Beginnings and Endings

A congregation decides very quickly whether to listen. Not consciously, and not finally, but the decision is real: in the first minute or two most hearers settle whether this sermon will be worth the effort of attention. Some have walked an hour to get there. Some are hungry. Some are grieving and only came because a relative made them. Some have heard the preacher every week for ten years and expect to know what he will say. The introduction is the preacher's one chance to persuade all of them that what follows concerns them.

The old rhetorical tradition had a name for this part of a speech, the exordium, and a clear account of its job. The Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero said the opening should make the hearers well disposed, attentive and ready to learn. Augustine carried the same three aims into Christian preaching in the fourth book of On Christian Teaching, written in North Africa and finished around 427. The three aims are still the right ones. Well disposed: the hearers should sense that the preacher is for them, not against them. Attentive: they should want to hear what comes next. Ready to learn: they should know roughly what they are about to be taught, and why they need it.

Paul at Athens does all three in two sentences. He is speaking to a sceptical, educated audience who have already called him a babbler (17:18), and who spend their time doing nothing more than hearing and articulating new ideas (17:21). He does not begin by attacking the idols that distressed him. He begins by observing that they are very religious, a word, deisidaimonesteros, that could mean devout or superstitious and that let his hearers take it either way. That makes them well disposed. He then names something specific in their own city, an altar he had walked past and read, to an unknown god: they had admitted publicly that there was a god they did not know. That makes them attentive. And he states his purpose plainly: 'Therefore what you worship as something unknown, I now proclaim to you.' That makes them ready to learn. Later in the same speech he quotes their own poets (17:28); the second line comes from the Phaenomena of Aratus, a Greek poet from Cilicia, Paul's home region.

Notice what Paul did not do. He did not start with himself, his journey, his credentials or an apology. He did not start with a joke that had nothing to do with what followed. He did not start with a definition, the way many sermons start with a dictionary. And he did not start with the conclusion, that God commands all people everywhere to repent, because to these hearers that sentence would have meant nothing until the ground had been prepared. He started where they were, and he started with something true.

A good introduction usually does three things, and you can check your own against them. It raises the need: the problem, question or longing that the text answers, which you named in module 2 as the need the text meets. It connects that need to the text, so that the hearers know the Bible passage is not decoration but the place the answer will come from. And it tells them, or at least hints, where the sermon is going. In a deductive sermon that may be the main idea stated outright. In an inductive or plotted sermon it may be the question the sermon will chase. Either way the hearer should know, by the end of the introduction, what he is listening for.

There are many ways into that. A question the hearers are already asking: what do you do when you have prayed for years and nothing has changed? A situation from their own week: the queue at the clinic, the letter from the landlord, the son who has stopped coming home. A proverb, which in many African, Asian and Pacific cultures is the most natural opening of all, because it states something the whole community already believes and lets the preacher test it against scripture. A detail in the text that the hearers have read past a hundred times. Or simply the reading of the passage itself, read well, followed by one sentence that says why it matters today. Peter at Pentecost began with a rumour; Paul at Lystra with a crowd about to make a terrible mistake. The best introductions are usually found in the hearers' world rather than in the preacher's library.

Introductions die in predictable ways. They apologise: I did not have much time to prepare this week, which tells the hearers not to bother. They run too long, so that a third of the sermon has passed before the text is opened; a useful rule of thumb is that the introduction should be no more than about a tenth of the whole. They promise more than the sermon delivers. They start with a funny story that has nothing to do with the text, which wins attention and then wastes it. They start with the preacher himself, his week, his trip, his opinions. Or they start with a long survey of background that the hearers have not yet been given a reason to want.

Two practical notes for many of the students of this course. First, in many churches the preacher must begin by greeting and honouring people: the senior pastor, the elders, visitors, perhaps a chief or an official. This is courtesy and in some places it is required, and it is not wasted time. But it is not the introduction. Keep it brief, and then make a clear break, with a pause or with the reading of the text, so that the hearers know the sermon has begun. The first sentence after the greetings is your real opening line, and it deserves as much care as any sentence you will say. Second, write the introduction last. You cannot introduce a sermon you have not yet built, and an introduction written first will usually introduce a different sermon from the one you end up preaching.

If the introduction decides whether people listen, the conclusion decides what they take home. John Broadus, in his Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons (1870), observed that the conclusion is the part of the sermon most often neglected, and that it is often the most important. He was right on both counts. Many sermons do not end; they stop. The preacher runs out of material, or out of time, or says in closing three times and keeps going. The hearers are left to make their own way out of the sermon, and most of them leave by the door they came in.

A conclusion has one job: to bring the main idea to bear on the hearers so that they know what God is asking of them, and to do it with the urgency the text deserves. That usually involves gathering, applying and calling. Gathering: restating the main idea, briefly and clearly, so that the whole sermon is in one place. Applying: saying concretely what it means this week, for these people, in their work, homes, fields and markets. Calling: asking them to do something. The sermons in Acts end with calls. 'Repent and be baptized' (2:38). 'He now commands all people everywhere to repent' (17:30). 'Watch out, then, that what was spoken by the prophets does not happen to you' (13:40). And with many other words Peter urged them, 'Be saved from this corrupt generation' (2:40). These are not summaries. They are appeals.

Conclusions fail in their own ways. They introduce new material, a fresh point or a new text, which reopens the sermon just when it should be closing. They end on an illustration so powerful that the hearers remember the story and forget the text. They end with guilt, a list of ways the hearers have failed, and nothing about the grace that answers it, which module 3 should have taught you to avoid. They end in vagueness: let us all try to be more faithful. Or they end with a call to a response the text never asked for, so that every sermon, whatever its passage, closes with the same appeal.

And not every text ends in triumph. The Inquiry's four endings in Acts show that a faithful sermon may meet mockery, delay and fear as well as faith. Some texts call for repentance; some for comfort; some for endurance under suffering that will not lift this year. A sermon to a congregation that has buried three young men this month may end with Lamentations, 'Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail' (3:22), and a call to keep coming back to God together, rather than with a rousing climax that the hearers cannot honestly join. The conclusion should land where the text lands.

In many churches around the world, the sermon's ending includes a public invitation: the hearers are asked to respond with their bodies as well as their hearts, by raising a hand, standing, coming to the front, kneeling at an altar rail, or going to a room set aside for inquirers. In evangelical and Pentecostal churches in Africa, Latin America and Asia, this is often the normal end of a service, and it is used not only for conversion but for rededication, for prayer for healing and deliverance, for the filling of the Spirit, and for anyone in need. In many other churches, Lutheran, Orthodox, Catholic, much of the Anglican and Reformed traditions, and some evangelical churches too, it is seldom or never used. This is a genuine disagreement among faithful Christians, and both sides must be heard at their strongest.

Its modern form has a history, and its defenders do not deny it. The mourners' bench appeared in Methodist and other revival meetings on the American frontier around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Charles Finney made the anxious seat, a front bench where those under conviction sat to be prayed for and counselled, a central measure of his revivals, and defended it in his Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835) as a way of bringing people to an immediate decision. D. L. Moody used inquiry rooms. Billy Graham's crusades made the walk to the front, often while the hymn Just as I Am was sung, familiar around the world. Defenders reply that the history of a form does not settle whether it is faithful. The printed Bible, the hymnbook and the Sunday school are recent forms too.

Their case rests first on scripture's repeated demand for public, immediate response. Moses stood at the entrance to the camp and said, 'Whoever is for the LORD, come to me' (Exodus 32:26). Joshua told Israel to 'choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve' (24:15). Elijah asked, 'How long will you waver between two opinions?' (1 Kings 18:21). Jesus said, 'Therefore everyone who confesses Me before men, I will also confess him before My Father in heaven' (Matthew 10:32), and Paul that 'with your mouth you confess and are saved' (Romans 10:10). At Pentecost the response came the same day and in public (Acts 2:41). Faith in scripture is not a private opinion quietly held; it is confessed, and confessed before others.

Their case rests second on the urgency of the gospel itself. 'We implore you on behalf of Christ: Be reconciled to God' (2 Corinthians 5:20). A preacher who believes that his hearers stand before God today, and that some of them may not have tomorrow, should give them a way to answer today. Defenders argue that a sermon which explains the gospel and then asks for nothing in particular has stopped short of what the apostles did. The invitation gives a seeking person a concrete next step, and puts a counsellor beside them to pray, explain and follow up. It does not save anyone, and its careful defenders have always said so. It is a first act of response, and an occasion for the church to meet the person who is responding.

R. T. Kendall, minister of Westminster Chapel in London from 1977, where Martyn Lloyd-Jones had preached for nearly thirty years and had opposed the practice, began giving a public invitation there, and defended it in Stand Up and Be Counted (1984), arguing from texts like these that public confession is part of the biblical pattern and helps the one who confesses. Many defenders add a cultural point that matters for this course. In much of the world, faith is lived communally and in the body: people dance, kneel, lift hands and come forward to the elders for prayer in every area of life. To forbid a bodily response to the word may be to impose one culture's reserve on another culture's faith. And they point to fruit: a great many believers, in every continent, trace their conversion to a moment when they were invited to come and came.

The critics' case is equally serious, and it is not a matter of temperament. It begins with the ordinary means God uses. John Williamson Nevin, a German Reformed theologian at Mercersburg in Pennsylvania, attacked Finney's measures in The Anxious Bench (1843). He argued that the bench substituted a technique for the patient work of the church, catechism, preaching, sacraments and pastoral care, through which God normally brings people to faith, and that it produced excitement which was easily mistaken for conversion. Iain Murray, in The Invitation System (1967), pressed the point further: an outward act at the end of a meeting is easily confused with the inward work of new birth; people who come forward are often assured they are now Christians, and many never continue; and the methods used to encourage people forward, repeated verses of a hymn, emotional pressure, every head bowed and every eye closed, can produce a response the Spirit did not produce.

Their texts are as real as the defenders'. New birth is God's work: 'children born not of blood, nor of the desire or will of man, but born of God' (John 1:13). 'No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him' (John 6:44). With Lydia, 'The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul's message' (Acts 16:14). Paul refused persuasive words of wisdom, 'so that your faith would not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power' (1 Corinthians 2:5). Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in Preaching and Preachers (1971), argued that truth should reach the will through the mind and the heart, that direct pressure on the will intrudes on the Spirit's work and can produce decisions that do not last, and that it tempts the preacher to measure his success by results he can see. Critics also note that the public response the New Testament actually records is baptism (Acts 2:41, 8:36, 16:33); the sacramental traditions say the call of the sermon is answered at the font, in confession and at the Lord's table, which the church has always had. Defenders reply that in Acts baptism followed the same day, and that where churches now rightly delay baptism for teaching, an invitation is one way of letting a person begin that public confession at once.

Critics add pastoral and global points of their own. In some congregations the same people come forward every week, so the invitation teaches them that assurance comes from a repeated act rather than from Christ. In some places the altar call has become a stage for spectacle, or for collecting money. And in persecuted contexts, a public response may be dangerous: a raised hand in a room where an informer sits can cost a job, a marriage or a life. Critics argue that a form developed in a Christian society does not travel safely to every society. Defenders answer each of these points in turn: that the misuse of a practice is an argument for using it rightly, not for dropping it; that a repeated coming forward for prayer is not the same as a repeated claim to conversion, and can be taught as such; and that the New Testament church confessed Christ publicly, and was baptized publicly, in exactly the kind of hostile setting where that confession could cost a life.

Both sides are right about some things, and it helps to say plainly what is not in dispute. Everyone in this argument agrees that a sermon should call for a response, because the sermons in Acts do. Everyone agrees that manipulation is forbidden: 'We do not practice deceit, nor do we distort the word of God' (2 Corinthians 4:2), and 'we never used words of flattery or any pretext for greed' (1 Thessalonians 2:5). Everyone agrees that walking forward saves no one, that the Spirit gives life, and that a person who responds must be followed up and taught. What remains in dispute is whether a public, physical response at the end of a sermon is a faithful form of the biblical call in your setting, or a human technique that the call does not need.

Between the two positions, preachers have found many ways of ending with a clear call. Some invite anyone who wants to respond to speak with the pastor or an elder after the service, by the door or in a side room. Some invite hearers to pray a response silently where they sit, and then to tell someone that week. Some call people to the next baptism class, or to the Lord's table. Some give a public invitation but refuse every kind of pressure: they say it once, plainly, and wait. Whatever you do, decide it with your church's leaders, in line with your church's practice, and with your hearers' safety in mind. And make sure the call fits the text: if the passage calls believers to forgive one another, do not end with an appeal for conversion simply because that is how sermons end.

Open the page from the last lesson, with your passage, main idea, need and skeleton. Today you add the two ends. Write the conclusion first, then the introduction, for the reason given in section 2.

Step one: the response sentence. Under your skeleton, write one sentence that begins The hearers are asked to, and finish it with something concrete that the text itself asks for. Not be more faithful, but something a person could actually do or decide this week: confess a specific sin to God tonight, go and make peace with the person they quarrelled with, bring their child to the next baptism class, keep praying for the son who has left, trust Christ for forgiveness today. If you are preaching to believers, the call may be to repentance, trust, endurance or obedience; if unbelievers will be present, decide whether and how to invite them to Christ.

Step two: the conclusion. Write four to six sentences. One that gathers the main idea in fresh words. One or two that apply it concretely to people in your congregation, without naming anyone. One that makes the call, with the urgency of the text. And, if you can, one image or line from the passage itself to end on, so that the last thing the hearers hear is scripture. Read it aloud. If it contains anything new, cut it.

Step three: decide the form of the response. Write one line saying how you will invite people to respond: silent prayer, an invitation to speak with an elder afterwards, coming forward for prayer, the baptism class, the Lord's table, or something else your church practises. If you serve in a place where public response is dangerous, write down how a person could respond safely and privately. If you are not the senior pastor, ask him or the elders about this before you preach.

Step four: the introduction. On a separate line write three things your hearers already know, feel or worry about that touch the need your text meets: things from their week, their work, their village or city, their family life. Choose the one that is most real and most connected to the text. Then write your first sentence, the one that comes after any greetings. Make it short. Make it about them, not you. Then write two or three sentences that move from that point to the text, and one that tells them what to listen for.

Step five: check the proportions. Time yourself reading the introduction aloud. If your sermon will be thirty minutes, the introduction should usually be about three. Then read the introduction and the conclusion one after the other, with nothing in between. They should sound like the beginning and end of the same sermon. If they do not, one of them is about a different sermon, and it is probably the introduction. Rewrite it until they belong together.