Influencing Like Jesus -- Principle 3: Know Your Audience

Principle 3: Know Your Audience

The Concept

An Excerpt from Influencing Like Jesus

Digging Deeper: Examples of the Know Your Audience Principle

The Concept

The better we understand our audience, the more effectively we can shape our message to influence them.

An Excerpt from Influencing Like Jesus

Learn as much as you can about the person you’re trying to influence before you go charging in with your brilliant insights and rationales. What would convince him or her is not necessarily what would convince you.

Now, that point may sound like little more than common sense to you, but I highlight it because it’s not always common practice. When we want to affect the way our teenager thinks, for example, do we first step back and consider what he’d truly find compelling? Do we take the time to consider what’s important to him? What his fears are? What his needs and desires are? How he views the world? Or do we just take the expedient route of defaulting to the way we’ve always tried to shape his attitudes and behaviors. If we do the latter, it might explain why things are not working.

This same lesson applies in the workplace. With your boss, for instance, the more you can get into his head and understand his constraints and pressures and ego, the more likely you are to generate ideas and solutions that he’ll embrace. With your customers as well, and your employees, before you say a word, stand in their shoes and view the situation from that vantage point. Remember, people do things for their reasons, not yours.

Digging Deeper:

Examples of the "Know Your Audience" Principle

The "Know Your Audience" Principle in Advertisements

A&P Stores: They know both their audiences -- men want to eat and women want to save (an ad from the 1950s).

Apple's Ipod: Targeting (and creating) relativists.

When Pastors Don't Understand Their Audience

Is "in-your-face evangelism" really the best way to reach postmodern people? Consider what one church in Indiana is doing:

A nearly 50-foot tall cross erected recently next to a church has irked some of its neighbors who see the towering cross as a distraction.

The cross, made from a bridge I-beam and a 35-foot crossbeam, says "Jesus saves" in letters 3-1/2 feet tall. It was erected last Monday outside Cross Tabernacle along U.S. 41.

"It is in-your-face evangelism," said Keith E. Taylor, pastor of the 1,400-member church. "I couldn't preach a better sermon than what that cross is doing."

From wire reports, as reported in The Virginian-Pilot, March 4, 2006, p. E3.

Is leading with "you' are a sinner" really going to attract postmodern people?

An excerpt from a local church flyer in Virginia (note: following each point is a scripture and some further explanation):

"How to Get to Heaven"

1. You are a sinner

2. The penalty of sin is death

3. Jesus Christ paid the sin debt for the entire world on the cross

4. Jesus Christ's sacrifice on the cross is God's free gift to all mankind

5. Jesus Christ is the only way to have forgiveness from God

6. You must personally accept God's free gift of salvation

When Pastors Do Understand Their Audience

When I decided to preach a seven-week series called "Sex and the City," a pastor friend in town said I must be crazy. Our city is famous for sex in a way few others are. I live in Amsterdam, the city all too well-known for prostitutes and extravagant sexual practices.

In Holland almost 80 percent of people live together before marriage. It's called samenwonen. In fact the government recognizes samenwonen as a legal standing in society, somewhere between being single and married. Here it is simply another alternative.

In my own congregation, there are more than a few people who live together while claiming to follow Christ. So when I brought up the subject, I decided to set the bar high.

I was tempted to give "seven reasons not to have sex before marriage," but rather than making it a "don't do it" discussion, I spoke about radical purity in an age of rampant impurity. We introduced our community to a man and woman who lived 3,000 years ago and were passionately in love with each other.

In the Song of Solomon, we observe this couple wait to consummate their relationship, see them struggle to have intimacy, and see them honor each other above all else. Then all of us in the congregation were challenged to measure our lives by the lifestyles of these two hot-for-each other lovers.

As we pressed on in the series, I discovered some things about speaking to a postmodern audience on sex and sexuality. Young people want us to "shoot straight" with them, to acknowledge how things are in many of our lives and also how God designed them to be. They were much more open to Bible study on the topic than I expected.

They also want room to reach their own conclusions. Instead of telling people up front that pre-marital sex is wrong (most people in my congregation don't even know what "fornication" means), I laid out the types of love described in the Hebrew text, and how they relate to the people in the poem. I let listeners in the congregation make their own applications.

During the series, our counseling center began to hear from people who had a lot of brokenness in the area of sexuality. And there was lots of processing in our small groups as well. But I realized that while people were open to confessing their sin, they appeared unable or unwilling to turn from it.

Four months later, when we were not talking about sex anymore, I gave people an opportunity to write a sin they were struggling with on a piece of paper and burn the paper. People came up by the hundreds to the trash bins to "burn their sins away," their sexual sins. The response was overwhelming.

That same Sunday we also gave people opportunity to go to our elder team to be anointed with oil and pray for healing in their lives. Once again people poured into the aisles.

During the series I felt overwhelmed by comments I heard over and over again. What I learned was quite unexpected:

1. Many married people are incredibly sexually lonely. I expected single people to struggle with this, but I was surprised that married couples struggle so much to connect on a physical intimacy level. I am more committed than ever to do marriage retreats at our church that encourage couples to spend focused time together.

2. Just about everyone has a sordid story. If we are really, really honest, most of us have a messed up past in the area of sexuality. One of the things I love about Holland is that people do not put on masks too much and are not that hypocritical. What you see is what you get, in a sense. Yet I was still shocked by the depth of brokenness in people's lives, and the long road ahead of many people to become whole again. I have learned not to underestimate the sexual wounds of the past for both men and women.

3. People are tired of promiscuity and really desire purity. I wondered a few times if I was indeed crazy to preach a series on sex in a city famous for it. While it was a great challenge, I believe God would have us do it all over again the same way. It gave God the space to work in people's lives in ways that I had not seen before. That made it all worthwhile.

--Brian Newman is lead pastor of Crossroads International Church in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

From: Newman, Brian. "License to thrill: in my city, prostitution is legal and preaching is dangerous." Leadership (Carol Stream, IL) 27:1 (Winter 2006), p. 48.

Understanding Your Postmodern Friend

For information about worldview (i.e., people's assumptions about God, about man, and about the relationship between the two), see:

Organizations:

Articles:

What is a Worldview, Anyway? (from The Truth Project, Focus on the Family)
The Best (and worst) Practices for Communicating with Unbelievers (from Moody Press)
Worldview@Work:Understanding how your co-workers think, what persuades them, and what does not (from Christianity9to5.net)

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