Ep. 5: Domain #4 - Clarity of Delivery

Episode 5: Domain Four — Clarity of Delivery

Most of what has been written about delivery in preaching treats it as a performance category — voice, presence, energy, gesture. Those things matter. But this episode is about something different.

Clarity of Delivery is about one question: In the moment of preaching, are you serving your listener's comprehension?

That is a different question. And it changes everything about how you prepare to deliver.

In this final episode of the launch arc, Jonathan walks through three specific, learnable delivery disciplines that belong in your sermon preparation — not just your instincts in the pulpit.

What you'll learn:

• Why the homiletical literature largely ignores the oral disciplines that actually serve comprehension
• What your congregation is cognitively experiencing while you preach — and why it matters
• Restatement — the most important and most underused delivery discipline
• Passage Preview — a four-second investment that transforms passive hearing into active listening
• Intentional Pause — the most underused clarity tool available to any preacher

This episode closes the four-domain framework — Clarity of Thought, Structure, Language, and Delivery — and sends you away with three concrete preparation habits you can add to your process this week.

Resources mentioned:

• Free Self-Assessment: ClearPreaching.com/resources
• The Weekly Clarity email: ClearPreaching.com
• The Clarity Audit: ClearPreaching.com/workwithme

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

In the moment of preaching, clarity is just about everything. Are you serving your listeners' comprehension? Are you helping them understand? Are they tracking with you? Can they follow you from movement to movement without seeing your notes? Are you making your notes visible as you preach? Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Clear Preaching Podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan McClintock. And today we are going to finish up the fourth domain of this clear preaching framework. I've introduced you, bring you up to speed, introduce you to these four domains: the clarity of thought, clarity of structure, clarity of language. And today we're going to look at clarity of delivery and what others have coined, the idea of oral clarity. It's more than just delivering so that people can hear you. We have microphones for that. It's a lot more than that. It's being clear through every stage of the delivery, using verbal and nonverbal cues so that your audience can track with you, understand with you, follow with you, and not get lost. Here's what this domain is about. In the moment of preaching, are you serving your listeners' comprehensions? When books on homiletics and preaching have been written, many have been written, and many books talk about this idea of delivery, and they focus on your voice, they focus on your presence, they focus on your energy, they focus on gestures, they focus on charisma. But here's three disciplines we're going to cover. Now, if you want to go deeper in this, you want to join the Clear Preaching Academy because there is an entire course around this idea of oral clarity. But today we're going to look at three of the eight principles that I cover in that course. We're going to look at three of these, and I believe these three are very helpful, and I think they're going to be important to help us deliver with oral clarity. The first principle is going to be the principle of restatement, this idea of returning to your central idea in the same words and in different words. As you get to each major movement or major idea of the sermon, you restate that. We'll talk about that. The second principle we're going to look at is this idea of passage preview, how we orient our congregation to the message of the text before we actually read the text. This has to do with your opening text, but also every scripture that you highlight or read in the body and the build of the sermon. This idea of passage preview, we're going to cover briefly today. And thirdly, we're going to look at this idea of intentional pause, giving your listeners time to process before the next sentence, the next thought arrives. This domain of oral clarity or clarity of delivery is an under-addressed part of the preaching process. Very little literature is written on this. And when it is talked about, it's talked about very briefly. My doctoral project for my doctorate of ministry degree in preaching was based on this domain, this domain of oral clarity. And the right or the author, the teacher, the doctor that I that I've based a lot of this on is Dr. Donald Sanuki. And he's written a book, Invitation to Biblical Preaching, that I would recommend. You'll probably hear me refer to that quite a bit, not only maybe in this podcast, but in other courses. It's a very influential book. And he deals, he has about two chapters that deal with this idea of oral clarity. It's probably the most robust handling of this by any homilitician, any writer on preaching, any professor on preaching that I have heard. Like I said, you're going to hear pieces of this in others' writings, but nobody deals with it to this extent that Dr. Sanoukian does, which is why I did my doctoral project on it and why I feel like a special podcast episode needs to be talked about, needs to be addressed with it. And also I have an entire course, a six-lesson course that deals with the idea of oral clarity in the Clear Preaching Academy. If you'll go to ClearPreaching.com, click join the academy, and uh you can you can actually the it opens, the academy opens June 1st of 2026. So right now there is a join the wait list button. If you're listening to this podcast before June 1st, 2026, you can join the wait list and get in when the day it opens on June 1st, 2026. But as I said, though it's a course on oral clarity. But let's look at this domain being very underaddressed. Let's look, there's a gap, as I said, there's really a gap in the literature. What the literature does well, when you're going to read books on homilitics on preaching, you're going to hear a lot about clarity of thought, structure, language. Those are dealt with quite a bit. And what you've heard me cover in these first couple podcast episodes, and there are also, again, courses on this in the Clear Preaching Academy. The literature covers these pretty well. What it mostly, what the literature mostly ignores, though, is the specific oral disciplines that serve comprehension and understanding in the moment of preaching. Preaching is an oral skill, and preaching happens orally. This domain of oral clarity is not about vocal variety just for its own sake. It's not about physical presence as some type of performance goal. And if you have theater in high school, it's not going to make you a better preacher because you're expressive. It's more than that. It's more than charisma, it's more than personality. You might not have a big overpowering personality in the pulpit. That's okay. You're called to be who God called you to be. But there are skills of oral clarity. Take advantage of learn these skills and be able to deliver your message, the sermon in a way so people can track with you, follow with you, and not get lost. What your congregation is experiencing in real time is what this is about. Oral communication is processed in the moment. Listeners cannot scroll back, they can't rewind you, they can't pause you and ask you to repeat yourself. It's happening in real time. What they're experiencing, not only is this real time, but they're experiencing working memory. What they hear competes with everything else their minds are carrying. You've sat and heard preaching before, you've heard how difficult it is to track sometimes and to remember. You're also, the congregation is also experiencing distraction and fatigue. A listener who's distracted for 30 seconds may miss your most important point. So how do we keep them from missing that? What do we do? Now we can't guarantee they won't miss it. We can't grab a hold inside their mind and their brain and keep them from being distracted, but we can employ some techniques and some skills that will make it more likely for them to catch what we are saying. These disciplines exist to work with that reality, not against it. So let's look at these three disciplines we're going to highlight today. Number one is restatement. It's probably the most underused of every delivery discipline. And one of the reasons is because we have this feeling against it. We've been taught not to do it because we've been trained to write clearly, not speak clearly. This practice of returning to your take-home truth or a key point multiple times throughout the sermon, to say it again in the same words or in different words, this idea of restatement. There is something that rises up in us that we don't want to do that because we've taught not to do it. But I want to talk to you about why restatement matters. Now, restatement can be done in the same words. Call that repetition. And repetition can be used and is important at certain times throughout the sermon. When you return to your central idea, your take-home truth sentence, you want to say that verbatim, say that with repetition. That will build recognition, build retention when you say the same thing in the same way multiple times. You probably don't want to say it two or three times back to back with the same words. That's where restatement comes in, where you say things back to back, but you say them with different words. We'll talk about that in a second. So repetition is saying the same thing in the same way, the same words. And that's used very much with your take-home truth, that central idea of your sermon, you'll come back to it from time to time, and you want to say it the exact same way. Now, there are times maybe you want to restate it and not say it exactly the same way, but I would propose, especially as you're learning this skill and learning to push back against what you've been taught in high school, writing, composition classes, you need to repeat. But this idea of restatement, not repetition, saying the same thing in the same words, but restatement is very important for probably the 12, 13, 14, 15 different times of your sermon where you say something you want people to catch and remember and help you follow. Restatement is stating the same idea with different language. This allows you to reach listeners who didn't grasp it the first time. So most preachers restate far less than they think they do. And restatement is not repetition for its own sake, it's giving your congregation multiple chances, multiple opportunities to receive the thing you most want them or need them to receive. A lot of times if we say an important statement in the text that the sermon in the sermon that the sermon's hanging on, if you just say it once, who's to say your audience, every one of them in there was cued in exactly listening without distraction that first time you said it? But if you immediately restate it again, and then maybe even immediately restate it again. So if you're telling somebody that God's grace is sufficient for your sin, what if you said that one time? Your whole sermon's hanging on that, but there you had half the congregation was distracted because in the middle of the sermon their minds are wondering. But if you stead, God's grace is sufficient for your sin. The mercy and grace of God is enough to cover the mistakes in your life. God's grace is able to take care of and to make way for you to move forward, even when you've got sin that needs to be dealt with in your life. Restating. I said basically the same thing, but I said it three times. So hopefully, either that second time or that third time, they're gonna grasp this idea that I'm getting ready to deliver and talk about in my sermon. Restatement. When it comes to the central idea, the take-home truth sentence, this is what restatement or repetition might look like across the sermon. Now, when it comes to, I just showed you what restatement, so that God's grace is sufficient for your sin. That was a point in my sermon. So that needs to be restated. When it comes to your central idea, you can rep repeat or restate also. So let's say that I'm opening, I'm building this open, this intro of my sermon, and I've I'm tying everything in. I'm setting up this idea that I'm going to preach today. And I get to the end of my open, and it it leads right into this take-home truth, this central idea I want to deliver. And this central idea is when God, and I'm preaching just for context, okay? I'm setting up this idea of preaching from from John, from Jonah chapter four, okay? You know, the background. Uh I'm giving you this take-home truth, and yet you don't have my full intro yet, nor do you have the context. So you have to just remember Jonah chapter four. You're probably familiar with it. The central idea, I'm building this open, this intro to it, and I get to this very end, I set up the rest of the sermon. I say, when God acts like God, the reasonable response is not to be angry, but to love what he loves. Maybe I'll restate it. When God shows who he really is, the right reaction for us to have is not be angry because we don't like what he did, but to say, God shaped my heart to love what you love. When God is God, he's gonna do things sometimes, and you've got a choice, either be angry about it or accept and love the what and the who that he loves. I restated it. And I gave my audience an opportunity to see this idea in a different light. And maybe they didn't catch it the first time, but hopefully after that second or third time, restating it, they catch it. And so then now I've restated it. I've laid this foundation by restating it. I've also let them know, hey, this is important. You need to listen to this. This a lot of things hang on this statement. And so then I will go into the sermon, and maybe it partway through the sermon, I'm everything's driving towards this statement. Everything's driving home this idea of when God acts like God, the reasonable response is not to be angry, but to love what he loves. And so maybe as I'm in the middle of the sermon and I'm talking about uh Jonah being angry in chapter four, and then I point out, see these two verses in verse four, and I can't remember verse number seven or whatever it is, you can look it up, where God sees Jonah's response of anger, wanting to die, and God says, Jonah, do you do well to be angry? And what that's really saying, God's really asking, is Jonah, is this a reasonable response? Is this the right thing? Is this the right way to respond? You see, we see God talking to Jonah here, and we understand God's questioning Jonah's the reasonableness of this response. And we gotta understand when God acts like God, the reasonable response is not to be angry, but to love what he loves.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

You see, Jonah was angry because God was who he said he was, and God was acting on his own character.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

So when God acts like God, the reasonable response is not to be angry, but to love what he loves. When God shows his true nature, which he always does when there's lost people around, don't be angry about it. The right response is to say, God, I want to love like you love. Restatement. A little bit of repetition in there. Driving that home. And then even at the close, land on it again. Because this is what I want people, this are take-home truth. I want people to walk away with this. So you can you can use this skill of repetition and even restatement to drive home your take-home truth, to uh to highlight certain major points and movements in the sermon. Again, you have to press against and push against what you've been taught in your high school English composition class, and maybe even some college English composition classes. The second principle is the passage preview. Passage preview. Here's where you orient your congregation to what they're about to hear before you read the text or before you read a scripture passage in the middle of your message. Most preachers read their text cold. The congregation hears it without knowing what to listen for.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

So here's really the formula of this. State something like this.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

As I read this passage, I want you to listen for this. It's gonna matter for everything we discussed today. This short little four-second investment brings significant comprehension in return. It brings them from passive hearing to active listening. You've told them something to watch for in the text. And so as you read the text, they're gonna be watching for it and listening for it. Few preachers do this with consistency. Let me demonstrate this for a minute. If I'm preaching from Ephesians chapter 6, I'm talking about the armor of God. And I'm getting ready to read verse 12, which we're familiar with, right? We wrestle not against flesh and blood, against rulers, blah, blah, blah. And I I'm getting ready to read verse 12, and I and I say this. I say, you know what, the armor is critical in helping us stand against the schemes of the devil. All right, we just saw that in verse later. Let's read verse 12. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. The listener receives this verse cold. No framing, no direction. They're processing the words without knowing what to look for. And I want you to look through this not from the standpoint that you know that scripture. You could quote that scripture in multiple different translations. You know what it says. The listener doesn't. You've been living with this text for the last week. You've spent eight to ten hours studying this text, every word, figuring out what Paul's talking about, all the nuances, the different angles to look at it. You've been living with this text. The church hasn't. The listeners have it. They have, they might, it might be familiar to some of them, but for many of them it won't be. They don't know what to look for. Instead, you're getting ready to read verse 12, say something like this. The armor is critical. We've seen it just as we read verse 11. The armor is critical. But what we're about to see is that this is not a passive stance. In fact, Paul sees this as a spiritual wrestling match. And that fight, the fight is not against our fellow man. When we're battling spiritually, the fight isn't against flesh, our fellow man, but solely against the spiritual forces of evil. Watch what Paul says about this in verse 12. For we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Now the listener is listening and reading to confirm what they already know to look for. And the idea lands clearly. Very important. Reviewing the text. I go into that a little deeper in the course Oral Clarity inside the Clear Preaching Academy. The last principle is this a principle of intentional pause. I've watched really young preachers really struggle with the pause because a one-second pause feels like 30 seconds to them. You almost have to feel like preachers, young preachers, developing preachers, and even some preachers that have been preaching for a long time can get thrown off by a pause. Because a pause to them means the audience thinks they've forgotten what they're going to say or they've lost their place. And the pause just goes on and on. But when you use pauses intentionally, it is so important and helpful to the audience. Silence is not empty. In preaching, a well-placed pause is one of the most generous things you can give your congregation. Here's a couple types of pause. One type of pause is after a significant statement. After you make a statement, give the congregation time to process what they just heard before the next sentence arrives.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

When God acts like God, our reasonable response is not to be angry, but to choose to love what he loves. Pausing for a second.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

Let that sit with them. Let them think. You're going to explain it. You're going to draw, you're going to, if there's any unclear part of it, you're going to explain it as you do. But give them a chance to let that sink in. Or maybe even before another type of pause is do that before your take-home truth, which I just told you a take-home truth there. But do it before the take-home truth. Signal that something important is coming. When you pause, if you've done that before, take two or three seconds, pause, watch all eyes. People that are looking down from the at their phones, look up. It's like the pause says, hey, I'm getting ready to say something important. Look up here. It creates a listening posture. The congregation leans in. A lot of preachers are afraid of silence. That's why we feel it. That's why we have all these ums, hallelujahs, and praise God's. And if I was doing that whole, if I was doing this whole podcast like that, hallelujah, and I had no pauses, praise God, and thought that thank you, Jesus. And I was trying to say signaling the same, thank God.

SPEAKER_01 21:30

We were afraid of pauses. Pause. Slow down. Give the audience a moment to think and process.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

And hey, I've been doing this for many years, but it is it's difficult for me too because I get to talking way too fast. You've already heard me on this podcast. I talk way too fast sometimes. And I gotta even be intentional about the pause because that is so important when it comes to. Clear delivery. The congregation almost always needs the pause. And it's a preparation discipline. Mark your pauses before you preach. So here's these three principles. Again, there's seven or eight of them that assist with oral clarity. I just wanted to give you a couple of them here today. But these three, three decisions to make before you preach. First of all, number one, mark your restatements. Find those major ideas and movements in the sermon, these statements that you're going to make, and figure out how you're going to restate those. And Dr. Sanukin says it. You need to restate something. Again, it feels uncomfortable because that's not what we've been taught in written written communication. But this is not written communication. This is oral communication, and the listener needs restatement and repetition. So mark the places you're going to restate. And the easiest way to restate is to put synonyms in for some of those major concepts in that statement. Secondly, write your passage previews. Every time you're going to talk about a specific verse and explain it, talk about it, make sure you preview that, give the audience what to look for before you read that passage. Help them to be able to read intelligibly. And then number three, mark your pauses physically in your manuscript, in your notes, or if you don't preach with much notes, in your mind, mark where you're going to pause. So you honor that in the pulpit. So we've talked the last four podcast episodes. We looked at clarity of thought, clarity of structure, clarity of language, clarity of delivery. These are so important. Clarity is not a gift. Clarity is a discipline. Clarity is not just something you're born with when it comes to oral communication. There may be some of those that these things just come naturally to them. But for the vast majority, 99.9% of us preachers, these do not come naturally. These are disciplines we've got to learn if we want to be clear. It can be developed across these four domains. So I invite you to join us in the Clear Preaching Academy. Go to ClearPreaching.com, click join the Academy. If you're listening to this before June 1st, 2026, you have to click join the wait list because it's not quite open to the public just yet. But I want you to check that out and join that. Join this community of preachers that's being developed, people that are in the fray with you, people that are preaching week in and week out with you, or maybe you don't preach week in and week out, but you can rub shoulders and with some people who are preaching the same time, the same way you are, and learn from them. And it's going to be a great community. So check that out. You can also go to clearpreaching.com. You can scroll down. You can join, uh subscribe to the weekly clarity, which is just a weekly email you get in your inbox where I deal with some of these principles on a weekly basis, and that'd be your first step. Maybe you then decide to join the academy. We'd love to see you in there. I want to challenge you. Preach so clearly that the people actually hear what you meant to say. It's work. Let's do it together. God will be pleased. People understand, and lives will be changed because the word of God can change it. God bless you.