Learn From Advertisers About Preaching
Learn from Advertisers About Preaching
A long time ago in this blog I did a series of posts on what we preachers can learn from television producers. Those posts are here. With this post I’m beginning a new series on what we preachers can learn from advertisers. I came across a book recently with the intriguing title, Preaching and the Thirty-second Commercial. I found that there is much that we can learn from advertisers about preaching more effectively. I’ll be summarizing the information of the authors, O. Wesley Allen, Jr. and Carrie La Ferle, in these posts, as well as adding my own insights and experience.
The World Has Changed
If you haven’t noticed, the world has changed. Let me give you few examples:
- In the last couple of decades the population of the world has grown tremendously. In 1998 the global population was 5.9 billion. In 2018 there were 7.6 billion people in the world.
- In 2007 the population of urban centers in the world surpassed that of people living in rural areas for the first time.
- There was no such thing as Social media in 1998. However, today more than two thirds of Americans are on Facebook, and more than 3 billion around the world have Facebook account in 2021.
- In 2019 81 percent of Americans owned a smart phone, and 96 percent owned some type of device to access the internet.
Imagine that! In other words, people are barraged with communication. The estimate is that in the 1970’s, Advertisers exposed the typical American consumer to 500 ads per day. Researchers estimate that the typical American today sees and hears 5,000 ads per day.. That’s a bit intimidating, isn’t it?
The Challenge For Advertisers and Preachers
When I used to train Sunday School Teachers, I used to share with them a drawing of a human head, and over it was an umbrella type of filter that filtered out what the human mind found irrelevant. The challenge, I said, is to penetrate the filter by making the information we are sharing with the students interesting enough and relevant enough to get through the filter. That filter prevents somewhere around 70% of the information that we receive daily from getting through.
You see the challenge for preachers, right? We need to learn from advertisers about preaching in order to break through the filter.
The communication that we give is relatively unique in our world. Almost nowhere else do people hear a monologue presentation for 30 minutes (except maybe in political rallies). What do we need to do for people to hear us through the noise of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram? How will they hear it when they are bombarded with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram messages?
I remember the day when my wife was waiting in my office for me to complete the second service of the morning. While there, she accessed her Facebook, and found one person who was in the 
worship service communicating with another in the sound booth. This happened while I was preaching. Hmmm….. Thankfully, they began the conversation by talking about my sermon before moving on to other things. But you see the problem. The filter is thick, and we preachers need to learn from advertisers about preaching, since they are experts in penetrating the haze.
Conclusion
In the next post, we’ll look at how many of the presumptions of our hearers has changed. This makes the challenge even greater. These posts may get a bit discouraging, but hang on. We’ll get to the methods to use soon.
