How to Preach to Teens

Many people start their preaching careers preaching to teenagers. Yet they have little or no training in preaching to teens. They are trained to preach to adults. You might wonder if you even connect with students or teens. Here are some basic observations after preaching to teens for thirteen years.

Instructions

1. Have something worth saying. This may seem obvious. But the most challenging thing of preaching to any audience is saying something worth while. And with teenagers most people preach too low, not too high. Here is my rule of thumb: if the content doesn't challenge my life this week, don't preach it.

2. Preach to yourself. This follows on the first, but adds to it. Not only does the sermon need to have potential to challenge your life, it needs to connect with your life this week. You need to be gripped by it, moved by it, challenged to act differently because of it. WIthout this it is very difficult to pull off number three.

3. Preach with passion. The number one comment from students about preachers they love is "passion." They want to know you care about what you are saying. This doesn't mean yelling at the students. That is a bigger turn off than you might think (even if it has been 'working' for years). This means authentically feeling what you are saying with such depth of emotion that it is impossible to not represent that with your voice, body, face, and gestures. Any attempt to "work this up" will come across as angry, inauthentic, over dramatic, or judgmental. That is why you have to preach to yourself first, foremost, and last.

4. Be appropriately vulnerable. Don't share your hero or heroine stories. These actually hurt your perception with most audiences. Share about the time you struggled to believe, failed to act, refused to give. Better, share about how you realized your own need for this message this week.

5. Incorporate the other senses. Find ways to creatively incorporate sight, touch, smell, and taste. I say creatively so that you won't pass out the goldfish crackers when speaking of the disciples becoming fishers of men. Please! Be creative. Teenagers live in a multi-sensory world. Burn incense, pass out dark chocolate, use a visual on stage...but make sure it is organically connected to the passage you are preaching about.

6. Use stories from lives they can relate to. They don't usually relate to Abraham Lincoln or a forty year old corporate business man. Pay attention constantly to life, and pick up stories that could be stories of students, teenagers, or people with lives they can somehow connect with. The best stories are the ones you have somehow personally encountered in your life. Even if that encounter came when you read it in Barnes and Noble and it deeply moved you. It can't be a search for a canned story.

7. Press them into action. Students live active lives and are naturally more application bent than many adults. Give them something to do with what you say. If you preach with points, consider making each point an application point, use the imperative (go, say, remember, do, run, refuse, determine, feel, create, reverse etc.)

8. Pray. Pray deeply, and sincerely, and often. Yes we have work to do, but it seems to me God has a role to play in this as well. Pray for wisdom, insight, empathy, creativity, humility, the presence of God in the sermon, the gospel to be clear, and freedom not guilt or shame or bondage to be the result.

9. Ask teens how it goes. Don't just ask adults what they think of your message. Ask students what you could do to improve your preaching. Let them know you seriously want to hear what they think. What do you do that is helpful? Multiply that. What do you do that is distracting or off-putting? Eliminate that. What could you add that you wouldn't think of? Add it.

10. Connect relationally with students before and after you preach. We are all relational beings. But students need this even more than other ages. The fact that you would take the time to listen, ask questions, get into their world, and not judge them will open doors for your preaching that an introduction never could.