Most of us have preached a sermon we were sure was good, then watched it land with a thud. The exegesis was sound and the outline was clean, but the room drifted somewhere around point two. Joe McKeever has been preaching for nearly sixty years and in What Makes Preaching Boring (And How to Fix It) he makes a simple, uncomfortable diagnosis: boring sermons answer questions nobody is asking.
That's a preaching lesson, but it's also a leadership lesson. A pastor who doesn't know what his people are wrestling with will struggle to lead them anywhere, from the pulpit or anywhere else. This guide isn't about adding gimmicks to Sunday morning. It's about paying closer attention to the people we've been given.
Read through it beforehand if you can. We won't get through every lesson, and we don't need to. Come ready to talk about the one that stings a little.
Before We Sit Down
Think back over your last few months of preaching. Which sermon do you think landed best, and which one do you suspect didn't land at all? How do you actually know? Hold onto both. We'll open there.
(1) Answer the question our people are actually asking
McKeever tells about a seven-year-old girl named Holly who sat through one of his sermons and then asked her mother why "Doctor Joe" thought they needed all that information. Out of the mouths of babes. Holly put words to what plenty of adults in the audience were thinking but would never say.
Boring preaching isn't often false preaching. It's just disconnected preaching. We spend the week inside a text, we get excited about what we find and we forget that the people in the room haven't been on that journey with us. They came in carrying a diagnosis, a teenager who won't talk to them, a marriage that's fraying, a job that's slipping away. If the sermon never touches any of that, it doesn't matter how accurate it was.
This is a leadership issue before it's a homiletics issue. You can't answer your people's questions if you don't know what they are. That means time in hospital rooms, at kitchen tables, and in the hallway after church, listening more than talking.
For our conversation:
- If someone in your church asked Holly's question about last Sunday's sermon, what would you honestly say?
- Where are you getting your sense of what your people are wrestling with right now? Is that source current or is it a few years old?
(2) Help them feel the need before you give the answer
McKeever points to the flight attendant's safety talk. Let’s be honest, most people don’t listen. We've heard it, we know where the exits are and we go back to our phones or laptops. The reality is that if an engine catches fire mid-flight, every passenger will suddenly want to know exactly how that oxygen mask works. The information didn't change. The sense of need did.
Good preaching does some of that work up front. Before we hand people the answer, we help them see why we need it, where we are vulnerable, what's at stake and what it costs if we get this wrong. That isn't manipulation or manufactured drama. It's honesty about our human condition, the kind of honesty Scripture itself practices.
The same holds true for leading change in a church. People rarely move because we have a good idea. Movement happens when we understand why staying put isn't an option.
For our conversation:
- Think about your next sermon. What's at stake for the listener if they ignore it? Can you say that clearly?
- Where in our leadership, outside the pulpit, are we offering answers before people feel the need for them?
(3) Say one thing
McKeever's test is blunt. If we can't say what our sermon is about in one sentence, we have a problem. Haddon Robinson called this the "big idea," a single truth that grows out of what the passage is about and what it says about that subject. Everything else in the sermon serves that one idea or gets cut.
Many of us were trained to preach three points and a poem. There's nothing wrong with structure, but three competing ideas usually means our audience remembers none of them. One clear truth, explained, illustrated, and applied, will travel further than a crowded outline.
One main sentence also works as a discipline for us. It becomes the North Star for the whole week of preparation. What goes in? What stays out? How will we know we are done.
For our conversation:
- What was Sunday's sermon in one sentence? How long did it take you to find it?
- What usually tempts you to add a second or third big idea?
(4) Preach the way Jesus taught
Jesus didn't deliver information dumps. Again and again, His teaching starts with a question somebody was actually asking. A lawyer wanted to know "Who is my neighbor?" and got the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29). The Pharisees grumbled that He ate with sinners and He answered with the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son (Luke 15:1–2). John's disciples asked why His followers didn't fast and He talked about new patches and new wine (Matthew 9:14).
Notice the pattern. Jesus let real questions, sometimes hostile ones, set the agenda and then He answered with stories people couldn't forget. He met people where they were and then took them somewhere they hadn't expected to go.
We don’t need to stop preaching Scripture verse by verse. We just need to ask two questions. What did this passage mean to the people who first heard it and where are people in my church wrestling with the same thing today?
For our conversation:
- What's a question you've heard from someone in your church recently that might deserve a whole sermon?
- When Jesus faced hostile questions, He answered with a story. How do you respond when people push back on you?
(5) Cut what you love
Most boring sermons aren't too thin. They're too full. Long stretches of historical background, word studies that go nowhere, the fascinating tangent we found on Thursday afternoon. McKeever's warning sign was simple. If our notes run longer than our time, something has to go.
This is painful because the material we most want to keep is often the material we worked hardest to find. Our congregation doesn't need to see all our homework. They need the thing our homework produced. A concrete story will usually do more than a paragraph of background, because people often remember what they can picture.
Leadership asks the same discipline of us. Not every good idea needs to be shared, launched, or put on the preaching calendar. Part of maturity is knowing what we leave out.
For our conversation:
- What's the thing you're most likely to keep in a sermon that you probably should cut?
- Outside the pulpit, where is your ministry carrying too many good things to do any of them well?
(6) Length is not really the problem
Pew Research found that the median sermon in the U.S. runs about 37 minutes, ranging from around 14 minutes in Catholic churches to more than 50 minutes in historically Black Protestant churches. Every tradition has its own expectations and none of those numbers is the problem by itself.
A focused, engaging 45 minute sermon can feel short and an unfocused 20 minute sermon can feel endless. The real question isn't "How long?" but "Did every minute earn its place?" When we blame length, we can avoid the harder work of clarity.
For our conversation:
- When your sermons run long, what's usually the cause?
- If you had to cut your next sermon by a third, what would go first? What does that tell you?
(7) Listen for the silence afterward
McKeever offers a few signs that a sermon didn't connect. We can't summarize it in a sentence. Our notes run past our time. Our own family can't tell us what the main point was.
Silence after a sermon is often feedback. So is the honest answer from our spouse or a trusted friend, if we've given them permission to give it. Most pastors get very little real feedback on our preaching, because most people are too kind or too intimidated to tell us. If we want to grow, we have to go looking for it.
If we don't build real channels for feedback, we will find out about problems only when they're too big to fix quietly.
For our conversation:
- Who currently gives you honest feedback on your preaching? If the answer is "no one," why do you think that is?
- What would it take to ask two or three people this week, "What was the point of Sunday's sermon?" and really listen to the answer?
Around the Table
- Which of these seven lessons hits closest to home right now?
- What question are our people asking that we have been avoiding, on the stage or off the stage?
- What would change in our preparation if we started every sermon by writing its one sentence first?
- Where is our leadership, not just our preaching, answering questions nobody is asking?
- Who could we invite to give us honest feedback in the next two weeks?
- What's one thing we will do differently in preparing next Sunday's sermon?
Let’s pray for each other!