Your sermons: all foam and no beer?

I once heard a talk criticised for being ‘all foam, no beer.’

Obviously, no one wants a pint that is 75 per cent foam and 25 per cent actual beer. And so, a talk that’s all foam and no beer is considered lacking in substance, body, and nourishing goodness.

For those providing the critique, the ‘foam’ represented illustrative material, all that light and worthless froth. The beer represented the solid, weighty, doctrinal content of exegesis and exposition (or lack thereof, in this case).

This critique misunderstands how illustrative material works.

I first experienced this during a communication workshop with Richard Garnett at Oak Hill College in 2009. He showed us a clip of the American preacher, John Ortberg, speaking about generosity. At one point John said to his audience, ‘I want you all to take out your wallets.’ There was a ripple of nervous laughter. ‘Hold them in the air. Now pass your wallet down the line to someone unrelated to you.’ Cue more awkward laughter. ‘Now I want you to give like you’ve always wanted to give.’

He was joking, of course. But the point landed. I realised that the ‘foam’ was not simply helping my mind understand something. And neither was it just a ‘cigarette break for the mind.’ The ‘foam’ had snuck through my defences and punched me in the gut. I realised illustration doesn’t just help the teaching, but that it does, in and of itself, teach, hitting us from different angles, in different ways, reaching different places.

In that workshop, Richard provided us with the acronym, FOAM, to help us think about different types of illustration:

F – Facts and statistics

O – Opinions and quotes

A – Anecdotes and stories

M – Metaphors and similes

Each of these can help bring light and warmth to our messages. They make it easier for people to listen to us. We will be more engaging communicators because we will be helping people to understand, and we’ll be moving their hearts in different ways.

The other thing I learned about FOAM is that you will almost certainly need more than you think. A few years ago, I listened to a number of respected preachers. I noted how much illustration they used in their preaching. Here’s what I discovered. The best preachers use some kind of FOAM, on average, every two or three minutes. So, in a 30-minute talk, they use somewhere between 10 to 15 pieces of FOAM. They weren’t always long, moving stories. More often, it was a quote, a statistic, or a metaphor. They were constantly weaving in illustrative material to engage and move their hearers.

So why not do an audit of your own preaching? How much FOAM is there? If you colour-code your notes, you’ll find it easier to see how much FOAM you use and how regularly it is employed. Ask yourself if you need some more, what you could do to add it in, and what may need to be removed. You may have to sacrifice some of that ‘meaty’ content, but what you gain in connection and communication will outweigh what you lose.

Remember, you are not teaching any less, but you may be teaching better. And you’ll almost certainly be connecting more effectively.

Today, if someone tells me my sermon was more foam than beer, I take it as a compliment!