Do pastors ever intentionally target specific individuals in the congregation when they preach?
Yes.
And in the process, they also provoke conflict.
When I first started preaching, I was only nineteen. When I prepared a sermon, I was just trying to put together some coherent thoughts based on the Bible so I could fill the half hour or so I had been assigned. It wouldn’t have dawned on me to scold anyone in particular from the pulpit. I had a hard enough time just trying to make sense.
As time went on, I became more issue-oriented when I preached. If I detected a topic that wasn’t being addressed in our church, I’d talk about that. My thoughts were centered on content, not people.
But that all changed when I became a pastor.
I was 27 years old in a church where the average age was sixty. (Doesn’t sound so old anymore.) When I stood up to speak, I looked out on a congregation of … 30-40 people. I quickly got to know them all, and I didn’t like some of them. (You wouldn’t have, either, but that’s another story.)
These people were ultra-fundamentalists, hyper-critics who wanted the church to go back in time three decades. The music reflected that, as did the way the church was governed. I grew not to like some of those growling faces when I got up to present the Word of God.
So when I prepared a message at home – and I spoke three times a week – I’d say to myself, “So-and-so really needs to hear this point. I will tailor it to her specifically.” Then I’d go to church and let it fly.
Only much of the time, whenever I aimed a portion of the message at someone … they didn’t show up!
For example, whenever I got on people for not attending church on a regular basis, I was saying that to people WHO WERE ALREADY IN ATTENDANCE! (The people who weren’t there never heard the message anyway.)
There were other times when I’d say something for the benefit of one person, and I’d look out, and they’d be asleep, or talking to someone, or not paying attention, and I’d realize that I had just wasted my time.
And, of course, even if they heard me loud and clear, they probably thought I was talking to someone else, not them!
So it didn’t take me long to learn that preaching to one person was a colossal waste of time. Maybe it was therapeutic for me, but it didn’t do anything to visibly change the person I was “aiming” at. Besides, how would I even know when my missives had hit the mark?
One of my preaching mentors – and he was definitely old school – advised me to target specific people in the congregation when I spoke. He did it, and he felt he had success with it, but after a while, I could not bring myself to do it anymore.
I should have learned from the last pastor that I served under as a youth pastor.
The pastor was gone one Sunday. At the end of the service, some kind of praise anthem was sung, and a few people raised their hands to the Lord. As I recall, some of those people were in the choir. Handraising was not done at our church. It was a practice imported from those divisive charismatic churches, and we weren’t about to become charismatic!
So when the pastor returned home, he was informed – probably by those same people from my first church – that handraising occurred in our church last Sunday! Oh my!
So what did the pastor do? He prepared a sermon for the following Sunday about controversial issues in the church, ticking off some examples … and then mentioned handraising.
Uh oh.
That was strategic product placement, wasn’t it?
Suddenly, the congregation was divided. You were either for handraising or against it. No middle ground.
Those against it stayed at the church. Those for it began making for the exits.
Years later, I had breakfast with the pastor. We got to talking about his handraising sermon. He told me candidly that he never should have highlighted that issue. He said, “People just wanted to express their love for the Lord.” And he was right.
As the years went on, whenever I prepared a message, the faces of certain people would naturally flit through my brain. It happens to every speaker. We don’t want to speak to a mass of people, but to individuals. And it helps if we speak to certain individuals, not those we don’t like or those we think are stuck in sin, but those who are hurting.
As I worked on a message, sometimes I would write down the names of a few people in the church on my worksheet, not because I wanted to “nail them” with the message, but because I sincerely wanted to help them advance in their walk with Christ. I would ask myself, “What kind of applications would free them to live for Jesus?”
As the congregations I spoke to increased in size, I no longer tried to aim a message at any one person. Why aim at one when dozens more needed help?
But from time-to-time, I believed that God wanted me to say something that I knew might offend certain people in the church. Although I’d ask the Lord what He wanted me to do, most of the time, I said it anyway. I subscribed to the philosophy of teacher extraordinaire Stephen Brown:
When in doubt, say it.
Why? Brown believed that would usually be the most interesting and memorable part of the message. And while many pastors try not to offend anyone in their message, my top two spiritual gifts are teaching and prophecy. The gift of prophecy leads me toward saying the hard thing rather than shying away from it. But I always tried to do it with grace rather than with rancor.
In fact, my preaching philosophy comes from John 1:17: “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” I tried to preach the truth with grace. Rather than bind people, I wanted to liberate them.
Our pastor speaks to several thousand people every Sunday. His applications seem to be aimed at the congregation as a whole. He has a big enough staff that they can handle the problem situations. And if he’s having problems with a church leader, he’ll probably call them into his office during the week and deal with the situation in private.
That’s the way it should be done.
So do pastors sometimes aim part of a message at certain individuals in a church?
My guess is that the younger the pastor, and the smaller the church, the more it’s done. But the older the pastor, and the larger the church, the less it’s done.
Let me conclude with this thought: while pastors can be controversial when they preach – just teaching what the Bible says provokes controversy in our culture – they should never deliver a message in anger or aim a message at a particular person.
When a pastor gets worked up, he raises the conflict level in his church. When he remains calm, he brings the conflict level down.
This Sunday, listen carefully to your pastor’s message. If part of his preaching seems like it was aimed at you, he didn’t do it on purpose. He may not even know you.
That’s the Holy Spirit.
