Learning Communication from Andy Stanley

If you hear him speak, you’ll know that Andy Stanley knows something about communication. He shares some of this knowledge in Communicating for a Change: Seven Keys to Irresistible Communication (Multnomah, 2006). Andy is senior pastor of North Point Community Church in the Atlanta Metroplex. 

If you have completed the Rockbridge Seminary course “Preaching/Teaching for Life Change,” you’ll be particularly interested in knowing more about Andy Stanley’s approach to communication. I consider Andy a master communicator.

Ed Stetzer recently interviewed Andy about communication for Ed’s blog. Here are excerpts from Andy’s responses to questions.

Communication all about engagement

There is this myth that people say, “Sermons need to be short because people today have short attention spans.” That is totally irrelevant. People’s attention spans are as long as their engagement. If I’m engaged, I will sit and stay engaged until I have to go to the bathroom. The issue is: are people engaged, not how long the sermon is. 

As a pastor we tend to err on: Is the information true? Not even helpful, but is it true? That is, if I present true information that is true to God’s Word, then I get an A. No, we are teaching the Bible, so we are assuming it is true. You don’t get any points for that. Good grief, we are teaching the Bible–it better be true! The more relevant questions should be: Was the presentation engaging? And was the information helpful? If you have an engaging presentation with helpful information, people will come back next week for more of that. If you are engaging but not helpful, after awhile they will grow weary. It is interesting but I did not learn anything. If it is helpful but not engaging, then I am bored. And it may be stuff that I really need, but if you didn’t engage me, I can’t stay with you. You need to be helpful and engaging.

What about verse-by-verse preaching?

Guys that preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible– that is just cheating. It’s cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn’t how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that. There’s not one example of that.

Effective preaching or effective communication is for me … isn’t three points or four points. It’s really one point that is somehow connected to a passage and it is connected to a life. And then you should stop talking because you are done.

Andy’s preparation process

At a recent “Grow Up Conference,” I diagrammed my communication process as: Me–We–God–You–Us. The communication starts with Me– let me tell you something about me. Then We, this is something we all have in common. Then God, this is what God says about it. You, this is what you need to do about it. And We, wouldn’t it be great if we all did it. So it is a relational outline. Start with you. Connect to them. What does God have to say about this issue? What should you do about it? And what should we do about it?

So I talked structurally about what you hang on each of those pieces. You outline your communication relationally, and not just in terms of information. And it is so much easier. When guys bring their sermon outlines to me I say, “Alright, now where do you talk about you? They need to know who you are. And if you jump to the Bible, they’ve got to go with you. To me, that is the journey. It is me taking you into a conversation. And we start together and then we end together. We have a common problem and we find a solution. And we are all still on the same page.”

Becoming an effective communicator is hard work

I listen to my own CD’s all the time. In fact, on some Sundays I listen to all three services. And I want to get better and better, and I work on getting better. I listen for dumb habits that I have. I sometimes watch my own videos, which is horrible. That will either make you better or want to get out of ministry completely. I think I make it look easy, but it’s not. I work very, very hard.

Andy’s advice to preachers

Show up every Sunday morning with a burden that is so heavy that you feel like you will die if you don’t deliver it. And pray for that. Because if you don’t have that, then you just have information. The people will put up with all kinds of a lack of excellence if there is an intensity and a burden that has to be delivered. And many times I have looked at my notes and thought, “Yeah, this might be helpful, but God, what’s the thing I can’t wait until Sunday morning to deliver? And I honestly can’t wait for Sunday morning.

The other thing I always tell pastors, “If you preach from your weaknesses, you will never run out of sermon material.”

To read the full interview by Ed Stetzer: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5

To see Andy in action, watch as he speaks at the 2007 Catalyst Conference: