INTERVIEW
Finding Your Voice: An Interview with Dale Shaeffer How do you find out your own particular style as a preacher? Grace & Peace spoke to Dale Shaeffer, who has been a lead pastor and church planter for 15 years and recently was elected as the district superintendent of the Florida district. I N T E R V I E W E R : R E B E CC A R O D E H E AV E R , A S S I S TA N T E D I TO R
HOW DID YOU FIND YOUR VOICE AS A PREACHER? Nothing will help you get better at what you do than practice, but not just usual practice— evaluated practice. One thing that helped me in my first year of preaching was getting feedback from people who cared about me enough to tell me the truth about how I communicated. I started with a simple, “Tell me three good things I did in the sermon that helped you, and tell me three things that were distracting or unhelpful.” I’d apply the feedback the next time, and that was my process for three years. Later, about a year into my church-planting journey, I started asking people to evaluate our service with four questions: “What worked today? What didn’t work today? What was unclear about what I communicated? What should I do differently?” Those four questions helped me tremendously. Being willing to hear feedback is essential to finding your voice. Listening to preachers helped me, too. I didn’t want to copy them, but I wanted to learn from them. So, I listened to preachers, other communicators, TED talks, and comedians to figure out how to deliver humor, time communication, and manage inflection. I read books on preaching and on writing. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird helped me understand the construction of a sermon. Stephen King’s On Writing helped me understand how to tell a story.
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I realized I was in a didactic pattern of communicating topical messages. The culture is largely biblically illiterate, and so much of the Scripture happens in the context of a story or a narrative. When I realized the relationship between the writer and the people, and the preacher and the people, my preaching became more narrative in style and form. So, I learned how to understand a story structure and how to embrace and resolve the tension in the story. A good story has many small tensions within the bigger tension. I began to see that most texts address a tension in a community of faith. I noted that the tension in the text is similar to what we face in life, so a narrative form of preaching became my voice. Through practice, reading, recognizing the cultural needs around me, and personal growth as a communicator, I was able to build my preaching voice. HOW DO YOU SELECT YOUR SERMON MATERIAL? I was taught what I call the Moses Model: Moses went up the mountain, met with God, came back with the word from God, and delivered it to the people. Over the course of my ministry, I realized that God speaks to a lot of people in our
