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Adam Ramsey > 5 Things to be conscious of when preaching to young people (part 1)
Over the past decade, I have had many opportunities to open the Bible and preach to young people in a huge range of settings and cultures.
While I have previously written on some of the most common ways I have bombed a sermon (and seen many other young preachers do likewise!), I have also learned some helpful practices along the way that can help the message stick.
While these practices are intentionally pragmatic, they are of little use if the fundamental message being preached is anything other than the gospel. Only the gospel – the good news of the finished work of Jesus, on the cross, in our place, for our sins – has the Holy Spirit propelled power to make dead hearts live. In all our ministry to young people, the gospel should never be assumed, but declared boldly and declared repeatedly. Your church is only ever one generation away from extinction, and the high calling of every parent and preacher is to faithfully pass on the baton of faith to the next generation.
So what follows are 5 super practical ‘sermon-wins’ I strive to be conscious of when preaching the gospel to a younger crowd.
Win #1:Be interactive.
If you’ve been in student ministry for more than 7 seconds, you know that keeping the attention of a room full of teenagers can feel like herding caffeinated squirrels. A vital part of preaching to students is repeatedly engaging them and involving them in the sermon. There are many ways to do this, but two of my favorites are:
1) Asking questions. Short bursts of dialogue and well-placed questions throughout a sermon both challenge our minds and engage our attention. When speaking to a crowd of young people, I tend to use a mixture of rhetorical and literal questions that involve them in the message. For example, I might say, “The Bible is not a book about many heroes but one hero. What’s his name? That’s right, Jesus!”
2) Encourage note-taking. The person who just listens to a sermon will never retain as much as the one who listens and writes down what they heard. Writing down your big take-aways from a sermon greatly increases your likelihood of applying them to your life. I encourage our volunteer leaders to sit among their students (rather sitting with other leaders or standing around the back) so that they can model this to their students.
Win #2: Be simple.
Simple doesn’t mean shallow. May youth ministries be done forever with watered down sermons that merely entertain, share, woo, intellectualize or abbreviate the Word of God! A ‘simple’ sermon is one where the Bible is preached in such a way that its truth is understood and remembered.
For me, the hardest part of preparing a sermon is not working out what to say, but what to leave out. Let me particularly address those who learned to preach in seminary of Bible college: the goal of a sermon is not revealing what you have learned about the Scriptures, but imparting what you have learned to your listeners (2 Timothy 2:2).
Actually, you can take your young people much deeper into the Scripture than you think; the key is doing it in a language they understand. You can teach a deep concept; just illustrate it. You can use a big Christian word; just explain it. Otherwise you might feel like you nailed your systematic theology, but your students will have mentally checked-out faster than a husband being forced to attend a birthing class (this is a theoretical analogy and in no way related to that one time I fell asleep on the front row of our first child’s birthing class).
Youth Leader: Preach the deep truths of Scripture in a way that a 14 year old will remember.
Win #3: Be repetitive.
Memorable preaching hammers home the hook.
An important part of preaching biblical truth in an unforgettable way is boiling down your sermon to a one-sentence hook. This is the nail that gets hammered home again and again and again throughout the message. If someone only remembers one thing from the message, your ‘hook’ is what you want them to remember. Memorable preaching hammers home the hook.
When people ask me what I am preaching on, my go-to response is, “Jesus.” Once I’ve sufficiently annoyed them with my Jesus-juke, my next response will be whatever the hook of my message is. For example, a sermon on sanctification and growing as a Christian might have the hook of, “Fruit happens slowly, but fruit happens.” If you have finished writing your sermon, but you are unable to explain it in one-sentence, you haven’t finished writing your sermon.
Make space in your sermon prep to craft, edit, meditate on, and re-edit this line until it finally takes up residence in your head like an unwelcome Taylor Swift song. Why?
Because memorable preaching hammers home the hook.
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About Adam Ramsey
Adam Ramsey really loves Jesus. He also enjoys being married to Kristina, going on Daddy Dates with his little girl, Alaiya, and wrestling with his boys, Benaiah and Ezra. Originally from Australia where he pioneered a youth movement and led a location at a multisite church, Adam currently serves as the director of Student Ministries at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, where he is equipping a generation to spread Jesus’ fame. Fiery and insightful, Adam is well known for his humorous, hard-hitting style that ignites people’s affections for Jesus.
Connect with Adam on Twitter.
