General Purpose
Many students of public speaking, including orators, get frustrated because they fear that their topic will not adapt to their judges’ and other hearers’ interests. However, students of public speaking perhaps can improve their persuasive power by studying the strengths and weaknesses of other speech personalities who must make certain kinds and qualities of adjustment because of a very diversified audience. Perhaps the best personalities to study are clergymen, for many of them face the problem of audience heterogeneity yet must assume the mandate to preach in a world of reality.

Heterogeneity and Inconsistent Attendance
Clergymen of different denominations recently were asked to identify significant problems they encounter while speaking to their respective congregations. Most revealed that the people who attend their services represent innumerable facets of society and are inconsistent in their attendance, so that the clergymen rarely can predict with accuracy the composition of an audience for a given service. Perhaps the only deduction a preacher can make about any given congregation is that the people have some interest in religion, but this factor also prompts a response that says everyone has different interests in religion. This problem has been as widespread historically as it is today. For example, Joseph Glanvill, a seventeenth-century Anglican preacher, remarked that some people came to church to be entertained while others came with a distorted zeal for religion. In his Seasonable Defence of Preaching, Glanvill set up a typology of religious audience, using anonymous characters in dialogue fashion to represent the different types in an audience. Each type Glanvill identified has a counterpart in today’s church congregation.

Glanvill presented five characters labeled A, B, C, D, and E. Character A represented the Anglican layman who ideally defended the conformist ministry. However, Character A was not always a model churchgoer, nor was he successful in persuading other laymen to concur in his religious convictions about the Anglican Church. Character B represented people who believed that too much preaching occurred. Character B was not totally opposed to preaching, but he contended that reliance upon frequent preaching as a tool by which people were won to the faith led to contempt and disbelief. Character C represented people who preferred the homilies, prayers, and catechetical instruction prescribed in The Book of Common Prayer rather than sermons composed by the minister. Character C contended that preaching had little value, for the preacher was unable to change the nature of the hearers. Character D represented people who broke away from the established church, turned to nonconformist sects for spiritual gratification, and indicted the clergy for preaching erroneous doctrine. Character E represented Anglican laymen who belonged to a parish in which the minister’s reading of the prescribed homilies of the Anglican Church was a substitute for plain preaching. Character E criticized other members of the laity for being insincere in their devotion and lacking the intelligence to understand divine matters. (1)

Other clergymen have written about this problem, but have said little about how to confront it today. Evidence reveals that too many resign themselves to the condition of excessive diversity within their audiences and confess their inability to cope with it. They should begin to confront this problem by gaining specific knowledge of their entire congregations.

Gathering Statistics and Identifying Patterns
Many clergymen may have access to information about their congregations, but apparently few utilize this information so as to know at least the statistics about their congregations and identify patterns that are based on the information. For example, some of the data that can be gathered and collated are:

1. Age. How many members of the congregation fall into the following age brackets: 1-7, 8-14, 15-18, 19-21, 22-25, 26-30, 31-40, 41-50, 51-60, 61-65, 66 and over? Where are the concentrated populations?
   
2. Sex. How many men and women are in each age bracket? What patterns appear in the statistics? For example, are more men than women under the age of thirty?
   
3. Marital Status. How many single men and women are in the group? How many fall in each age bracket? How many married couples are in the group, and what age brackets do they represent? How many people are divorced and how many remarried ? How many widows and widowers are in the group? How many children are in the group? How many are adopted or foster children?
   
4. Employment. How do the people earn a living? How many blue-collar and white-collar positions do they hold?Does a certain type of employment predominate? How many teachers, doctors, lawyers, dentists, and factory workers belong? How many women are working, and are they single or married? If married, do they have children?
   
5. Economic Status. What are the various incomes of the people, and how many are in each category? How many people own their homes?
   
6. Race and Ethnicity. What races are represented in the congregation? What ethnic groups are represented, and how many are in each group? Do interracial marriages exist? How many?
   
7. Organizational Affiliation. What religious organizations or clubs do the people represent? What sex or age groups predominate in such organizations? How many espouse the various political parties or ideologies? Does a certain political ideology predominate?
   
8. Educational Background. How many have been graduated from grade school, high school, college, and professional and graduate schools? How many had public, parochial, or private-school formal education, and for how many years?
   
   

Utilization Is Better Than Insufficiency
After collecting and arranging into patterns the above data, the clergyman should refer to it when preparing his sermons, for the latter should be designed for a specific congregation, not a universal one. By relying on a congregational profile, the clergyman is less likely to address an age bracket that is not in the audience, or to talk as though the majority of the hearers are wealthy when the contrary is true. Moreover, the clergyman is more likely to be cognizant of any exception to the general patterns, especially of the religious implications involved.

Insufficiency occurs when the man in the pulpit looks at his hearers once a week, rationalizes that they are all the same in the eyes of God, and then proceeds to communicate as though all of the people are of one age, sex, marital status, economic status, educational level, and political or religious ideology. While most clergymen are mildly aware that similarities and differences exist in their congregations, many seem to lack a precise knowledge of these factors and fewer adapt to these realities in the preparation of their sermons and other discourses about religion. They certainly assume the responsibility to preach as mediators between God and man, but the influence of communication among human beings is not fully realized when God’s words are preached downwardly from the clergy to the laity. In this sense the clergyman follows a pattern of one-way communication: from God, to the preacher, and then to the laity. When preparing to preach, the clergyman should conceive of himself as being the mediator between God and his real congregation for a meaningful three-way communication. The clergyman serves this role best when he accounts for his congregation as he finds and knows them, not as he thinks they are or should be.

When the clergyman has knowledge regarding any one category, he is more likely to observe the potential for many sermons about age and religion, education and religion, or all other categories and their religious implications. Also, given any concept in religious discourse, the clergyman will see that it may have a relationship to all or most categories. For example, the general topic of crime and what religion has to do or say about it generates a variety of specific concepts about crime. Other perspectives are crime and age brackets, crime and sex, crime and education, crime and employment, crime and race, and crime and group affiliations. The clergyman can better focus on these perspectives, if he has a profile of data about his congregation.

Knowing Similarities and Dissimilarities
In practice, clergymen generally note and adapt to some of the most obvious similarities that exist, but all too often they fail to observe and account for the differences that exist. For example, when a clergyman recently addressed a group of fathers and sons, he spent most of his time discussing the problems of parents in rearing their children. He apparently failed to account for the younger half of his audience, as is shown by the reaction of one teenage son who said after the experience: “After the speech there was a question and answer session that proved to be a slight success. The audience participated in the discussion, but the opinions were one-sided. The fathers were the ones who spoke, and the sons were afraid to voice their reactions. The speech would have had greater success, if the fathers and sons were separated.”

Some clergymen attempt to control the diversity of congregations by employing practices that may or may not be useful. For example, some schedule services for different age groups. Some advertise on religious billboards and in bulletins and newspapers their sermon topics and the intended audiences. Some look for patterns of attendance by certain people at certain times, and adapt their sermons to the anticipated groups. Thus, it is common to hear a preacher direct certain portions of his sermon to the young, the old, and the married people present. Little evidence is available to believe that one approach is necessarily better than another. The clergyman who aims at influencing the religious beliefs and actions of his congregation should try several approaches. However, before he attempts to preach, he should begin with a profile of congregational data as a reference point.

Some clergymen have commented that they conduct religious instructional services for each of the various age groups, a services for each of the various age groups, and, therefore, these people are receiving intense religious instruction.. Such reasoning has prompted some clergymen to ignore these people in their sermons. Other clergymen have commented that the family is the basic unit, and, therefore, they have directed their sermons to the family unit. These attitudes result in preaching practices that ignore conscious and rational audience analysis. The presumption that religious instructions are the same as preaching loses sight of the fact that instruction often is limited to exposure to, or drill in, the tenets and historical data of a specific denomination. Also existing is the presumption that, if religious instruction is offered early in life, the recipient will apply it for the rest of his or her life. However, many clergymen fail to give religious instruction outside of the regular services and because of this the only contact with him for many people is the regular service to which the sermon occurs. With respect to the family unit comment, to direct a sermon constantly to the family unit is to overlook potentially significant factors that may exist and be important at the time of the sermon. This, too, reflects a lack of knowledge about the significant differences and similarities that may exist in the composition of the entire congregation, or of one specific group within the congregation..

The Unseen Audience
A knowledge of the external characteristics of a given congregation is relatively easy to gather and examine, but some factors operating in the speaking situation are not clearly observable. The counterpart of speaking is listening, and clergymen can better prepare their sermons, if they are aware of the probable thoughts of the audience during a given sermon.

Many people have reflected extensively on the subject of listening. For example, Ralph Nichols makes the speaker acutely aware of some of the behavior of listeners and generally advocates education for the masses on how to listen in society. Most likely it is impractical for busy clergymen to instruct their congregations on how to listen, but perhaps some innovative clergymen care enough to do something about it when and where they are able.

Some people who attend church services are uninterested in the substance of the sermon. After they learn what the service is about, they suddenly lose all interest in the rest of it. This is a factor that clergymen must consider when preparing their sermons. Other people lack motivation to listen, and this should prompt clergymen to consider the motivational bases for their sermons. The immediate point is that listening is a silent process, and lack of interest in the clergyman’s concepts leads to low levels of attention.

Other listeners tend to correlate ineffective oral and visual habits of delivery with the substance of the sermon. If they do not like the clergyman’s vocal or physical behavior, they often rationalize that they dislike the substance of the sermon. Thus, clergymen must consider what they can do to improve their delivery. A thought-provoking clergyman, observing that some preachers say very little but are visually or vocally dynamic, may conclude that his delivery is of no consequence. Clergymen often tend to believe that religious ideas will prevail in spite of ineffective delivery. Nonetheless, investigation reveals that the human behavior of a listener often is influenced more by delivery than by any other component of oral communication.

Clergymen address some people who are easy and other people who are difficult to excite intellectually and emotionally. Members of a congregation who are easy to excite may concentrate on something which the preacher has described, and their resulting excitement over it causes them to fail to listen affectively to subsequent communication. Such people can put themselves through a process of mental introspection and shut out the world immediately adjacent to them. Likewise, people who are so predisposed to preaching that they have a low level of expectation of help or inspiration from sermons can develop a patterned behavior in which they have acclimated themselves to being comfortable in the listening situation. They are so familiar with the preaching of a particular clergyman that they seem to build up an immunity against his preaching over a period of time.

Professor Nichols revealed that good listeners tend to focus on central ideas, but only about 25 percent of persons listening to a formal talk are able to grasp the speaker’s central idea. Nichols recommends the employment of conventional organizational thought-patterns, transitional language, and recapitulation to increase the listeners’ ability to locate the important ideas of a given discourse. In short, clergymen should use tools of discourse to create conceptual focus for the members of the congregation.

Human behavior is such that attention can be faked in the listening situation. Many people tend to exert themselves to concentrate on the sermon, if for no other reason than out of respect for the preacher. Then, at any given point in the oral-aural situation the listeners’ minds can go in one direction while their physical symptoms lead one to believe that they are attending to what is being said. The religious arena is not exempt from this listening habit. Other people choose not to feign attention. For example, one person commented after a Christmas sermon:

His language was clear in conveying his meaning, but it sounded as if his only motivation was that he had to give a sermon. The members of the congregation were looking around, staring at the floor, and in general not paying attention. Consequently the application of his Christmas message was lost to many in attendance.

The zealous clergyman may over-react to this phenomenon of latent attention by employing all kinds of devices for grasping and sustaining the attention of his audience. Perhaps nothing could be more disastrous, for he may succeed in keeping his listeners awake, but fail to influence their religious thought and behavior. The danger is that the clergyman may concentrate his energy on one aspect of speaking while he excludes a comprehensive approach to homiletic preparation. Serious preparation of inventive, stylistic, structural, and oral-visual aspects of the sermon tends to increase the amount of real attention by the listeners.

Distraction is another phenomenon that occurs in the listening situation. People are notorious for mentally creating their own distractions. For example, when a sermon becomes dull, the listener can think about some problem or some pleasant experience he or she is having. People who need relief from sleep-inducing sermons also find distractions in the physical surrounding, such as the clothing of certain people, the beautiful church windows, or the numerous items of the church’s aids to worship. Many churches have eliminated the distractions of crying babies and noisy children by building soundproof rooms or by providing baby-sitting service. These devices may eliminate certain obvious distractions, but the silent potential for distraction is much more difficult to combat. Clergymen have a constant need to make certain that their sermons relate directly to the reality of the audience. In this way they minimize the boundaries of silent fantasy and other processes of distraction.

The last phenomenon concerns the ability of the listening mind to receive discourse at a rate relatively faster than is commonly expected. Many clergymen think that in order to be understood they must speak very slowly. Clergymen must understand that the mind is faster than the tongue. Sometimes a faster rate of speaking may help to sustain attention, and it certainly allows the clergyman to cover more substance in a given amount of time. Clergymen could lessen the time normally given to a sermon and be just as effective. The era is over when the hourglass determines the length of the sermon.

Conclusion
Clergymen, orators, and other public speakers should always remember that effective communication demands that religious and other concepts should be supported with creditable evidence, valid logical processes, well-grounded emotional appeals, and speaking behavior that displays the speaker’s intelligence, good will, and sound character; that structure should be precise for the intended message; that language should be clear and impressive; and that vocal and physical delivery should enhance the speaker’s message. None of these criteria can be accomplished successfully, if the speaker fails to at least try to adapt to the specific occasion and especially to the homogeneity of the audience. In short, public should always try to discover as much data as possible for any given audience.

(Dr. Wayne C. Mannebach directed debate and forensics at Ripon College for nine years, and for the past twenty-nine years he has taught English at St. Mary's Central High School in Neenah (WI).