this.’”

Ben Mott, co-director of the Center for Congregational Leadership, says that while the process can be painful, pastors reconnect with what first called them to ministry and rediscover that preaching is at the core of pastoral leadership. 

The Rev. Melinda Oberhelman, pastor of First Baptist Church, Idaho Falls, Idaho, said she was filled with apprehension before her CECL preaching retreat in May.

“I went into it thinking, ‘This is going to be awful,’” she said. “These people are preachers and they’re going to be listening to my sermon and it’s already been looked at by Dr. Carrell. I was thinking, ‘I’ll probably never preach again and probably shouldn’t.’”

But instead, she said, the week was a “great experience.”

“It was very encouraging and very helpful,” Oberhelman said. “I found myself thinking, ‘All right! I am doing it. I can make it better.’”

After individual counseling and coaching sessions, the pastors end the week by creating an action plan, outlining how they will use what they have learned to build upon their existing strengths and deliver more transformative sermons—sermons that ask parishioners to make specific changes. Later, the pastors videotaped another sermon at their home church and the congregation was surveyed again. 

The change in transformative content was notable. While only 39 percent of the pastors included a call for change in their pre-test sermon, 85 percent did so after participating in the feedback training program. Carrell’s analysis and the listener surveys confirmed an overall increase in the sermons’ “transformative quality.”

Carrell said the top 5 percent of sermons—those considered most transformative by both listeners and expert reviewers—had four common traits:

• They asked for change;
• They were organized to make it easy for people to listen;
• Whatever the preaching style, they were well delivered in ways that authentically communicated relationship and emotion; and
• They integrated listeners’ perspectives.

“If pastors want change to happen, they have to ask for it,” Carrell said. “That seems like a big ‘duh,’ but it’s one of the most important points from this study. In the first sermon, few pastors asked for change. Their sermons were informative, not transformative.”

For the pastors who made the greatest improvements, the key was changing how they spent their time preparing their sermons. Most, for example, set a clear spiritual growth goal for the sermon. While they prepared, most increased their own spiritual activities activities, such as meditation, journaling or personal devotions. Many began talking with others, including lay listening groups, to discuss sermon ideas and content.

Importantly, Carrell said, the pastors also began practicing their sermons out loud. While orally rehearsing a sermon might improve delivery, the real payoff comes in improved organization and clarity, critical to listeners, Carrell said.

“Preaching is a radical act,” she said. “We need to expect from it revolutionary reverberations.”

Carrell’s study is funded by the CECL program, through its Lilly grant, and the University of Wisconsin System. An article about the study has been accepted by the academic journal, Communication Education, and is scheduled for publication early next year.