How to Present Your Message Quickly and Concisely with Message Maps

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Jul 20, 2012 in Featured, Ministry, Preaching, Sermons, Video | 0 comments

Message Maps helps communicators effectively share a single idea in a moment. Use Message Maps to organize your ideas, express them simply and quickly, and effectively offer a convincing message to hearers.

The video below shows communicators how to do this. It’s focused on business communications, but I want to adapt it to Biblical communications.

Thanks to Lifehacker for the post and video.

As the video states, use three steps to help you communicate your truth with Message Maps.

Message Maps Start With a Twitter Friendly Headline

First, boil the message down to a single idea that you can share succinctly enough to post on a service like Twitter that limits the author to 140 characters or less. For preachers this means express the main idea or Big Idea of your message in this same concise statement.

For example, the simple message of the Gospel could be posted on Twitter like this:

Jesus knows you make a lot of mistakes, but he took the consequences for your sin and wants to forgive you.

That’s pretty simple and seems to encompass the whole thing. If I worked harder, I could word it better, but for demo purposes it suffices.

Share the Main Ideas

In the video the speaker shows how to pull the three main ideas from the Headline and state them in a map. You can use something like a mind mapping app or just a piece of paper or whiteboard. Draw a circle with the title in the center. Now draw a line coming from the center to these three other ideas. State them in as simple a fashion as you can. That will help you quickly present the idea to someone.

Using our above idea, we could give the following three lines:

• Jesus knows you sin
• Jesus suffered in your place
• Jesus wants to forgive you and work with you

The man in the video wants us to use three main ideas, but not all ideas include three. You could present two or four. In fact I might prefer to split the third statement above into two:

“Jesus wants to forgive you. Jesus wants to work with you sharing His forgiveness to others.”

Support Your Sub-points

Now that you have the gist of your message, support each of the main ideas. You only do this if your main idea and sub ideas get a hearing. For example, in a witnessing situation you could state the above and ask if its okay to talk with the person more about this. Or you might ask, “Can I tell you how this changed my life?”

In a sermon, you assume they want to hear more. Preaching teachers tell us that each idea must get treatment with the following:

• Explanation – appeal to the mind and answer the question, “What does that mean?”
• Illustration – appeal to the imagination and answer the question, “What does that look like?”
• Argumentation – appeal to the will and answer the question, “Is that true?”
• Application – appeal to the commitment of the person and answer the question, “How do I use that in my life?”

Use the following to do the previous four things:

• Stories: tell your story AKA your testimony of how you were saved
• Facts: share the facts of the Gospel AKA the Roman Road
• Examples: tell about what Jesus did for others you know, if your audience already knows your story

The above could serve as a good presentation. It’s not really a sermon since it’s not based on a text of scripture. It’s a presentation. Use it for a witnessing situation with a friend or as a short message to a civic group.

Other Uses in Ministry

I could see this being useful when you’re presenting ideas to your church board for a potential new ministry or a change in something the church already does. You might use it to communicate your church’s vision to the congregation. Share facts about how your vision will help your church minister. Give stories about ways people have served or how Jesus changed people’s lives.

What do you think? How could you use this ministry to effectively communicate the Gospel? How could an expository preacher use it to get across the idea of a text?

Six Facts Videos: an Evangelistic Presentation and Strategy

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Apr 24, 2012 in Featured, Video | 0 comments

At a recent Ministers Conference of the Catawba River Baptist Association, Rev. Steve Parker, the pastor at Zion Baptist Church in Morganton, presented his The Six Facts Gospel Presentation and Evangelistic Strategy for the benefit of the ministers present and their churches. I recorded the session and posted the six parts of the hour-long presentation on my YouTube channel today. Here they are for your benefit.

Full YouTube Playlist

Here is the full YouTube Playlist. This will move from one video to the next. If you want to view them individually, see below.

Here are the individual videos by part in case you want to see them one by one instead of as a full YouTube playlist.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

If you want a DVD of these videos please contact the Catawba River Baptist Association and they will be able to get you a DVD for a small fee.

Bringing Them the Sun/Son

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Mar 11, 2010 in Editorial, Sermon Illustration, Video | 0 comments

There is a small town in Canada called Inuvik. It faces long periods in the winter where it never sees sunlight due to being so far north. And I thought Wisconsin winters were long and dark. As a marketing stunt, Tropicana paid to have a 10,000 lumen light hoisted over the town using helium balloons for a period of time. It brought them artificial sunlight. Here is the ad …

Of course, as a preacher I cannot resist the connection to bringing a dark world the light of Christ who is the Son of God. Fortunately for us, it doesn’t take this much effort. Just sharing your story about how God changed your life is enough.

Roman’s Road eTract for iPhone

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Jan 21, 2010 in Technology | 0 comments

Laridian has produced what it calls an eTract for the iPhone. The concept is that this is a witnessing guide for use on your iPhone or iPod Touch. You open the app and follow it as you are sharing the Gospel with someone. It follows, for the most part, what is traditionally called the Roman’s Road. This witnessing presentation usually uses four scriptures from the book of Romans.

Romans 3:23

Romans 6:23

Romans 5:8

Romans 10:9

The tract is pretty good and strays a little from the traditional Roman’s Road. But in a good way. While I kind of wish it was a little more colorful and I also wish there was a way to give it away, it is a good little app. For only 99 cents in the App Store how can you go wrong?

There is a possibility that there might be future eTracts using the same framework but with different content. I would love to be able to submit my favorite witnessing format and have them create an app.

Manhattan Declaration & the SBC GCR

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Dec 4, 2009 in Editorial, Prayer | 0 comments

The Manhattan Declaration is a document that calls for Christians to stand with one another over conscience issues like abortion, same sex marriage and government involvement in these things.

I had not made a decision about whether I would sign it when one of my respected church leaders/members asked me to consider it and said he had signed it.  I wanted to wait till I read the full text of the document. Due to schedule it took me a while to do so, but this week I finally got around to doing so. Then I read the list of those who signed. The men and woman were people that I have respected, learned from, and prayed for often.  But something bothered me. So I began to look for opposing views. Of course there were the people who are not believers including those on the left politically and the news media outlets that think the three tenets in the document are foolishness. But I found one person that I also respect, have learned from, and pray for who said he was not signing it. John MacArthur. I read his reasons and they were a significant set of concerns.

So I thought and prayed and asked what God would have me do. Today, I chose to sign it. You can read about my concerns at my church’s web site where I posted about it at the request of my church member.  You can also see at the bottom, the update which outlines why I chose to sign it.

But there is another document that I did not hesitate to sign and I want to focus on that.

I am a Southern Baptist. I have been sad to see that after our internal holy war was finished,  our denomination began to decline. For the first time our numbers are smaller than larger than they were the year before. Sadly, this has been masked by growth in ethnic congregations. The heart of the Southern Baptist Convention used to be our Anglo churches. They have been in decline for a long time. I am sad to say that my own church has been one of those.

So when some of our denominations leaders have chosen to stand up for what is called the Great Commission Resurgence, I was interested. I learned about it and studied it and got on board. I chose to sign the list of people who are praying for the “Great Commission Resurgence” or GCR. There has been some debate about this issue, but the motion to appoint a study committee passed overwhelmingly and many of us were excited.

But then I read a blog post this week that criticized it. The heart of the GCR at this point seems to be a call to reorganize the way we are doing missions. And this blog post said that will have little effect because he said that the organizational structure of the denomination has little to do with our decline. He said that our decline was because Christians don’t care that much about the Gospel or witnessing. He said, announce to your church this Sunday that after service you are going to the local stores and passing out Gospel tracts. See how may show up to go. [Update: the blog has a new post about how the GCR could win]

I think he is right about part of what he states. But, does that mean we should not reorganize our denomination thought? No! I have long felt we needed a new way of doing things. The GCR is not this generation’s holy war. It is a sincere hunger to see our denomination growing again. It is needed and I still support it.

The absolute truth is this: until the American Christian church gets excited about changing people’s hearts by living and sharing the Gospel we will continue to decline as a church and anti-Christian beliefs and policies will continue to win out in the public square. We need a multifaceted attack. We need people to be the salt and light to preserve and guide our culture in Washington, state houses, local school boards, and court rooms. We also need them in Hollywood, universities, and civic groups. We need people to influence the culture for Christ by pushing our ideals.

At the same time, all of us need to be about the business of doing the work of the Evangelist. We need all hands on deck! It is not a time to sit back and coast or let others take the lead. It is time to lead and be involved in telling people about Jesus first!