Jesus Didn’t Preach Like We Do
What 307 Questions, Zero PowerPoints, and a Whole Lot of Storytelling Reveal About Christ’s Way of Teaching
Jesus Didn’t Preach Like We Do
What 307 Questions, Zero PowerPoints, and a Whole Lot of Storytelling Reveal About Christ’s Way of Teaching
Series: Sacred Conversation: Talking Our Way Toward Healing
About fifteen years ago, I began experimenting with something different in my preaching.
Instead of diving straight into the text or offering a polished introduction, I started with a question. Not a rhetorical one, but a real, open-ended, discussion question. I’d invite the congregation to talk to the person next to them, or better yet, to move across the room and include someone sitting alone. I’d give them three or four minutes. Then I’d walk around, listen in, and ask a few folks what they were hearing or thinking. One church actually called it the “coffee-break” and people went and refilled their mugs and talked to people about the question when they were in line.
Sometimes the answers were thoughtful. Sometimes funny. Sometimes tangential. And sometimes, people didn’t talk about the question at all, they chatted about TV shows, weekend plans, or stayed quiet altogether.
At first, it would always take a few months for people to get used to it. The silence at the beginning felt awkward, even risky. We’re conditioned to expect church to talk at us, not with us. But over time, I found that these small windows of conversation began to draw people into the story in ways a traditional sermon monologue could not.
That short exchange at the beginning did more than break the ice. It broke open hearts.
It didn’t always “work.” And that’s okay.
When people avoid the question, it might be a sign that:
They’re hiding from an encounter with something deeper.
They’re unsure how to be vulnerable in church.
They’re not spiritually ready, or just having a hard day.
Or maybe, I didn’t do a great job explaining why we’re doing this at all.
And all of that is okay.
The goal was never to guilt anyone into talking.
The goal was to open the room to sacred conversation.
When I arrived at my current church - during the pandemic, no less - I found myself in a very different context. This congregation was used to shorter services and even shorter sermons. And everyone kept their distance from one another to avoid the spread of Covid. So this approach didn’t land as easily. It’s been slower, clunkier, and at times awkward. And yet… I still believe deeply in it. It’s a cultural shift, and it takes time and patience.
Because something happens when we shift from lecture to dialogue.
A sermon moves from information to transformation.
Why It Matters: The Data We Can’t Ignore
In a time when church attendance is declining and attention spans are shrinking, we need to ask not just what we’re saying, but how we’re saying it.
According to Barna Group, 64% of Millennials say they want to talk about faith, but they’re rarely invited into conversations in church settings. Church is lecture, and not conversation. Lecture reminds people of school.
A 2023 Gallup report showed that trust in organized religion is at a historic low (31%), while the hunger for authenticity and relational depth is at an all-time high.
Neuroscience consistently affirms that active learning, which includes conversation, movement, and emotional engagement, leads to better retention and transformation than passive listening alone.
Which means:
Sacred conversation isn’t soft.
It’s strategic.
It’s not a gimmick.
It’s formation.
And Jesus modeled it better than anyone.
Jesus and Questions
Jesus asked 307 questions.
He answered very few.
He rarely offered bullet points.
He never handed out a fill-in-the-blank worksheet.
And no one ever sat silently while he talked for 30 minutes and then dismissed the crowd with a song.
Jesus didn’t preach like we do.
He disrupted.
He invited.
He unsettled.
He engaged.
He created what Dan White Jr. calls “curiosity-creating events”, spiritual openings that required response, not just reception.
The Rabbinic Way: Stories, Questions, and Dialogue
Jesus wasn’t a Western lecturer.
He was an Eastern rabbi.
His primary tool wasn’t argument.
It was Midrash, the Jewish art of dialoguing with the text through questions, stories, and multiple layers of meaning.
That means his “sermons” were never monologues.
They were provocations, catalysts for conversation and communal reflection.
When the disciples asked, “Why do you speak in parables?”
Jesus essentially replied: Because I want people to come ask Me about them. (Mark 4:10–12)
He was planting seeds.
Inviting deeper questions.
Drawing people closer.
The Problem with Clarity
In our culture, we idolize clarity.
But Jesus didn’t.
In fact, he often made things harder to understand.
Not because he wanted to confuse us,
But because he wanted to form us.
Clear answers short-circuit transformation.
But holy questions create space
For wrestling,
For trust,
For Spirit-led discovery.
Jesus Wasn’t Afraid of Being Misunderstood
He let the rich young ruler walk away.
He let the Pharisees stew in their own assumptions.
He told parables that only made sense after people lingered, asked, and stayed close.
That means Jesus was secure enough in his identity that he didn’t need to control how people perceived him.
What if preaching looked more like that?
What This Means for Us
If Jesus taught through questions, stories, and dialogue,
Why do so many of our churches default to lecture?
We’ve inherited Enlightenment-era models of teaching that prize efficiency and control.
But formation is slow.
Dialogue is messy.
Discipleship is relational.
If Jesus was more interested in formation than information,
Shouldn’t our gatherings reflect that too?
Learning to Teach Like Jesus
To follow Jesus is not only to believe what he said.
It’s to embody how he taught.
It’s time we stop treating sermons like sacred scripts
And start creating environments where curiosity, reflection, and conversation are welcomed as worship.
Guiding Question:
What question has Jesus asked you recently, one that won’t leave you alone?
Or- what question do you wish the church would finally ask?
A Prayer for Unlearning the Stage
Storytelling Christ,
You didn’t come with scripts or slides,
You came with parables.
You taught us how to wonder again.
Disrupt our need for control.
Interrupt our addiction to certainty.
And form us into a people
who ask, linger, and love like You.
Amen.
Coming Next:
Why We’re Afraid to Talk
What Keeps Us Silent, and How the Spirit Makes Room for Our Honest, Awkward, Beautiful Selves
For years I was part of a church that even changed the name of the homiletical event. We called them conversations—not sermons. We’d begin with open ended questions followed with a brief lecture and then more discussion.
We didn’t view the lecture as “truth” distilled into a 10 minute challenge to do something. Instead, whoever spoke was saying, “This is what I discovered studying this text—does it ring true?”
Even our weekly practice of the Eucharist intentionally included discussion between the participants.
So, can I conclude that the Sermons on the Mount and on the Plain were compilations of things Jesus said rather than monologues? Or were Jesus’ teaching methods more diverse—sometimes questioning, sometimes telling engaging stories and sometimes speaking for prolonged periods, sometimes challenging, sometimes comforting—sometimes both to different members of his “audience?”