"It's A Sin To Bore For Jesus"
Ron Boyd-MacMillan wrote a remarkably useful and entertaining book, Explosive Preaching, which I picked up while researching my own book.
His insights, intended to aid religious preachers, are useful to anybody who intends to make a speech, whether at a wedding or for work.
In this interview (audio below), Ron:
- tells me why the great early preacher St Augustine used to improvise;
- says he’s been disappointed that churches, in Covid, have sounded like bureaucrats interested only in health and safety; and
- tells stories about his work training preachers across the world and in many denominations. In particular, how he prepared Chinese “house church” preachers to memorise dozens of hours of sermons all at once.
Whatever your interest in communication, you’ll learn from Ron how to think about your purpose, your audience, the arrangement of your material, the style you adopt, how to memorise your material, and how best to deliver it.
PLUS: Whatever kind of creative work you are doing, you will want to stop occasionally and assess it. That applies to public speaking, writing a book, and making a podcast.
At the start of this episode, I perform a quick assessment of my own progress with this podcast, and note that I would never have started if I had hoped to know all this at the beginning – a reminder to all creative types to get started.