This Sunday, in a church near you, someone is going to yell. And that person will probably be the preacher. Yelling has long been part of the preacher\u2019s arsenal of public speaking tools. When the crowd tunes out, take it up a notch. When someone nods off, let loose with a stentorian bellow. When people seem placid, fire \u2018em up with a rousing round of shouting. When you catch a whiff of apathy, yell about it. If the \u201camens\u201d reach a lull, cut loose with another ear-splitting session. When the sermon is nearing its climax, make people reach to turn down their hearing aids. Crank it up, shout it out, and bring the house down! I want to raise the yelling question because a lot of preachers shout, and it undoubtedly has an effect on the delivery and the message. Is this effect good or bad?<\/p>\n
There are things worth shouting about. Is preaching one of them? I know many effective speakers and preachers who can transition to shouting without even thinking about it. For some of these speakers, yelling is just the modus operandi <\/i>for preaching. They start quiet, but then they ramp up to a fever pitch in just a few minutes. Other speakers know how to nuance their yelling by carefully selecting the points in the message at which they will yell.<\/p>\n
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Other speakers don\u2019t yell at all. Why are you<\/i> shouting? In this article, I want to ask that question from several angles. Rather than simply accept yelling as necessary or dismiss it as unnecessary, let\u2019s be intentional about this technique.<\/p>\n
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Why are we yelling?\u00a0<\/i>Someone once said, \u201cYou hear of screaming used-car salesmen…but you never hear anyone screaming in a Mercedes commercial.\u201d \u00a0Preaching isn\u2019t about used cars. But it\u2019s probably not about Mercedes, either. So much for that cute-sounding quote.<\/p>\n
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This is an important consideration. Marshall McLuhan is famous for saying, “The medium is the message,\u201d by which he meant that the form a message takes is symbiotically related to the perception of the message itself. You can\u2019t separate the two. Medium \u2014 how the message is proclaimed \u2014 influences the meaning of the message.<\/p>\n
When it comes to yelling, that medium embeds itself within the message itself. In other words, your yelling says something about the message. So, we should ask this important question \u2014 Is what you\u2019re yelling about worth yelling about? <\/i>Pro-yellers would answer with a facile \u201cyes.\u201d But let\u2019s go a level deeper with two more questions:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let me take that first question, \u201cWhat does yelling communicate?\u201d There\u2019s no single right answer, but a range of possibilities. Here are just a few:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n None of these are necessarily wrong in and of themselves. It\u2019s okay to be angry (Ephesians 4:26). It\u2019s good to be heartbroken (Matthew 5:4). It\u2019s totally appropriate to raise your voice so your listeners can hear you. Thanks to modern amplification, most preachers don\u2019t need to yell to make themselves heard. Nor do they need to yell in order to make their message understood. However, yelling can <\/i>impact the message. Since anger, grief, intensity, and passion are not alone negative things, we need to ask an even more nuanced question.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If yelling has meaning, and I\u2019m arguing that it does, <\/i>then what meaning does yelling put upon the message? Well, it depends on a lot of things. So, I\u2019m going to break this question down, sharpen it up, and put it to you: \u00a0Does yelling within this context, at this point in my message, about this subject matter, with this style and towards these people help or hurt my overall message?<\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wow. So we\u2019re getting this detailed about a way of speaking? Sure it may be seem like overkill, but it pays to be conscientious and careful, especially with an issue as important as preaching. Yelling is a double-edge sword. It can offend people, or it can enhance the message. Yelling says something about you too.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Since this article has two-dozen questions in it, I don\u2019t mind asking just one more. After all, this is the whole interrogative title of the article, \u201cShould you yell when you preach?\u201d For that matter, should you roar, shout, scream, snicker, yuk…you get the idea. Sure you can. Maybe you should. I don\u2019t know. It just depends. If you\u2019d like to yell in the comments, you can use all caps. Should you or your pastor yell when they\u00a0preach?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This Sunday, in a church near you, someone is going to yell. And that person will probably be the preacher. Yelling has long been part of the preacher\u2019s arsenal of public speaking tools. When the crowd tunes out, take it up a notch. When someone nods off, let loose with a stentorian bellow. When people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[2307,4154,4141,405,4136],"tags":[2077,2079,2078],"class_list":{"0":"post-12667","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-christian-lifestyle","8":"category-church-resources-church-resources","9":"category-church-ministry","10":"category-pastor-how-to","11":"category-pastoral-leadership","12":"tag-pastor-discussion","13":"tag-pastor-sermons","14":"tag-yelling"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogrouting.sharefaith.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/750-yell-preach.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
What Does Yelling Communicate?<\/h3>\n
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What meaning does yelling inject into the message?<\/h3>\n
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So, should you yell when you preach?<\/h3>\n