Why Your Message Notes may be Sabotaging You

As someone who speaks in a variety of contexts (church services, conferences, training schools), I often get questions on how I prepare and how I organize my messages. I love when I get this question, because I love to talk about the craft of speaking, and preparation and organization for messages makes a huge difference. In my experience, this is an area that makes a tremendous difference and often receives too little focus. It's easy to focus almost entirely on what we are going to say, or perhaps how we plan to say it, and miss the point that the way you structure the message itself has huge effects on what comes through the process.

There is a famous quote in the business world that is often used to describe why focusing on structure is so important:

We often trace results to tactical things: how much effort we put in and so forth, when in reality there is great power to the structures we have in place, and structural effects will overtake tactical choices nearly every time.

I would suggest that this applies to our preaching as well. So here is my question for you: what do you want the experience of your communication to be? For me, I want the experience of preaching (both for me and those who are hearing) to be clear, relevant, helpful, succinct, powerful, and fun. If that's what I want the experience to be like, then I need a structure that facilitates that. Unfortunately, what I see more often than than anything else is that this is what people are using to share from:

Ugh...talk about a structure that just speaks, "boring, dry, overwhelming amounts of information." If this is what we produce, and what we share from in our preaching preparation, isn't it natural that's what the experience on the other side will feel like? I think we can do better.

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Where I've landed (at least for now)

I think each communicator needs to work through the process of developing their own approach to sharing. As an example to encourage your process, here is what I presently aim to do as I prepare a message. I've developed this framework over hundreds of messages and years of speaking, so don't feel too discouraged if your process doesn't feel like it comes right away; it needs to be born out of your practice and your reflections on your practice.

By the way, to make this all concrete, I'm going to refer to one of the messages I recently posted on my site here: The Kingdom and Government. Here is a full copy of the sermon notes I used in this message.

My goal is take us all on an idea-journey

The starting question that I think I would ask is this: what is your goal in speaking? Do you want to convince someone of a particular point of view? Give them a practical tool for their life? Educate them on what the Bible says? All of these are noble goals and may be your primary approach to speaking. The goal I've set is to bring people along an idea-journey, where I explore what the ideas contained in the Bible actually mean, and in that bring us all the point where we have to determine what we believe and what we want to live.

You can't have many major ideas on the journey

One of the primary mistakes I see many communicators make is they have too many ideas in play in their messages. When that happens, and when the ideas aren't well organized, the whole thing turns into a tangled mess of about 100 concepts, and it's impossible to know what to walk away with. In my experience, an idea journey should be 3-5 ideas. (Mine are nearly always four). If you go beyond five ideas, any overall structure is too complicated to remember, either for you or for your listeners. Not only do we only have 3-5 ideas we can share, these 3-5 ideas need to link to each other; they need to be a journey. The first need to naturally lead to the second, the second to the third and so on. Usually I set it up so that each big idea is the next natural question to ask after the previous one.

In the specific message we're using as a reference point, here is my idea journey:

1. Politics is in the air right now; we need to talk about it
2. Many believers don't have a strong link between their faith and how they think about politics. We should have that link.
3. God's kingdom relates to our natural governments by working incarnationally. (This is the link you may not have)
4. So concretely, that means a few things about how we should see our natural government.

That's it. The whole 28 minutes worth of message is these four ideas, which naturally build on top each other.

Anything else I say needs to fit within one of my major ideas

Now obviously I say a lot more than those four major ideas during those 28 minutes, but everything else I say is there do explain or expound on those four ideas. I won't let myself add anything extra that is an "interesting tidbit" or and extra observation from the biblical text, the rest of what I share is defining and exploring these four ideas.

Within each of these four ideas, I try and appeal to a number of different learning styles and types of learning. My goal is to make each point through a number of distinct "channels":

• Biblical text(s)
• Logical analysis
• Illustrations or analogies
• Visuals
• Stories from my life or other's lives
• Appealing to the group's sense of emotion or connection

Each one of these will be helpful for a different person. One person is only asking the question, "Is that what the Bible says?", another is looking to feel emotionally connected to it. A third wants to make sure they see the logical coherence, and a fourth wants to experience it creatively. Yet another is looking to see it, and another is asking if this actually works in people's lives. Each of these people is looking for something distinct and different, and that specific channel of connection will really unlock understanding and connecting with the idea journey.

Much of what I do then, is within each of these idea-journey level points, is work to include as many of these channels of communication. Hang out in each one of these major points and work back-and-forth between these different learning channels. I logically develop the ideas, then I hit a Scripture which says the same thing in that channel, then I share an analogy that illustrates what I'm talking about, and so on. I'm actually not often saying a lot of different things, so much as I'm saying the same thing through these different channels. As that happens, I can observe the way this is (or isn't) connecting with the audience, and either move on, or keep developing in that area.

In this way, I view each of these major ideas like an accordion; they can expand or contract based on what you need. If people are struggling to connect with the idea, stretch the idea out a little longer and add more channels of connection. If people get it and you're ready to move on, contract that idea and move on to the next one.

This means my messages tend to be dynamic; a piece of feedback I often get at church is how different the messages are from each other with each service. There are of course multiple reasons for that (getting more comfortable with more deliveries is a factor for sure), but some of that is that I'm purposely adjusting the message on the fly based on what's needed in the moment. I can do this because I only have four ideas, not like 48.

To make this section concrete, in the major idea, "Many believers don't have a strong link between their faith and how they think about politics.", here is what I put in my notes (not even precisely sure if this is what I did):

1. I observe that this is an area we haven't necessarily given a lot of thought.
2. I suggest that submission to Jesus in every area of our lives means we need to be submitted to Jesus here, or our life won't work well. (Logical analysis)
3. I used the analogy of someone who had a drinking problem to illustrate how not having a portion of our lives in alignment with God's plan is problematic (analogy)
4. I read Isaiah 9:6-7 and noted that it talks about Jesus' government (Biblical text)
5. I talk about how the language "kingdom of God" necessarily means we have to think about God's government and our government. How can we have a rule without a form of government? (Logical analysis again)

and so on. You see the point; pretty much all I'm saying over and over "We can't afford not to think about this" in these different channels.

I organize my notes to visually capture the accordion

My goal with my message notes is for them to disappear from the process as much as possible. I want to be present in the moment, communicating, and my notes are to help me do that when I need them, then I want them to be out of sight, out of mind. Because of that, probably the most important element I need from my notes is to be able to find my spot in the notes very quickly. I don't want to follow my notes through the message; I want to be fully in the moment sharing for as long as I can, then quickly pick up with my notes when I need to.

It turns out that if you want to quickly find where you are in a message, about the worst way you could do that is organize with a lot of text (like the sermon outline above). This is better than it could be because there is some organization that is visual (the indents), but if you have pages of text like above, you're asking to get bogged down. It turns out that our brains process visual information 60,000x faster than text. Sixty-thousand times faster! If you want to be able to quickly sort through your notes and find something, don't organize with text, organize visually.

Here is how I do it: I organize with a big, colored shape to denote each of the major ideas I have. This way I can find which major idea I'm in almost instantly. Within each accordion, I add a color next to each point with which channel of input it is:

• Biblical texts are red
• Logic is yellow
• Illustrations, analogies, or stories are green
• Connection points are blue
• Visuals are teal

This way I can look at the color of the notes and nearly instantly I can parse which major idea I'm in and which channel I'm looking for. Looking for that illustration? Find the green bar. That verse? The red bar. I can sort through the entirety of my notes and find visual or scripture in much less than a second. This allows me to be more fluid and sharing in the moment, and then I can engage the notes when I need the specific information, or when I get lost, but I don't get tied to the notes, having to closely follow through them unless I get lost. Here is what it looks like:

This not only gives the advantage of simplifying my notes and how to engage with them, it also draws out some broader message features: what is the balance of the different channels of input? How many different kinds do we have in each major idea? All of this is instantly visible and it results in me creating a more balanced message because I can see the forest, just as well as the trees.

Not only is this more functional, and easier to use, it also feels a lot more fun to me. It's colorful, engaging, and that puts me in the right mental state to communicate that way. I don't look at my notes and feel bogged down by pages of black-and-white text; my message notes give me a dose of energy just by looking at them.

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Find your own way

Each communicator needs to develop their own philosophy of communication and methodology with his or her notes and so forth. I'm not suggesting you should adopt my method - although feel free to borrow any of this that is helpful to you - but rather I want to suggest that if you're a regular communicator, do the reflective work it takes to determine what your approach will be. Once I developed this approach (probably about 3-4 years into regularly communicating), I saw massive returns in my preparation process and my delivery experience. The structure of our communication has the power to make the result we want feel like we're pushing uphill the whole way, or like it's a natural, fruitful experience.