Karen:     We had a phone call from a friend who’s a listener to this podcast and she said, “One thing I like about your Before We Go Podcast is the way the two of you always summarize what you’re saying into a single sentence. How did you come up with that technique?”

David:     That’s a funny story and I’m kind of brought in a joke to the story. But we can tell it again.

Intro:         Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:     In my mind, Karen, I’m thinking this has to be over 50 years ago. And as I reflect on it in my mind, it’s like it happened a couple days ago because it was a huge thing. We were in a new church we were planting in the heart of Chicago. I wanted to get a more of an interactive feel with the congregation. We had a rented facility, so we had our service at nine o’clock and then at 10:30 we had regular what would be like classes or discussion groups. And one of those was always the option for people to go into the pastor’s class and talk about what he said in the sermon.

I had worked on a deal and because I didn’t always preach, sometimes somebody else on the staff would preach. I said, we want to do this consistently. So, if five, six people come to that class, that’s fine. But if there are more people than we need to divide it in two and sometimes you preach a real winger and there would be 25 people who wanted to talk about it. I say, “Oh, you start by going around the circle, get the people to say their name.” And then you say, “As you heard the sermon this morning, if you would put what you think the pastor was saying into a sentence, what would the sentence be?” And people very graciously.

Karen:     Struggled with that concept.

David:     Yeah.

Karen:     That was a good technique.

David:     Well, it started the discussion. One day I preached on a passage in Romans, which was a terrible passage as far as me and how I handled it.

Karen:     Harder passage than others is what you mean.

David:     And I said, “Why don’t we start and go around the circle and have you put into a sentence what you think I was trying to say.” And it was probably the third person up. It was a visitor that he said, “Reverend Mains, why don’t you try to put into a sentence? What is you attempted to say today?”

Karen:     How’d you do?

David:     I was absolutely humiliated. I could not do. I said after that, and I’ve been true to my word. I said, “That’ll never happen to me again because I’m going to figure out what that sentence is before I give somebody the opportunity to respond.” And that’s what kind of started it all.

Karen:     So, that incident, that embarrassing incident was the embryo for what became the Mainstay Ministry’s communication system.

David:     Yeah.

Karen:     I mean, that sounds a little grand, but there is nothing that we do that’s in a communication format that we don’t try to reduce to a sentence. And so let’s talk about what that sentence is supposed to include and try to explain it to our listeners because, David, a lot of times people of all kinds of backgrounds and abilities are asked to maybe not give a sermon, but to speak in this group or to talk in that one or to tell about their work and into a group of maybe donors or whatever. And this methodology that you have developed and trialed through all your years of communication, been preaching in churches, your own church for a while, and then in other people’s churches and then training pastors. Did a lot of training of pastors.

David:     We’ve cared a lot of listening ourselves.

Karen:     And a lot of listening ourselves. In evaluation, we don’t listen critically as far as a negative thing, but we listen as communicators to say if this pastor we’re listening to, are they really going to be communicating what they’re trying to say from this passage of scripture, and will other people remember what they said?

David:     I did it with our kids. We would leave the church and drive home and say, okay, let’s see if we can remember what was said in the sermon today. They would work on it. We still do that. We don’t do it in a critical sense, either.

Karen:     No.

David:     We do in in a helpful sense. Let’s see what we can remember from the sermon. And most of the time I would say that we can tell what we think the thrust of the sermon was. But then there are a number of times when we say, “I’m not sure what it was he was talking about.”

I found that I began to teach this to people. And I would guess probably did somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundred pastor’s conferences. Sometimes it would be like 10 people. Sometimes it would be up to 200 people. I would say to them, “I’ll give you the technique, but I’m going to do it by picking a text.” I don’t think we’ll cover everything this visit. So, I’m thinking of two more visits after this on this same topic.

Karen:     On the podcast we will have three visits on this topic.

David:     This time I’m going to take a very simple text and then the next time I’ll make it a little harder and then very hard. But to show that each time we follow the same pattern every time. This is a passage Karen, on Luke, you’ll recognize it immediately. It’s chapter 13 verses 12 through 14. This is one I would, in the pastor’s conferences say, “I’m going to read a passage. And then what I want you to do is to tell me, what is the subject.”

“Then Jesus said to his host, when you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives or your rich neighbors. If you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Okay. I read that passage and I said, “What would you say is the subject of this passage?”

Karen:     This is to the group of pastors you were talking to.

David:     And I remember one specific time, one man’s hand just shot up and he had a big smile on his face, and I thought, he’s got it. He’s got it. I said, “What would you say is the subject of this?” He said, “grace.”

Karen:     It’s a broad topic, isn’t it?

David:     Sounds like a minister. Grace, maybe every passage I read would have been about grace. Not sure these people heard about grace a lot, but I wanted to be more specific. So, I’m going to ask you and I know what you’re going to say because you know…

Karen:     This is one of my favorite passages, a certain from scripture. So, if you would ask me that same question, I would say it’s about hospitality because that is just a theme that runs through the old and New Testament. We often don’t pick up those scriptures that really do pertain to that topic.

David:     Well, Jesus is saying if you invite a guest.

Karen:     Yes.

David:     So that’s, I don’t care if you call it entertaining or hospitality. Having people over. And he’s giving a different way of doing it than normal. But the basic subject matter, if somebody wants to get an A plus from me, as the teacher is to say hospitality. And at that point I’d say that’s great.

And the second question that I always ask in terms of putting a message together before any of the specifics of it are lined up, is not only what is the subject, but what is the response? How would you say the response is listed here?

Karen:     In this passage? Well, Jesus is obviously saying, don’t practice hospitality to get something. And often that’s why we do invite people into our lives.

David:     Well, or you just enjoy those people.

Karen:     You enjoy those people. So, you get the satisfaction of spending more time with them. Nothing wrong with that. But Christ is gearing in another kind of way to practice hospitality. And that’s to look for those people who are overlooked.

David:     Or they are forgotten people.

Karen:     Or forgotten people. Or neglected people who are, what we say, down on their luck or maybe odd. But anyway, the general category is the people who are not generally invited to these official affairs, these outreaches of hospitality.

David:     And he has this sense of they can’t repay you.

Karen:     They can’t repay you. Yeah.

David:     So, it’s a wonderful, wonderful teaching. So, then the question is once that’s understood, and people have gotten that much, is the average person going to be able to know how to do this? I remember Karen, I went to a Lutheran church not far from our home because there was a Hispanic gentleman that I had come to know and he had accepted Christ into his life, but he wasn’t involved in church. But we went to this Lutheran church because they had a Spanish service.

Karen:     They have a great outreach to the immigrant community here.

David:     This was the passage the minister preached on. I don’t speak Spanish. And I had a couple of years of Spanish in high school. That’s a long, long time ago. But I could tell this is the passage he was speaking on. It was very obvious. And on the way back from the service, I said to my friend, “Did you understand what he was talking about?” And my friend said, “Yes.” We talked in English, and kind of his broken English. And I said, “Do you think anybody in the church is going to do that?” He said, “No.”

Karen:     Yeah.

David:     I think it was a huge jump for him to hear that sermon because he didn’t have a home. He didn’t have anything. Maybe the pastor should have said, maybe you’re sharing a lunch or a cup of coffee in McDonald’s or something. But it never got to the level where his response was anything other than “No, I can’t do that.” He’s going to do it. It was beyond him.  

Karen:     I think this methodology, this communication methodology that you have developed over time, over years, and we’ve done every single broadcast for 20 years using this, reducing it to a purpose sentence.

David:     In every podcast we do.

Karen:     In every podcast we do, we always have a sentence. And people, as they’ve listened to us now, will begin to detect that if they haven’t already detected it. We usually say, well, we’re saying in a sentence is.

David:     I’ve had people come up to me sometimes years. I mean, you’re talking 10, 12, 15 years and they say, “Do you remember that sermon you preached on?”

Karen:     And then they’ll give you the purpose.

David:     And they said, “I wrote it in my Bible.”

Karen:     Yeah, I remember. I’ve had people do that as well. And that’s rare. I mean, you can have someone say, “We heard you speak such and such a place and you spoke” and well, the Holy Spirit or what the general topic is, but they never get down into the specifics of what you were saying. often because the communicator hasn’t gotten down into those specifics as well. So, let’s break this apart for our listeners so they can hear what we are talking about.

David:     Well, we’re assuming that somebody listening to us will be asked, maybe will be surprised, to give a talk that has some kind of a spiritual aspect to it, I assume. And they won’t know how to go about it. So, we’re saying these are the questions you want to ask.

Karen:     As you’re preparing.

David:     Clearly in your mind and then you start to put the pieces together and it’s very easy because you know exactly where you’re going. When asked to give a spiritual talk of some kind, begin your preparation by asking yourself three questions.

              Number one, what’s my subject? Number two, what’s the response being called for? Number three, what how-to suggestions might be helpful? Okay and is this something we do regularly?

Karen:     Yes, we do this all the time.

David:     It’s over and over.

Karen:     It’s become so habitual, you know, we don’t even recognize that we’re doing it, but we find that it has helped not only the listener have clarification on what we’re doing, but it helps us have clarification as we’re making preparations.

David:     After having spoken somewhere, it would be a huge answer to prayer if someday I would say, “If you’d like to talk about the message, you can.” And then somebody will come and say, “Do you remember a long time ago back in Chicago?” And I said, “Why don’t you try to put it into a sentence?” “Well, I’m here again and you did it.”

Karen:     That’s great. Okay, first of all what we do is we say what’s the subject and we did that a little bit when you read that passage.

David:     Yeah, that subject is hospitality.

Karen:     Obviously, it’s hospitality. It’s extending invitation and in a particular kind of way to the needy or to the outcast or to the forgotten.

David:     Yeah, that’s this response. Jesus is saying don’t overlook the forgotten people. That’s a very powerful message that he gave. Back then it was unusual for people to invite the lame, the crippled, the blind, the people you mentioned there and it’s unusual for most people now. Then the question is how do you do that? I think the average person is going to say, “Oh man, all those homeless people living downtown in the big city. What am I going to do as far as asking them?”

Is that what has to be done or do we have to get better suggestions than the leaping to that extreme?

Karen:     You begin this process with prayer and a listening kind of prayer. We are all busy. We all overlook those who are lonely or and I would include the lonely among them, those that Jesus gave. So, I think our hearts need to be sensitized by the Holy Spirit. So, I often say, “Lord, who is there you would like us to invite into our home?”

Now often the loneliest people that we run into are the ones who appear most successful. Their success prohibits other people from connecting with them or reaching out because they think they have everything. So, what we do need is a sensitizing of the Holy Spirit. I just say, “Lord, who are the people I need to be inviting into our lives?”

We can talk about using hospitality in a whole variety of ways, but this is specifically inviting people into our home for a meal or for a special breakfast or dessert something like that. And then I just wait until I feel an urgency or a push or approach is a better word or someone comes to mind.

David:     What I want to do Karen in terms of where we’re going in this series, this was an obvious passage. Next week when we talk, I’d like to talk about a little more difficult passage and how to unpack that one and then a really, really harder one because it’s a whole book.

What if you only have one time to talk and you’re supposed to give an overview of say Philippians? You know something like that. That’s not going to happen for most people. For some ministers it might. I’m just trying to say on the simplest level is where we are starting here.

And Karen I also, in terms of all that sometimes when you say here’s the subject, here’s the response I’m calling for, this would be a good illustration that just fits there. Be open to the Holy Spirit saying even do it a different way. Maybe you’re not the one to give the illustration but the person you first heard it from is a good one to do it with.

Karen:     Communication gurus are telling us that the single lecture format is diminishing. That was the format where you had one person who spoke and sometimes for an hour an hour and 15 minutes. I mean when it was in its heyday that has sort of ruled the day in communication, but it is changing. We have higher participatory learning models in schools of higher education. You have a cousin who’s the chancellor of a large state university and she moved into participatory learning model a long time ago. So, I would say that the lecture format is one of the hardest formats to do well with. And if you’ve been asked to speak somewhere or share somewhere and you’re gulping about it, we’re giving you a tool to help you prepare. A tool that also helps your listeners understand where you’re coming from. But you can begin to participate in the new models that are coming our way.

And so, one of the things I would suggest that people do is say, “Is there a way I can dialogue about this with another person who has expertise in this and let me give one example out of my life?”

I had been speaking on hospitality which I did for years because my first book was Open Heart, Open Home. It was on hospitality and I just sort of happenstance in the group I was speaking to was a group of women, maybe a hundred and hundred and fifty women. I said, “I’m wanting you to think about a time when hospitality was extended to you, and it changed your life. So, take a little time to think about it. I’ll begin but then I’ll break up my lecture and invite some of you who have thought of something that way that hospitality changed your life to share that.”

So that’s what happened. I had one woman stand and there were several who volunteered but I asked this one woman to go ahead and share. She was a pediatrician but early in her practice a young couple had brought an infant to her who was very, very sick and there was some thought that this baby would not survive. She used her medical skills, and that little infant was saved really because of her. She fought for his life within the medical system. And he went home with a life ahead of him which was wonderful for those parents.

So, they invited her to come for dinner. And I said to her, “This was in the group where I’d been speaking.” I said, “Were you a Christian at that time?” And she said, “No, I wasn’t a Christian before I went to their house for dinner, but I was a Christian when I left.”

David:     That’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.

Karen:     Someone has asked us to speak and we’re trying to go through this methodology that we’re sharing. One of the things to do is to sort of break form and invite people who have something to say about our topic into our lecture environment or our single person sharing environment. And that opens that up in ways that we can’t possibly anticipate.

David:     But what you did do before you said what is my subject?

Karen:     Yes.

David:     It’s going to be hospitality. What is the response I want? If you were talking on this passage, you would say that people would include in their thinking the forgotten individuals. But anyway you had the framework all set up.

Karen:     Yes, it did.

David:     So, you knew what you were asking.

Karen:     Yeah, I knew that that interruption I wouldn’t lose my way in my own organization of my thoughts because of this methodology. So, it’s a powerful methodology and let’s go through it again so that our listeners can catch the process that we use.

David:     Well, you’re asking in the very early part. Maybe you start with a text, maybe you start with an idea, but whatever the idea is, you have to pinpoint it by saying, “This is my subject. This is what I’m going to talk about.” Second question. “What is that?

Karen:     Well, the second question is, “What is the response I’m calling for?”

David:     Okay. And then if it’s like this passage we had today, that response is going to be very difficult for people. So then, you have to give some kind of suggestions which says, “Okay here’s where you are. Here’s where I’d like to take you. You don’t take them all the way down to the final destination five months from now but you get them started in the process.”

Karen:     The interesting thing about the how to section that I have discovered as I use it you can mention how to’s and generally they won’t do any of the how to’s that you’ve mentioned. Now they might but most of the time what the how to does that third element of this system it opens their mind up to create a possibilities. If they come back to me and dialogue about it I’ll ask well how did you do what you said you were going to do and they’ll come back with all kinds of ideas that were not included in my list of how to’s but the how to’s in my list stimulated the way their own personality would function which I find to be absolutely delightful. Because many of the things that they did were not things I would have thought of. So there’s just this lovely interchange in the feeling that God is working in the process in some way to take his truth out of scripture whatever it is we’re speaking on and apply it in a deep way to the listeners that they are talking to.

David:     So if you are asked by somebody would you be willing to speak to our group maybe it’s a group of five people, maybe it’s a group of 50 don’t just say oh no I could never do that. We’re saying yes you can’t and here’s how you get going on it you got to figure out what’s the subject I’m talking about. What’s the response I want from my listeners. And then what suggestions can I give them that will help them to move along the way in terms of this topic from talking about.

Karen:     Yeah it’s great.

Outro:        You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters. hosts@beforewego.show.

If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2024 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.