In this long post, I want to explain why I'm a manuscript preacher, talk about what that looks like, and give you some of my tips and tricks. Even if you never become a manuscript preacher, if you have to preach in front of people, you may be helped by reading this.

Terrified of Public Speaking

) It happened again last night. I had a nightmare about public speaking. Here is an odd truth: even after preaching over a thousand sermons, even after routinely preaching high emotion funerals and leading large weddings, even after being in the ministry for close to twenty years, I'm still not comfortable with public speaking. I don't think I ever will be.

As odd as it sounds, that may be my greatest strength as a preacher. You see, I've given a lot of thought into why I'm not comfortable with public speaking. I've really dug into what exactly scares me. What's happening in those public speaking nightmares. It boils down to four specific things:

1. Not knowing what to say.

This is the most pressing of my terrors. In so many of these public speaking nightmares I'm standing up in front of a crowd and I have nothing. My mind is totally blank.

After all, I am not an unending spring of wisdom. Like every other married man in the history of the world, very often my wife asks "what are you thinking about?" and I say, with total honesty "nothing." What happens when you have nothing and there are 100 or more people staring at you, all expecting you to have something? I don't want to find out.

2. Not having enough to say

A similar terror is the fear of not having enough to say. I remember the first few times I was ever asked to preach as a teenager, and despite my best efforts, it was over in five minutes. I still remember how disappointed my pastor/boss was, when as a twenty-three year old asked to fill the pulpit, I couldn't speak for longer than fifteen minutes.

I almost always preach now for thirty-forty minutes, but I still have a fear that I'm going to come up very short. Too often, I've said something at the beginning of a message like "I think this is going to be a short one tonight", and while it usually isn't, this is tangible evidence of this fear coming to the surface.

3. Not having enough to say, and still saying a lot

Maybe a bigger fear is not having enough to say and still preaching for forty minutes. I've heard many preachers who routinely say in an hour what they should have said in fifteen minutes. I really don't want to become that kind of preacher.

Have you listened to one of John MacArthur's sermons lately? Whether you like him or not, that man is 83 years old, and his sermons still have far more content than mine ever will. But that's not normally how it goes.

What seems to happen is, that normally, as a pastor ages, they start sharing the same stories, they start inserting the same points, they start saying the same sound bites. As they age, they become better at adding this air into their sermons. They know they can just fall back on their hobby horses or their favorite stories - and so they do.

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I want my sermons to be like a can of Pringles, not like a bag of Lays. I want my sermons to be full of content. I want a thirty minute sermon to be a thirty minute sermon, not a ten minute sermon with twenty minutes of jokes, stories and air. I'm terrified of the day I start resorting to filler.

Finally...

4. Not staying on point

I'm terrified of being all over the place. Of being known for chasing rabbit trails and going far afield of my point.

My favorite preachers have always been tight. They have always been the ones who I knew had a point and stayed on that point. When they started telling a story or sharing an illustration, I knew that they knew where they were going with it.

I have ADHD. I'm naturally all over the place. I want my sermons to follow a straight line, and I'm terrified my sermons will look more like a golden retriever let loose in a busy parking lot.

I'm not a great public speaker

I think my fear of public speaking is further intensified by knowing that I'm not a great public speaker and likely never will be. We all know preachers who have an unbelievable gift of presence, the Scott Pauley's and the Kenny Baldwin's, that is not, and likely never will be me.

I'm not a yeller. I'm not a pew walker. I'm not a joker. I'm not a big, commanding presence. I know this and I've made peace with it.

I remember being in Bible college and listening to the never ending array of preachers come through and thinking all along - I could never do that. I could never be Mr. Larger-than-life. I could never be like Clarence Sexton or like R.B. Oullette. That's just not me.

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But there was one chapel speaker who came, and I believe he only came once, who changed my life. (It was Jim Blalock, a pastor from Jupiter, Florida.) His preaching style was so different. He wasn't trying to keep our attention with his personality, he was keeping out attention with his content. It was the first time I ever heard a preacher and thought both of these things at once: "man that's good", and "I think I could do that someday."

He happened to be a manuscript preacher.

I'm still terrified by extemporaneous speaking. If I visit your church for a service, and you call me up on the fly to come up to the pulpit and say something, I will not be grateful for the opportunity, I'll probably have high blood pressure for the rest of the day. I don't stammer much anymore, but when I do, it's almost always during the parts of the service when I have to speak off the top of my head (like during announcements or business meetings.)

Pastoring is hard

As a pastor, I have to preach to the same people week in and week out, for years. There are dozens of people in my church who have been faithfully in their place to hear me preach now, three times a week, for the last 11 years. Those poor people have heard nearly 1,500 Ryan Hayden sermons, and there is no end in sight.

It's really hard to preach to the same people for years and not get boring. I'm not that interesting. They have heard every one of my stories by this point. They know what happened that one time I got lost in the cave. They know the punch line to both of my jokes.

Further, they know me. They know that my kids aren't perfect. They know that I still don't have flowers in my garden patch (after living in the same house for 11 years.) They know I'm likely to forget whatever it was they told me last week. They've learned to roll their eyes at every new hobby.

Despite my obvious and abundant flaws. Despite the other preachers in town who are quite good, and the preachers online who are excellent. They still come to listen. I can never take that for granted.

I often try to remember that when I'm speaking to 50 people for thirty minutes, that I'm not just using thirty minutes of people's time, I'm using 1,500 minutes of people's time. People are collectively giving me more than a full day of man hours. The day that is no longer an honor and a solemn responsibility is the day I should probably stop pastoring.

Pre-preaching

The main reason I write out my sermons is that it allows me to face my main fears - fears around content - before I stand up in front of people. The manuscript gives me the confidence that I have enough to say, that my sermon will not be just filler, that my sermon is not the same thing I preached last month, and that I know where I'm going.

I don't think of my manuscript as a piece of prose, I think of it as pre-preaching. In my mind I'm not sitting in my tiny closet office staring at a black screen. In my mind I'm in the pulpit, and I'm preaching through my fingers. I'm finding the dead ends and the tough spots, identifying the places where I'm going to drone on. I'm discovering where I haven't thought through that point enough. Where a point needs some work, or needs to be said differently. Again, it's not manuscripting, it's pre-preaching.

Charles Spurgeon told his students that the golden key to keeping people's attention is to say something worth listening to. David McCollough said "Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard." Writing out a manuscript, or pre-preaching, gives me the opportunity to be sure that I'm thinking clearly through my subject and that I'm saying something worth listening to.

This pre-preaching is an unfair advantage that's available to any preacher willing to put in the time. It's an unfair advantage that only requires a few extra hours of your time, and the will to see it through. It gets easier and faster, but it's never easy or fast - and that is a benefit.

Dangers of the manuscript

I don't like to think of myself as a manuscript preacher. I'm a preacher, who happens to have a manuscript. Of course, if I lose my train of thought, I can always pick up my notes and read - but I don't really think of what I'm doing as reading. I'm preaching. My notes are a guide. But if things work the way they are supposed to, my brain finds the well-worn tracks my writing has already gone down - and I'm not bound to my notes.

Preaching needs earnestness. I need to preach with authority. The fire comes not from the tone of my voice - but from the conviction with which I speak. The fire comes when I believe what I'm saying and when I believe that people really need to hear it. If this is the case, there is nothing about a manuscripted sermon that makes it have any less fire than a sermon spoken extemporaneously.

Also, and I cannot stress this enough: A sermon needs to sound like a sermon, not like a person reading prose. When I'm writing something to be read - like this post, I may rely on lots of parenthetical statements, or I may use some clever rhetorical tricks. I may employ longer sentences and longer quotes - but I can never do that with a sermon. In a sermon my vocabulary needs to be turned down, my sentences and paragraphs need to be shorter - I need to write like I'm speaking to a bunch of people listening.

Recently, I had a conversation about preaching with a man who attended my church for years. I showed him my notes and explained that everything is written out. He didn't believe it. He said you would never know - that's a good thing. That's what we are going for.

Now, let me close this already too long post with some...

Tips for writing and preaching a manuscript

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1. Write like you are preaching.

I've already belabored this point, but if you are going to write a manuscript, then you need to write like a speaker and not like a writer. When we speak, we use a different vocabulary. We use different sentence structure. We use shorter and choppier sentences.

I just imagine I'm preaching as I write and try to make sure what I'm writing is something I can actually say. Sometimes I read my notes aloud and edit the parts that I have a difficult time saying. Remember, it's a sermon, not a book.

2. Start with an outline.

I like to write out what I think the passage means in a few sentences, and then write out an outline before I start working on a manuscript. You actually do this much like you would if you were writing a research paper -

• you start with lots of reading and study
• you write a thesis sentence
• you write an outline of points supporting your thesis
• you write the body of the paper.

Writing a sermon is the same. Only your main source is going to the be scripture and your "paper" isn't for the consumption of professors, but a sermon to be listened to by real people.

3. Have a word goal.

As you preach, you'll learn how many words equals a thirty or forty minute sermon. Words count is much more valuable as a metric than pages. (Pages can be altered by format and font, your word count is your word count.

My word goal is to be between 2,800 and 3,200 words, but I often go as low as 2,300 and as high as 4,200. This is going to vary greatly for you based on your talking speed and ability to stick to your point. So test and adjust accordingly.

4. Pay attention to paragraph length.

When preaching, short paragraphs are much better than long paragraphs. Bullet points and block quotes are good. Complicated outlines are useless.

5. Plan your rest stops

One of the nice things about writing out your ideas is you can be much more deliberate with diversions from your main point. I like to try to find things that may seem like a rabbit trail, but actually further my point.

My favorite writer who uses this technique is Malcolm Gladwell. He often tells stories that seem like they are totally unrelated to what he is saying, only to weave them back into the plot. This gives people a mental break, while staying on point.

This is hard to describe, and even harder to pull off. But if you can, it's so worth it. In my opinion, it's much better to keep people's attention with well-timed and interesting anecdotes than it is with shouting and stomping. This is only possible with a curious mind, lots of reading, good notes and absolute clarity about the point you are trying to make.

6. Make your manuscript scannable.

If your goal is to NOT read your notes, then they must be scannable. Again, short paragraphs and bullet points are your friends - but so are bold and italic sentences - clear and abundant headings, and well defined breaks for scripture.

7. Use writing software, not a traditional word processor.

This is just my opinion, but you are doing yourself no favors when you use apps like Microsoft Word, Google Docs or Apple Pages to write your manuscript. Those apps were made for creating documents, not for writing. Instead, use a distraction free writing app. Here are some of my favorites:

• Obsidian
• Sermonly
• Bear
• iA Writer

8. Be careful not to just read your manuscript.

Your manuscript is your guide - but you shouldn't be tied to it and should only be reading it in rare cases. Watch a recording of yourself preaching or ask someone you trust for feedback. Does it sound like reading or preaching? If you are too bound to your notes, maybe read your notes through or even preach through them to an empty room. But you aren't Jonathan Edwards - don't stand and read. Stand and preach.

9. Write names of people in the congregation in the sides of your notes.

I use a mac app called Create Booklet to print my notes off as a little booklet that I bring with me to the pulpit. Often, before the service, I'll look around the room and write the names of people who are there in the margins, purposely jumping around the room.

As I preach, when I come to that name, I make it a point to make eye contact with them and spend thirty seconds speaking directly to them. In this way I'm sure to look up from the pulpit and move my gaze around the room.

10. Mind the runways.

I really struggle on this point. But having a strong introduction and conclusion really make a sermon. I'm much better at introductions than conclusions. But if you are going going to write out two parts of a message - these should be what you focus on.

True to form, I didn't think of a good way to land this post. May it's choppy ending remind you to think about how your sermon will end before you get airborne with your message.