#628. The church flavored Q&A.

A few weeks ago I spoke to a singles group about honesty in dating relationships. The talk was called “The Biggest Gift” and focused on the idea that in order to have honesty in a dating relationship you need to give the person you’re dating the gift of going second. I spoke for about 30 minutes and then was supposed to take 15 minutes of questions. I expected maybe two or three questions and then we’d call it a morning.

I was wrong.

Before I had even finished saying, “thank you for having me,” a guy in the front row had his arm up. And then a lady in the back row starting waving her hand and then like popcorn, hands started going up in the air and I started getting sweaty.

Without realizing it, I was suddenly thrown into an “Instant Sermon Feedback” situation. Never experienced an ISF? Allow me to explain.

An ISF is a quick Q&A session that immediately follows a message. It could be at a conference, in a Sunday School class, at an all members church meeting, etc. It’s simply your chance to respond with no wait to what you’ve just heard. And they can be tricky.

Usually in those situations, I bite my tongue because my first desire is to ask a fake question whose goal is only to get my across my own point and make me look smart. Basically I make a statement, instead of asking a question and essentially say, “Hey everyone in this room, I want you to think I’m smart and all bibley, so I’m going to pretend I have a question but really I’m just adding my own P.S. to this sermon.”

That’s ridunkulous, (a phrase I would say constantly if I could actually dunk which is why God cursed me with a low vertical leap, it’s my thorn in the flesh) but I do it. And chances are I’m not the only one who could use a little refresher in popular Instant Sermon Feedback.

So here are the three most common ways people respond when given a Q&A moment with a speaker:

1. Yeah, but.
If you’re a speaker and you hear this phrase, “Yeah but,” get ready for a wild ride my friend. No one ever starts a sentence with “Yeah but,” and then ends it with “you’re really awesome and a great communicator.” During my Biggest Gift ISF a woman asked me to “define intimacy.” I replied, “Intimacy is the ability to be emotionally naked and vulnerable without fear of consequence.” She immediately said, “Yeah but, I’m not talking about being all naked under the sheets.” Thrown into a weird tailspin by the “yeah, but” I had no other choice but to respond, “Neither am I, but I am a big fan of naked under the sheets.” I think I even gave naked under the sheets the double thumbs up as I said it. I’m such a smooth operator.

2. The Challenge
This one is fun to experience when it’s not you on the stage. Jumping right over “yeah, but,” someone in the crowd just busts out a question that lets you know they disagree. This happened to me, when a woman asked, “What would have been a gracious way to handle that situation you described?” What she meant was, “The way you handled it wasn’t gracious, can you please give us an example where the main character in the story, in this case you, isn’t a jerk?” Touché. She was referring to a story I told to illustrate what happens when you over share on a date. Once on a first date in college, I went to a girl’s apartment. She went back into her bedroom and emerged with a pillow case full of journals and diaries she had written over the years. She then proceeded to read them to me. In that moment I started to calculate how many of my keys I didn’t need and which ones I could throw into the kitchen to make a shiny, loud distraction so that I could sneak out a window. On a first date, the answer to the question, “Do you like living in Atlanta?” is never “My dad didn’t hug me enough or ever throw the baseball with me.” But the woman in the crowd was right, I could have handled that situation with more grace. So she got me, and you’ll have the chance as a crowd member to get a speaker with your own challenge during an ISF. I highly recommend it.

3. The curveball
Another great approach is to throw out a curveball, some completely unforeseen sentence of awesomeness that reduces both the speaker and the crowd to fits of laughter. That happened to me at the Christian Web Conference a few weeks ago. During the Q&A session I told the crowd, “humor is a gift from God and when we refuse to accept it, it makes him want to take it back, like the unicorns.” Minutes later, a very serious looking, bearded gentleman raised his hand. I called on him and he said, “Sure, but why did God take away the unicorns?” I loved that and responded with something like, “Because we took their beauty for granted and did not respect their ‘stabbing horns.’” He responded, “Well I think you’re disrespecting unicorns. I have a site called stuff unicorns don’t like.com and you just made that list.” I thought that was hilarious and chased that guy down later to ask him to guest post on Stuff Christians Like. Few things are as delightful as a perfectly thrown curveball.

Those are the three options I see most often, but what about you?

Have you ever experienced one of these three Instant Sermon Feedback moments?

What’s the funniest or weirdest or most awkward thing you’ve experienced during a church flavored Q&A?