Participatory Church Gatherings

Why Participatory Church Gatherings? - Part 6

It's Better to Preach to your Pet than Sit through Sermons

This diagram is called the Learning Triangle¹ - and it's pretty easy to see what it is saying. It maps how much our brains retain by various learning methods. Listening to a lecture (or sermon) results in a paltry 5% retention rate, adding written notes or a Powerpoint presentation hardly improves this percentage (10-20%), while discussion results in a 50% retention rate (not bad!), and those actually doing the teaching remember 90% of what they said.

Here is how Dr. Ellen Weber from www.brainbasedbusiness.com sums up the message of the learning triangle: 'Brains require workouts to learn and grow ... while lectures foster a couch potato mentality ... from the brain's perspective, you learn more and better retain it if you talk to your dog ... than if you listen to lectures'.

Know you know why, if you are a church-going Christian, you cannot remember in any detail what was said in any of the (approximately) 50-100 sermons that you listened to in the last year! No wonder some Christians never seem to make spiritual progress - they do little more than listen to sermons. Perhaps this explains the fact that preachers are able to visit a church after an interval of three to four years, preach exactly the same sermon they did the last time, and yet many of the people in the congregation will greet the sermon with acclaim, unaware that they have already heard the same sermon virtually word-for-word just a few years ago. As Spurgeon said in the context of some people's rather shallow Bible reading, 'the Bible has mighty free course among us nowadays, for it goes in at one ear and out at the other'.

The reason why lectures persist (in all sorts of walks of life), despite the fact that listeners get very little out of them, becomes clear from this triangle: teachers themselves find that lecturing provides the most stimulation for their own brains. Preachers will tell you the same thing - they really learnt a lot from the exercise of studying and declaring the Word of God, in addition to the spiritual blessing of being prayerfully dependent upon the Lord for help in the study process and act of delivery. The pity is that it is only rarely that somebody else shares the blessing.

The lesson for church life should be obvious: if we were sincerely interested in getting people in our congregations to actually learn and grow, we would do two things:

1. We would include stimulating discussion after our sermons so that people would remember a lot more about the subject.
2. We would try as quickly as possible to get people involved in teaching others the Word of God - for that is the very best way for them to grow themselves.

What's puzzling is the fact that, despite the fact that the New Testament picture of the church involves exactly these two components, because the New Testament shows a participatory picture of church life where individuals are able to ask questions or share something they have learnt, yet this model of church life is scorned in our modern situation. Why is that?