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This I learned from watching Dr. Howard Hendricks' remarkable lectures this semester in BE101: Bible Study Methods. (Incidentally, anyone can experience this course by reading Dr. Hendricks' Living by the Book. It covers the course material almost verbatim, even down to the anecdotes and overhead diagrams. If you want a fun, approachable way of learning how to study the Bible with skill and insight, you can do no better than to read this book.)
In delivering a public lecture, sermon, or other speech, if you want to make a real impact on the minds and lives of your audience:
- Make no more than one or two points.
- State them as briefly and clearly as possible.
- Repeat them again and again.
- Amplify their importance to the absolute extreme. Use nothing but superlatives.
- Clothe them in as many stories as you can muster.
Stories are the key. Your stories should be real, personal (they involve you, or people you or your audience know), honest, and intense. The audience should be able to identify with the characters in the stories. The stories should underscore the questions you want your audience asking and the answers your speech is designed to give them. The feelings, questions, and consequences your stories highlight should be intense and powerful to the audience you're speaking to. They should come from the heart, and go to the heart.
Spend 90% of your time telling stories, and 10% in abstract discourse to make the actual point. If your audience is enraptured by your stories you won't need to spend a lot of time making your point. People are smart: if you can get them paying attention, thinking, and caring about the issue at hand, they'll do a lot of the mental work of understanding your message themselves. Stories are the key.
This technique didn't originate with Dr. Hendricks: it's also Biblical. What, after all, is a parable? Just trying counting the number of statements Jesus made in the Gospels that are "abstract" and the number that are illustrative or "story." You'll find the proportion of stories-to-abstract-discource to be very high. Not to mention that virtually the entire Old Testament is an illustration and object lesson, very scant on abstract commentary, and later illuminated in abstract form in the New Testament.
