In this series I’m asking Andy Stanley some questions about preaching but I’m cheating when I say that: I’m reading his book (Communicating for a Change: Seven Keys to Irresistible Communication
) and generating my questions that he answers in his book.

The best lesson I learned about preaching, well at least in the top three, was a lesson about style and it came from pace. I have a natural excuse: I’m a professor. We can bog down in details and proof and it can go on and on and we can offer, say, five or six Bible references to prove our point … and we can and we do … and we lose the audience sometimes. I learned this lesson from my editor at Paraclete, Lil Copan, who once told me that I needed to stop convincing my audience and start trusting that they believed me. Then she said it, “Just explain it. Just explain what it says. Don’t break it apart into all its pieces and then inductively prove it all. Your audience trusts you to tell them what it says.”