SPEAKING IN PUBLIC EFFECTIVELY:
How to Prepare, How to Present,
How to Progress
By Richard Bewes
Christian Focus. 191 pages. £6.99
ISBN 978 1 781 916 834
Richard Bewes is one of the most gifted and engaging speakers of our time. Here we have the distilled wisdom of his (nearly) 60 years of speaking ministry.
With so many excellent books and conferences helping Bible teachers to ‘get the message right’, this new and revised edition of Bewes’s 1998 book is a welcome and necessary encouragement to ‘get the message across’ as well.
Not that there is any lack of stress on the vital importance of ‘getting it right’: Bewes quotes Charles Simeon: ‘My endeavour is to bring out of Scripture what is there, not to thrust in what I think might be there.’ The new edition cautions us from speaking from a tablet, ‘much less eye contact with the audience’, and encourages us to speak from notes in a Bible ‘held in the hand clearly visible… . Here is our authority’.
Practical and helpful
There is practical and enormously helpful advice on how to prepare sermons, evangelistic talks and addresses for broadcast or open air. The challenges of speaking away from our own church and in other cultures are also addressed.
The best illustrations are drawn from our own experience and reading, not from other people’s talks, and so we are encouraged to develop a system of filing our own gleanings.
There is helpful and hilarious advice on how to use our voices: ‘gargling with warm salt water is recommended by some. The great thing to avoid before speaking is nuts’! And even a cure for hiccups is prescribed: ‘a teaspoonful of granulated white sugar… I keep a small sachet always with me’.
He also encourages us to seek constructive feedback from trusted critics. Bewes quotes extensively from his wide reading: from Spurgeon to Stephen Lungu; from Whitfield to Lloyd Jones.
I can’t promise that I won’t be recycling some of his stories, including the wise advice to a young curate from his vicar when he asked, ‘are you suggesting, vicar, that I put more fire into my sermons?’ ‘No’, came the reply, ‘I’m really trying to suggest that you put more of your sermons into the fire’.
If I’d had the benefit of Richard Bewes’s wisdom as a young preacher, many more of my sermons would have ended up on the fire rather than in the pulpit!
