#620. The sermon with 247 different points.

“Panic.”

That’s what I felt when North Point Community Church asked me to speak at their singles retreat. I was excited, certainly, but I was also terrified. North Point is Andy “freaking” Stanley. For years I’ve attended there and been in awe at the way they do things. They are like the Apple of churches to me and as I prepared my two messages, I felt violently under qualified to have my name associated with anything they do.

Part of the process was that I had to submit an outline with a fill in the blank structure before the retreat. I’ve never done that. I tend to just try to tell a story. At Cross Point Church I told three stories, did a little bit of the robot and wrapped it up. So when I sat down to write the outline for North Point, I entered into new territory, the territory of the “Over Pointer.”

Have you ever experienced a sermon by an Over Pointer, that curious species of Pastor who tends to pack 247 different points into one sermon? It’s possible this is just a Southern Baptist thing and that other denominations never suffer from this, but maybe it’s universal. Maybe the disease of over pointing is international. Regardless, it grabbed hold of me with a fierceness.

The outline I submitted to North Point for the “Date Less Jerks” speech (yes I know “fewer” is grammatically correct, but like a rapper, I focus on flow, not grammar) had 3 main points and about 42 sub points. It was supposed to be about 25 minutes long, which meant each point would get roughly 19.2 seconds of speech. I’m no math whiz, but I think that all adds up to a horrible sermon.

Fortunately, the staff at North Point saw my outline dilemma, recognized me as an Over Pointer and encouraged me to dial it back. But what about you, how do you spot an Over Pointer? How, upon entering a sanctuary, can you tell before the sermon even begins that you’re about to be over pointed?

The bulletin.

The secret to spotting an Over Pointer is to always check the bulletin. Here are the three things you want to look for:

1. Thickness or Girth
If they hand you a bulletin and it’s thicker than your wallet, you are in trouble my friend. If the person handing you the bulletin is visibly sweating and is wearing those carpal tunnel sleeves that people with wrist problems wear, it is on like donkey kong. You are about to be sermon noted like you’ve never been sermon noted before. I hope you brought a twelve pack of pens for all the note taking you’ve got in your very near future.

2. The amount of fill in the blanks
If the sermon notes look like a church version of the game “Mad Libs” and unfold like an accordion on paper that rivals the length of the scroll Jack Kerouac wrote “On the Road” on, you might be in trouble. My initial North Point outline had sentences like “A _________ is ______who ________ and _________ _______ your ________.” I would have made the punctuation a fill in the blank if I could have figured out a way to easily draw a line under a period. Brutal.

3. The Alphabet Sandwich
If you ever see numbers and letters spooning together in the sermon notes, get ready. There’s never any reason to break something down to points like 2B1, 2B2, and 2B3 with the numbers effectively serving as the bread in your alphabet sandwich. When you start to see letters and numbers frolicking across the page, you’re about to be over pointed. A sermon notes page should never look like a periodic table of the elements.

Those are the three warning signs, but I know what you’re thinking, “Jon, we don’t use bulletins at our church. Our minister doesn’t use sermon notes.”

Fear not, I’ve got you covered. In a situation like that, you want to find where the sound guy sits and watch him. If he’s doing yoga or pilates in order to warm up his arms in anticipation of the amount of times he’s going to press “Next” on powerpoint, buckle up. You are about to go on a fantastic voyage to the land of over pointing.

Has that ever happened to you?

Have you ever been over pointed?

What's the longest sermon you've experienced?