Doing Things That Work
This article originally appeared in Preaching: The Professional Journal for Ministry Leaders, Winter 2026.
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I like to do things that work.
Maybe you do too. In fact, I think most of us do. When something works, there is a satisfaction that comes along with knowing you made a difference. When someone responds to a Sunday morning sermon with an honest-to-goodness life-changing decision, you can't help but feel that the hours of study for that lesson were well spent.
I don't like things that don't work.
I doubt you like them either. It is excruciating to try to summon the motivation to do something that you know does not work, will not work, and never has worked. If you have ever been asked to do something totally fruitless for the sole reason, "it has always been done that way," you know what I am talking about.
But there is a third category.
What about the things we do, and we never know if they worked? What about things that lack good analytics, metrics, or feedback? We just work hard and hope they hit the mark. Unfortunately, when I do things that leave me wondering if they worked or not, most often I eventually toss them in the "didn't work" bin and abandon them.
The tension of not knowing what works really resonated with me during the pandemic. Like most of us, I spent several months running an online church I never planned on or signed up for. Filled with dread that our empty seats would remain empty forever, I did everything in my power to create meaningful online content in an attempt to keep our community engaged. In place of our Wednesday night meetings, I recorded short devotional videos each week, which I emailed out to our members. At first, these videos racked up several dozen views and comments. However, by the end of the first month of the shutdown, the view count had dropped to about a dozen each week, with no comments. My motivation began to evaporate. As the weeks wore on, I began to dread making that video each Wednesday. I was convinced it didn't work, and therefore it was a waste of time.
One day, I was griping to a friend about this very thing when he reframed it for me. He asked me, "What if you knew that what you were doing was radically impacting those twelve people?" I realized that if my efforts were spiritually forming twelve people, I would see that as a huge win. I would be highly motivated to give those videos my best effort every week. Making the videos would take the same amount of effort as before, but it would be a joy, not a burden. The difference? Knowing it was working.
Each week, pastors spend countless hours studying and crafting beautiful homilies that most people forget before finishing their lunch. Over a century ago, German researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus successfully demonstrated the human tendency to forget what we have learned. Ebbinghaus' research showed that "people usually forget 90% of what they learn in a class within 30 days. And the majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class."[1] If a preacher invests a dozen or more hours a week in preparing a single sermon, would it not be wise to preach in a way that the congregation remembers the information beyond the end of the day? How can preachers ensure the message is retained past Sunday and, even more importantly, that hearers apply it to their lives?
Modern public education systems and advances in neuroscience have discovered many powerful frameworks that describe how the human mind stores and retrieves knowledge. The Spacing Effect, Bloom's Taxonomy, and Cognitive Load Theory serve as building blocks for modern education strategies, spanning from preschools to universities. Millions of dollars a year are poured into consumer research on mass marketing, seeking the best ways to make a brand's message stick with a consumer and translate into a point-of-sale action. The human race has accumulated a wealth of knowledge about what leads to higher retention and integration of a message. What if we could apply the best discoveries from other academic domains, such as Educational Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Marketing, to Homiletics? What if we could do small things that would create big increases in retention among our listeners? What if there was research to show us that it worked?
Fast forward a few years, and I began work on my ministry project for my doctoral dissertation. I wanted to design an experiment that would help preachers like myself know how to be most effective in the pulpit. Surveying the literature, it was clear that there was already an abundance of information on how to structure a sermon delivery to make it more dynamic and memorable. However, my educational and workplace experience in both Christian Education and Marketing taught me a few effective strategies that could be applied after the sermon to enhance retention and application. I wanted to see if these things would work in the local church.
Any professional educator will tell you that retention is increased by repetition. How many of us learned spelling words as children by going over them again and again and again until they were burned into our brains? We did that because it works. Repetition is a key principle in education. But not just any repetition, spaced interval repetition. Do you remember cramming for a test in high school or college? Late the night before the test, you open the textbook and attempt to "cram" in all the information you can into your brain. Sometimes, the student stays up late into the night to study because they believe this approach is more efficient, given the shorter window of time between studying and the test, during which they might forget the information. However, extensive studies have provided a clear result: studying in smaller sessions at spaced intervals is much better for retention.[2] This phenomenon, known as the Spacing Effect, "is an improvement in future memory retrieval performance caused by more widely spaced practice (where repeated learning events are distributed temporally rather than massed at a single time)."[3] Many studies have documented the Spacing Effect, showing that two-spaced presentations are roughly twice as effective as two-massed presentations.[4]
Educational science has discovered that repeating the same information a day or more later results in significantly more retention of the information than a single presentation. Mass marketers have also found this to be true. Have you ever been shopping online for shoes on Monday only to find nothing but shoe ads popping up later in the week? This process, known as retargeting, is one of the innovations this industry has developed by spending over $84 billion annually on market research aimed at finding better ways to encourage you to part with your money. And it works. In fact, reintroducing a product-specific advertisement is six times more effective than a standard web banner ad.[5]
To summarize what we have learned so far, numerous highly intelligent individuals have invested considerable resources to determine how to enhance people's ability to remember and apply information. Pastors spend their lives trying to get people to remember and apply information. I wanted to know if presenting the same information from Sunday's sermon to the same audience a few days later would increase their retention and application of the sermon in a similar fashion.
The experiment took place over the course of three weeks. During those weeks, I preached each Sunday just as I usually would. Within the congregation, there were four groups. The first group served as the control group. They would hear the sermon on Sunday and take a quick online quiz at the end of the week, asking them to recall the specific text preached, the theme, the specific application, and whether they had personally followed through with the application that week. Group two would hear the sermon on Sunday, then on Tuesday, they would receive a 5-7 minute podcast, which was a condensed version of the same sermon with only the illustrations swapped out to keep it fresh. Group three would listen to the sermon on Sunday and then receive a condensed version of the sermon on Tuesday as a YouTube video created from the podcast audio, accompanied by appropriate visuals. Finally, group four would listen to the sermon on Sunday and then receive a short devotional essay summarizing the sermon on Tuesday. Each group would then take the same survey at the end of the week, asking them to recall the text, theme, application, and whether they had followed through with the application.
After several weeks and a lot of data to analyze, the results were in. Participants who received a second presentation demonstrated an average combined increase of 21.4% in accurate recall of sermon content compared to the control group. Retention increased regardless of the method. Podcasts, videos, and devotionals all increased retention roughly the same amount. Even better, three weeks later, they still remembered the sermon material at higher rates than the control group. The educators and mass marketers were right. A second presentation of the same material given at a spaced interval was significantly more effective than a single presentation. Application was a bit of a different story. Though people recalled what the application was at an increased level, only a modest improvement (4.9%) was reported for actual application follow-through on the sermon's call to action
Keep in mind this was only one study with a small sample size and a single congregation. This study would need to be duplicated on a larger scale before it could be considered a scientific fact. However, given the numerous rigorous studies from other domains, it is likely that these results will hold up. Scripture seems to support this, beginning with God's command in the Shema (Deuteronomy 6) to repeat his stories and commands to children when rising and sleeping, when working and resting, when traveling and coming home. God expected spaced interval repetition to be a hallmark of spiritual formation. If that is the case, it would seem that one of the best things we can do to increase our effectiveness in the pulpit is to repeat ourselves. And that is where the problem is.
In preaching, there can be a tremendous pressure toward novelty. If you have ever committed the grievous sin of reusing an illustration, then you have probably been chastised by someone for having "preached that sermon before." In an effort to please our audience and maintain the status quo, we may feel compelled to move on to a new text or subject each week, lest we bore our people by repeating the same topic. But why move on, if the command of scripture and the evidence of research is to tarry? Preaching again on the same text on Wednesday night, or for several Sundays in a row, may be the thing that causes the word to sink in and take root in the heart of your hearers.
For some, the idea of repeating the same text or topic rather than moving on might induce anxiety. This crisis of new information is known as Status Quo Bias, a preference for maintaining the current status quo by rejecting or dismissing new information.[6] When practitioners learn that a new method is more effective, they must decide whether to become early adopters, often criticized and dismissed, or continue to use less effective methods to please the uninformed masses and maintain the status quo.
One example of the Status Quo Bias is the death of the first president of the United States, George Washington. Washington had fallen ill, and the traditional medical practice of the day was bloodletting, which involved draining blood from the body to remove impurities that were believed to cause the illness. In a twenty-four-hour period, 2500ml of blood was drained from Washington's body, resulting in his death.[7]Contemporary physicians and journalists, who might be considered early adopters, had begun to argue publicly against the traditional practice.[8] However, when Washington's attending physicians expressed concern that Washington had lost too much blood, it was the implored pleas of Washington himself to drain more blood that pushed them to keep the status quo and continue bloodletting, eventually causing his death.[9] Washington may have recovered if these physicians trusted the growing evidence against bloodletting rather than attempting to look good to their patient. Similarly, homileticians must choose what is most effective over what the people prefer. God calls His servants to humble themselves in the eyes of others to do what best serves the Lord. David, a man after God's own heart, states this well when criticized by his wife for worshiping God in a way that she found humiliating. David danced before the Lord and a large crowd in his underclothes. As he responded to Mical's accusations, he said, "I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes" (2 Sam 6:22). David was willing to be humiliated if it was in service to the Lord. Early adopters are often criticized and even humiliated by others for doing what they know is effective. The early evidence suggests that revisiting the same text, topic, and application a few days later is more effective than moving on. It seems like this is something that works. I like to do things that work. Do you?
[1] John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, updated and expanded ed. (Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2014), 130.
[2] Encyclopedia of Education, (2003), s.v. “Memory: Myths, Mysteries, and Realities.”
[3] Encyclopedia of the Mind, (2013), s.v. “The Spacing Effect.,” 710.
[4] Frank Dempster, “The Spacing Effect: A Case Study in the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research.” American Psychologist 43, no. 8 (August 1, 1988): 627–34.
[5] Anja Lambrecht and Catherine Tucker. “When Does Retargeting Work? Information Specificity in Online Advertising,” in Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. L (October 2013): 562.
[6] William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, “Status Quo Bias in Decision Making,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty1, no. 1 (March 1988): 7–59, https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00055564.
[7] Michael L. Cheatham, M.D., “The Death of George Washington: An End to the Controversy?” The American Surgeon 74, no. 8 (August 2008): 770–74, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/death-george-washington-end-controversy/docview/212850529/se-2.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.