I thought I would share here the general content of my workshop on “Growing as a speaker” at the recent Rooted Conference. This is part one.
Competence
My very first youth group meeting I led as a rookie youth minister, I scribbled a few notes down and got up and spoke for 15 or 20 minutes with little to say and nothing of substance. It lacked scripture & gospel truth. I was embarrassed, to say the least, by my incompetence. The look on student’s faces when I got done left me with one frightening realization. I had no idea what I was doing and I’d better learn quickly how to provide substance with a style that captivated and challenged the students God had entrusted to my care.
Ten years later I faced a new challenge. This time it was in England. The challenge was to figure out how to communicate gospel truth in 15 minutes or less to a school assembly of between 200 and 500 students. That would not be terribly difficult except for the fact that 98% of them had no connection to the church or anything Christian. When they sat down in assembly, they crossed their arms (some figuratively and others literally) and looked up with a glare that said, “I have no interest in what you have to say”. I spoke weekly in assemblies for 5 years and I loved the challenge of captivating minds and communicating the gospel. I had already had ten years to learn how to effectively communicate to students and I was the only youth minister that did these assemblies. We saw some great fruit from those years. I was given the freedom in both public and private schools to share my faith freely as long as I did not tell students what they needed to believe. It was an amazing experience!
The truth is though that in my first 15 years of youth ministry I made a very significant shift in how I spoke to students. I went from learning how to do a great “youth talk” to how to communicate the truth of the Bible to students. In learning how to do a good youth talk I learned the Ken Davis SCORRE method. Ken was a highly sought after speaker in the 80’s and 90’s because he was such a dynamic communicator. He did inspirational speaking to corporations, stand up comedy for events, and evangelistic talks for various ministries across the country. He was the best at that time. His method looks like this…
Subject – what are you going to talk about?
Central Theme – narrowing your subject to a statement
Objective – what are you trying to say?
Rationale – the main points that support the objective
Resources – illustrations, Bible verses, etc to support your main points
Evaluate – look at your talk after you wrote it but before you deliver it to see if it makes sense and follows the model.
I learned a few other things from Ken Davis…
• Fermentation – prepare a talk and let it sit for a few days at least. Then go back and refine it.
• Parallel or progressive sub points to the main idea. For people to remember what your talk was about, sub points need to be either parallel or follow a linear path. Ken gave a talk at an event we took students to in which he challenged students to live a life with: nothing to hide, nothing to prove, and nothing to lose. The points here are both parallel and progressive and so memorable we put them on a t-shirt.
• Build a library of illustrations – gather stories, stats, facts, etc in a system that you can tap into as you prepare messages.
• Outline and go – I got to the point where I could quickly create a one note card message that outlined the points and illustrations I would use. I have in a pinch been able to deliver a good youth talk with 30 minutes prep time using this method.
My late younger brother studied improv at Second City Theater in Chicago. He encouraged me to take a class. He said it would help my work. So I did Improv 101 and the thing that I took away was the idea of learning to live in the moment. In improv you have to learn to feel like you are there in whatever the setting is. As a speaker I started to be able to tell stories like they were happening right now. Some of the best speakers I’ve heard understand how to live in the moment.
When we pursue competence, we will move from:
Unconsciously incompetent – which I was on my first night at youth group
Consciously incompetent – which was how I left my first youth group meeting
Consciously competent – knowing that we are working to be better communicators
Unconsciously competent – applying skills without even thinking about it.
But competence toward what end? I took a group to Ireland a few years back to form a partnership with a diocese there. We attended Ireland’s largest youth conference called “Summer Madness”. One of the speakers, who I am embarrassed to say was an American delivered two talks which were entirely devoid of the gospel and yet he called for a response. His first message was more about him than anything else. His second message emphasized that teens today are hurting, Jesus wants to take away that hurt so therefore come to Jesus. No mention of sin or forgiveness or the cross. Our students were shocked and I was proud that they saw through this. Our competence must be in communicating the truth of God and not just our great ideas or personality.
Great youth talks rely on us and our cleverness to create a persuasive message. Messages that transform lives have God’s word as the source of authority and take into consideration how people learn and grow.
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