April 2025
by Ian Macdonald
I am really looking forward to a short course I am hosting in June – posing the question, Can Preaching learn from Stand-Up Comedy?
The day has its roots in a conversation many years ago with a minister who knew I was active on the stand-up comedy circuit. He reflected that we tend to preach for about 8 or 10 minutes, but in comedy clubs people sit and listen for an hour or more. “If anything, we should be preaching for longer!” he said.
The thought amused and horrified me in equal measure, but it did get me thinking about the difference between stepping onto a stage on a Friday night, and into a pulpit on a Sunday morning.
It also prompted the realisation that all the preaching training I had received had been, on the whole, about preaching, in the context of preaching, drawing from understandings of preaching. It struck me that crashing a different aural art and discipline into the arena of homiletics might open up a great range of insight, learning and opportunity. Not to turn preaching into stand-up but to think differently, and to draw from the skills gleaned from a very different (and less forgiving) school of communication. I also thought it might be fun for us to share stories of joy, of disaster, and of learning from the two experiences.
The comedy circuit has been such a deep place of learning for me, where feedback, wisdom and encouragement has been, in my experience, more readily available than in preaching settings.
Over the last eight years or so I have explored preaching and stand-up with a number of groups, in a number of settings. They have always been tremendous fun, but have also been deep shared learning journeys in the art of engaging an audience/congregation, and hopefully led to a fewer Eutychus (Acts 20.9) type disasters!
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Ian Macdonald is Tutor in Mission at Sarum College. He is leading a day on Preaching and Stand-up on 5 June 2025. Details and link to book:
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