My role as a pastor of an urbanized mega church in Kigali has come with the responsibility of teaching and preaching adult learners. I teach at least once in 6 weeks. My experience working with adult learners as I have taught God’s word to them has been an illuminating adventure. Adult learners are ironically both easy and hard to teach. Easy because it is easier for them to sit through a teaching and conceptualize what you’re teaching and difficult to teach because as a teacher, I need to constantly prepare, contextual messages that speak into their various situation. Our congregation will let you know when you have not prepared for the teaching. They will call pastors out on ill preparedness.
In our sermon planning processes, we have to ensure that the audience hearing the message grabs it and allows the message to transform them. So they are always looking for challenges messages that don’t create a dependent congregant but one that will rely on the message to make a conscious decision to change and be better. The idea is because adult learners are making the move from dependency to self-assessment and there after direction.
As I prepare my sermon messages, I’m very cognizant of the fact that my audience of adult congregants is knowledgeable and experienced, so it guides my preparation to stick to relevant information because the audience is quite experienced. They also aspire to hearing messages that will be relevant to their day to day life and work because they want the messages to guide them in their social roles in society.
The messages that I preach usually have to carry applicability for Monday after church on Sunday. The immediacy of application is a longing from our congregation through the messages we teach. Also because most of the messages we teach are driven to transform the soul, they appeal to the internal motivation of the hearers rather than the external motivations.
Finally, as I prepare the sermons to teach our adult congregation, the ‘Why’ of the message has to be weaved throughout all of it, otherwise it won’t have impact in the parishioners we are tasked to serve. Because they always need to know why we preach what we preach.