What to Avoid When Preaching: 12 Habits That Lose a Congregation

# What to Avoid When Preaching: 12 Habits That Lose a Congregation

None of these are moral failures. They are habits, most of them invisible from the pulpit and obvious from the fourth row, and almost every preacher has at least three of them.

What should you avoid when preaching?

1. The apologetic opening

"I didn't have much time this week." "I'm not really a preacher." "Bear with me, this might be a bit rambling."

Whatever your motive, the effect is to tell a congregation that the next twenty-five minutes are not worth their full attention, and they will believe you. Start with the sermon. If the preparation was genuinely thin, the congregation will find out on its own and does not need a preview.

2. Two sermons in one

The most common structural failure past the first year. You found two good ideas in the passage, could not choose, and preached both. What people carry home is neither.

The fix is upstream: one claim, in one sentence, written at the top of the page before you draft. The other idea is not wasted; it is next month's sermon.

3. Explaining without landing

A verse-by-verse walk that explains every clause and never says what any of it demands. It feels rigorous while you are writing it, because the work is real. But if a listener cannot answer "so what?" at the end, they heard a lecture.

Every movement needs a landing: one sentence naming what this means for someone in that room. Not five. One.

4. Applications nobody can obey

"Let's be more intentional about community." "We need to grow in our commitment." These cannot be done or not done, so nobody does them.

Test every application by asking whether a person could fail at it by Wednesday. "Invite one household from this church to your table before the end of the month" passes. Abstractions fail.

5. The illustration that swallows the point

You tell a four-minute story, it is a good story, people are gripped, and afterward everyone remembers the story and nobody remembers what it illustrated. Illustrations should be windows: you look through them at something, not at them.

Practical rule: if the illustration is longer than the point it serves, cut it in half. If people quote the story back to you and cannot say what it was about, cut it entirely.

6. Family and congregation as material

Using your spouse, your children or a member's situation as sermon illustration without permission. The congregation will laugh, and something will be quietly lost: your family learns they are content, and members learn that what they tell you may end up in a sermon.

Ask first, every time, including for the flattering stories. Children in particular cannot meaningfully consent to being a recurring character.

7. Preaching at somebody

A specific person did something this week, and the sermon is now aimed at them. Everyone can feel it, including the person, and it turns the pulpit into a weapon.

If someone needs correcting, go and see them. The sermon is for the congregation, and a text applied to everyone will reach them too.

8. Unmarked confidence

Presenting a contested interpretation as though it were settled, or your inference as though it were the text's claim. Congregations contain people who read, and the moment they catch you overstating, everything else you say gets a discount.

The repair is one clause: "Christians have read this two ways, and I take it this way because..." That sentence costs eight seconds and buys years of credibility.

9. Running long because you did not cut

The sermon overruns because the draft was never edited, so you are cutting live, badly, while nervous. What gets cut in the moment is usually the application, because it is at the end.

Cut on Friday instead. If you consistently overrun, the problem is word count, and it is arithmetic rather than discipline: our sermon length calculator converts a draft to minutes, and how long should a sermon be covers what different settings actually expect.

10. The false ending

You say something that sounds like a conclusion, the congregation gathers itself, and then you keep going. Do it twice and attention does not come back for the real ending.

Know your last sentence, word for word. When you reach it, stop. A conclusion that adds new material is a new sermon starting at minute twenty-eight.

11. Verbal tics you cannot hear

"Amen?" after every point. "Right?" as punctuation. A throat-clear before each transition. Three "so"s per sentence. These are invisible to you and countable from the pew, and once a listener starts counting they have stopped listening.

You cannot fix what you cannot hear, which is why the only real remedy is reviewing your own delivery. More on that below.

12. Never listening to yourself

The habit that keeps the other eleven alive. Preachers who never review their own preaching keep every tic and every structural weakness indefinitely, because nothing in the Sunday feedback loop surfaces them. People say "good sermon" at the door regardless.

Reviewing one sermon a month is enough to catch most of this. Listen for where you sped up, where you filled time, whether the applications were concrete, and whether the ending landed.

How do you keep a congregation engaged?

Engagement is mostly a structural property, not a delivery one. Energetic delivery cannot rescue a sermon with no tension in it.

Raise a real question early and do not answer it too soon. A congregation stays with a sermon for the same reason a reader stays with a chapter: something is unresolved. Most sermons that sag in the middle sagged because the question was answered in the introduction.

Vary the texture. Exposition, story, direct address, a pause, a question, back to the text. Ten uninterrupted minutes of any one mode loses people regardless of quality.

Use the concrete. Named places, specific situations, real objects. Abstraction is the fastest way to lose a room, and it is the default register of theological language.

Look at people. Not at your notes, not at the back wall. Actual eye contact with actual faces, held for a sentence at a time.

Respect the ending. People give more attention to the last three minutes than to any other part of a sermon, and preachers routinely spend those minutes shuffling papers and re-summarising. Put your best material there.

The structural side of this is really a question of how the parts fit together, which is laid out in the five parts of a sermon.

Is it bad to read a sermon manuscript?

No. It is bad to read a manuscript badly, and that is a different problem with fixable causes.

Preachers have used full manuscripts for centuries, and some of the most affecting preaching anyone has heard was read. What makes read preaching feel dead is not the paper; it is the loss of eye contact, the flattening of the voice into reading register, and prose written for the eye rather than the ear.

If you use a manuscript, do these five things:

• Write for the ear. Short sentences. Subject early. Few subordinate clauses. Read it aloud while drafting and fix anything you cannot say in one breath.
• Format for the eye. Large type, short lines, wide margins, generous white space. Never let a sentence break across a page.
• Mark it up. Bold the sentences that must land. Mark the pauses.
• Know your paragraph openings. If the first line of each paragraph is in your head, you can start it looking at people and drop to the page mid-paragraph, which is where the eye contact comes from.
• Rehearse it standing, out loud, once. One pass is enough to convert a document into something you are saying rather than reading.

The alternative failure is worth naming too: preachers who abandon notes before they are ready ramble, repeat, and run long. Notes are not the enemy of life in the pulpit. Unrehearsed material is.

How do you handle nerves in the pulpit?

Nerves are not a defect. Something that matters is about to happen and your body knows it. The aim is to carry them, not to eliminate them.

Over-prepare the first ninety seconds. Nerves peak at the start and drop once you are moving. Know your first sentences cold and you buy yourself the passage across the worst of it.

Slow down deliberately. Adrenaline speeds everyone up. Plan a pause after your first sentence, and one after reading the text. They feel enormous to you and normal to everyone else.

Breathe out before you start. Nervous breathing is shallow and high. One long exhale before your first word settles the voice more than any other single thing.

Give your hands a job. Rest them on the lectern or hold your notes. Undirected hands find the microphone, your pockets, or your face.

Accept that you will fumble. You will lose a word or a place. The congregation is not scoring you. Pause, find it, and go on; a two-second silence is unremarkable from the pew and endless from the pulpit.

Reduce unknowns. Arrive early. Stand where you will stand. Find the clock. Test the microphone. Most pulpit anxiety is not about preaching, it is about the room.

And afterward, listen back once. Every item on this page is audible in a recording and invisible in the moment; the tic you cannot hear, the two minutes that lost the room, the ending that arrived twice. Listening on your phone is enough. If you would rather read than listen, our tool at sermon-transcription.com turns the audio into text you can mark up, which makes the verbal tics easy to count because they appear on the page. That helps if you preach weekly; if you preach occasionally, a recording and twenty minutes of honest attention will do the same work for nothing.