Building Bridges to Action
David Mains
Good words without deeds
are rushes and reeds.
Thomas Fuller
Life is Act,
and not to Do
is Death.
Lewis Morris Just as the fetching introduction pulls people into the sermon, the effective conclusion drives home the point and propels into the world people with an agenda.
A Rob Suggs cartoon in Leadership pictures a hapless pastor in front of a chart showing precipitously declining attendance. His companion suggests, "I'm no expert, Joe, but perhaps you shouldn't close each sermon with 'But then again, what do I know?'" The inappropriate ending can ruin even a great beginning.
But most preachers won't destroy a sermon with a foolish conclusion. The greater danger is losing an opportunity by not tapping a sermon's potential, by forfeiting the final push that makes a good sermon great and changes lives.
David Mains has a passion to change people's behavior. With dogged determination he returns to one overriding concern: Have I given people a way to act on their conviction? Some concrete way to put conviction to work? If not, he believes, he has not concluded properly. The sermon is incomplete.
Mains, many years a pastor at Chicago's Circle Church, now preaches on "The Chapel of the Air," a daily radio program originating in Carol Stream, Illinois. With brief minutes to communicate to an unseen audience, Mains now concentrates all the more on providing appropriate bridges from conviction to action. He shares his methods in this chapter. I listen to a lot of other preachers — carefully, too. It's more than professional curiosity; I want to learn from both their strengths and their weaknesses. I can usually determine the subject of the sermons I listen to. But often I'm confused about what I'm supposed to do or to stop doing. That's frustrating, ...
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