Ep. 37 How to Connect Quickly and Completely with Manley Miller

Hey, Mark Brown. I am so pumped to have our guest today. You know, there's very few people that, especially pastors, where I say, wow, they're good and they're funny, and they crack me up, the way he uses illustrations and the way he gets his point across. But I think one of the biggest things I love about Pastor Manley Miller is his willingness to be uber transparent. Like, I love that because it's so connecting.

Well, you know what I found out, I actually coached his dad, Chick, several years ago, so I'm really keen to get to see how Chick and his son are different. And I can't wait to unleash Pastor Manley Miller on our audience. Let's do it, man.

Well, and I want to bring this up, too. I think one of the other reasons that I wanted to interview him for a podcast is because we haven't had a pastor in a while, and he's so good, he could be a motivational speaker. So, like, it's almost. If you're not into the Christian thing, like, let go of that. He's good on the platform, and he's also going through one of the biggest transitions in the hotbed, one of the hotbeds of the coronavirus, because he's from way down south. And nola. I'm learning nola.

I didn't.

I saw N O L A. I was like, what is that?

That's Nolens, Louisiana, man. Come on. Come on, Cher.

We're gonna dive in with Pastor Manley Miller on how he on the pulpit is unforgettable.

Anyone can give a presentation. Few deliver unforgettable presentations. What's the difference? You're about to find out. Welcome to the Unforgettable Presentations podcast with your hosts, world champion speakers and coaches, Mark Brown.

Mark Brown, your life tells a story, and there's someone out there who needs to hear it.

Darren Lacroix. And Darren Lacroix.

Stage time, stage time, stage time.

Ready for some powerful presentation, Ahas? Let's dive right in.

I already have to correct myself. It's behind the pulpit, not on the pulpit. I am just a chucklehead sometimes. Manley Miller, thanks for being here.

So good to be here. So good to join you guys. Appreciate y' all having me on. Thanks.

And Mark, does his accent give away where he's from?

Come on, Cher. A little bit. Truth is, I first heard him a piece of a sermon about parenting. I said, man, this dude is from the area in New Orleans, Louisiana. I could just hear it right away. It was great, man. Who am I to talk with my Jamaican accent.

Yeah, man, nice. So manly. Let's dive right in. How did you end up with becoming a pastor or doing presentations? I'm like, you talk about in your sermons that you were born kind of with the gift of gab, but people born with it and transferring it to stage sometimes doesn't work. Give us your background.

Well, you know, I grew up like a lot of people in New Orleans. I grew up Roman Catholic, and so I didn't really have a concept that people preached. I wouldn't really consider a Catholic homily, no offense to anybody who's Catholic, to be preaching, but I didn't really see that as a thing that existed. I remember when I was in high school, I was probably about 15, 16, I was maybe a sophomore, junior, and somebody delivered a speech at school and I remember thinking, man, if there was a job where you can speak in front of people and change their lives, that's something I would be interested in doing. Not knowing that that could be a clergy job, if you will, a ministry job. And then through some circumstances and changes that happened in our lives, my family ended up going to a church, which is a church where I work at now, which is Celebration Church. I began to see that kind of as an option. And then an opportunity presented itself for me to start doing a little bit of speaking to a small, small group of people. And then that led to an opportunity to a much larger group. And it was just kind of obvious to the people that were listening that this is something that I should be doing. And so that's kind of how it came about.

Wow. And one of the questions we love to ask people who we think are unforgettable, who do you think or what presentation had you heard that you would say that was unforgettable? And why do you think it was.

Unforgettable to you from a pastoral level? The person that I think is the greatest presenter right now is TD Jakes. I mean, he's up in age and he's still killing it, man. His energy level, his humor, his practicality, his ingenuity, his. I mean, I probably heard him preach a hundred times, and every single time I'm blown away at how deep he gets and how powerful he delivers. And then I would say, from a non ministry perspective per se, I would say, actually the person that I think his genius is Zig Ziglar. And I've never heard anyone, even to this day, who had understood and had the power of voice control that Zig Ziglar had. And his body language and his ability to. I mean, I heard him. He was probably. He's probably in his 80s. When I was a young man and heard him, and I was blown away at his ability to connect to a crowd that was 60 years his junior. In seconds, I would say those two things. I would say another presentation, if you will. That blew me away the very first time I saw it. We had a. Billy Graham came to town, and there was a guy who was leading music for him. His name's Tommy something. I can't remember his name. And I'd never seen anybody control a crowd like this guy. I mean, it's 30,000 people. And he spun his guitar around his back, and he just had everybody in the palm of his hand in seconds. And when you see that, it's just like, man, okay, that's somebody that really, really knows what they're doing. Being on stage, you gotta control the room. And to see somebody that can do that in seconds to strangers, man, that's a powerful thing, you know?

Pastor Manley, I'm gonna yank the wheel slightly because I hear a theme emerging here. It seems to me, with TD Jakes and Zig Ziglar and the gentleman Tommy X, they all had the power of presence on the platform. And some people say, you know, how do you develop that and how do you get this kind of presence? You identify that these individuals had that kind of presence. And there are also women who have similar presence. They walk on the stage. Jeanne Robertson, she's 77 years old, she walks on the stage, she's six foot tall. Everybody goes, woo. Jeannie's here. In your mind, how important is having good presence for you as a pastor on the platform to connect with an audience of varying ages for you personally?

Well, I discovered this actually, you know, leading a small group when I was a new Christian, if you will, and I wasn't even a pastor yet. And being in a small group and you sit around like a little discussion group, and you ask a question and it gets quiet and nobody answers. And then you feel the need to interject and like, all right, I'm answering my own question because nobody answered. And something I discovered early on is the ability to own, I call it own, the silence. And what I mean by that is you actually allow there to be a little bit of space and let other people sit in the moment for a second. And the reason why people use a lot of filler words, in my opinion, is because they're uncomfortable with there being any silence. But the silence, you know, we could have this debate is music made from the notes that are being played or the space that's in between each note. And sometimes I think that owning the room and owning the platform comes from your ability to leverage pauses, silence, and allowing there to be some space. I opened a sermon one time with 60 seconds of silence, and that was a real. It was just an experiment to see what would happen. And people started laughing, people started coughing, people started shuffling. They were uncomfortable with the 60 seconds of silence. And then at the end, I said, see, that was 60 seconds of silence. And I opened up with a Bible verse which is, be still and know that I'm God. Talking about why it's so difficult for us to be still because that silence makes us uncomfortable.

Bam.

Oh, man. I tell you, Darren, Darren, I'm going to give control to you in a second. But I just recorded today's Today, probably Monday. I recorded last week a 59 second video on the power of five minutes of silence. And I hadn't met many until today. And to hear that message can reinforce to me the power of silence. You and I, Darren, have gone through several discussions about the discomfort people feel in that moment of silence. And you have very strong feelings about the power of silence yourself. And you said, bam. When he said that. And I really want to know what you're thinking when he said the power of silence.

Well, I just think it's missed by so many people and so manly. If you notice Mark turning to the right and kind of looking away, he's taking keepers. So at the end, we kind of recap the whole podcast. And I love. It's funny because I'll go to write it when Mark will turn at the same time, like, ooh, that's good. That's gold. And I think most people, they want to fill, especially emerging presenters or new, newer pastors, they want to fill that void. We always say the most important part of a presentation is the thought process in the listener's mind. So if we don't let them think, we're creating a disconnect when we just tried to set it up. But no, you know, we got to let them think. Brilliant.

Brilliant.

Love this.

I like what Fripp said. She said we learn best in moments of reflection. So I want to continue the story. Pastor Mandy, so you're a young guy. You realize that you can let people think in this silence. And to continue the thought, how did that help you or guide you in terms of understanding the power of being present and your presence on the platform and how you use that Even now with your illustrations, your sermons and your interaction, how did that kind of helped shape your style, so to speak?

You know, I never really thought about it a whole lot, but I think I've always been very comfortable owning the platform, or owning the stage, if you will, or owning the pulpit, whatever you want to call it. I've always felt very comfortable to the point that it was probably dangerous early on. Like, it was probably arrogance early on. But I think walking out, looking at people and really trying to connect with their soul requires a little bit of silence, because you have to, as the speaker, reflect while you're talking to see whether or not you're actually resonating with people. There's a book someone gave me, it's called the Seven Laws of the Learner by a pastor named Bruce Wilkinson. And the first law of the learner, he says, is that it is the teacher's responsibility to cause the student to learn. And he talks a lot about how a teacher's responsibility, if a student is not engaging, is to work hard to engage that student, that the student doesn't adjust to the teacher, the teacher adjusts to the student. And if you're presenting anything, there's a teacher student relationship at some level. And so you have to realize, you have to have enough reflection while speaking to honestly give yourself feedback of and what I saying in this moment, connecting with the people. And if it's not, I better make an adjustment or I'm not going to make a connection and I'm not going to have an impact on the audience who's listening to me now.

What's cool is, again, I'm listening to you carefully, and you say you're on the platform or at the pulpit delivering a message, but you're constantly understanding the importance of having that relationship with your audience. And in our coaching, Darren and I encounter so many people who are so focused on delivering the message. They want to get the script right, they want to get the words right, they want to get the gestures right. But you're saying you're from before you even say a word, you want to connect with their soul, you said. So you're trying to make sure. So as you go along, you're almost gauging the audience. How does that work for you to make sure you maintain that relationship?

Okay, so in talking to Darren before, he's made this statement, he said it to me the other day, but he said this to me a previous time when we met is he was talking about how he has such affinity for pastors because they have to create new content every week. And I'll speak to that in a second. But I think that what I do for a living and what a person who is a motivational speaker, let's say, or a person who's delivering presentations in some other area, or even a salesperson delivering a presentation are backwards. And the reason is because I deliver different content every week, but to the same audience. And most people who are professional speakers, they deliver the same content to an ever changing audience. And so that has two different approaches that you have to have. Right. I mean, that's a completely different mindset. So I have some advantages by having the same audience and some disadvantages by having to come up with new content or perspectives all the time. And so the flip side of that, it's not like I don't go speak other places where it's not the same congregation. I do have that experience and sometimes either of the languages. So I know what it's like to make that adjustment. But those two experiences changes what you're doing. And so I think to answer that question that you're asking, you really have to understand first the different perspective. The perspective is I have a certain rapport with the majority of the room now. I've got new people coming in every week. I can have inside jokes, and I can have recurring themes, and I can do certain things to connect with people. Right. I think the mistake that people make when they have a different audience with the same content is they put too much attention on getting the content perfect. When imperfect content connected to the audience is more powerful than perfect content that never made a connection to the audience.

I gotta write that down, man. That's awesome. This is. This is good material. Imperfect content connected to the audience is way more powerful than perfect content, but no connection, man. Darren, write that down, buddy. He's gonna get the soundboard going, I'm sure.

I gotta get my sound effects going here.

I should.

I should have warned you ahead of time, but he's got toys.

Faster, manly.

Brilliant.

That's the revelation. Imperfect content with the connection, it's so much better. That's awesome. Thank you so very much for that, man. That's great.

Yeah. And I know one of the things that I love about you is you're so transparent. You're so willing to just go deep and open up for the good. You can tell your intention is good, but most people don't have the confidence to do that. So in one of the sermons I watched of your, you even brought this up. So you got me curious. But you Had a line that you went from pothead to pastor. Like, I love the alliteration. And then what? Like, now, that must connect you with so many people because you're willing to be transparent. What's your thoughts on that?

You know, it's definition of terms, right? So I don't think that I'm transparent. I think that I'm authentic. And I think that transparency and authenticity are different things. Transparency is polished, and it's something that you attempt to be on purpose. I have chosen to be authentic. And so my philosophy of pastoring and speaking is that I'm going to give you all the evidence to discredit me up front. So if you want to use that to discount what I'm saying, then feel free to do so. And so when I say it's easy for me to say I was a pothead because I was, that is authentically who I was. I smoked weed every day of my life. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and again on Monday. And I had the perspective of, I'm going to do this every day for the rest of my life. And a part of my experience in my relationship with God that changed things for me is that I realized that that was not who I wanted to be. And I had a transformative moment. And so it's very easy for me to say it, and it's easy for me to say what my struggles are now because I feel like going back to connection. There's nothing that connects with people like authenticity. And when you're authentic, it makes people kind of uncomfortable, you know, I mean, there are people that don't come back to our church because they're like, man, he telling too much of his own truth. I'm worried if he gets to know me, he gonna mess my thing up, you know?

Oh, I love that, Mark.

Yeah. I've often preached, for lack of a better word. I've often said, authenticity plus vulnerability equals credibility. Authenticity plus vulnerability equals credibility. That's a Marcus that I've been using for the last several years. And people who know us know, I often say, because I believe it, or people get to know you for who you really are and you're being honest about lends itself to them saying, you know what? I will listen to what he says because I can relate to him or her. I can see where they've been. I've been down that road before because oftentimes people think a pastor, you know, well, he's pious, he's a holy man, holier than that. He will teach me how to Live my life God's way By the word of God. Hallelujah. Oh, glory hallelujah. Okay. And they don't often see the person behind it. And very often we look at the title or the label. He's a pastor of a church or he's a mega church. You know, we put these labels on when you're just a husband, a dad who wants to serve God, you know. And I think the idea of being authentic is really, really important at every level of presentation. Have you seen or heard people, you thought to yourself, and they're holding something back. You're not really authentic even in the ministry. And what impact, if any, has it had on you in the work that you've done?

Well, it's dangerous when you meet your heroes that are heroes from afar, because sometimes when you meet a person that you consider to be a hero, you get very disillusioned after meeting them as a person. And the reason is because who they are publicly and who they are privately are misaligned. And that anytime you encounter it shows you that there is no authenticity. And so what happens is, if you want to be a speaker, right at the end of the day, you're hoping that people will listen to you and you'll make some kind of an impact, and you're hoping to make a difference in their life or them internally, or you're trying to change their motivations, like you're trying to make an impact on someone. And if you do that, people are going to want to get closer to you. It's what's natural, right? I mean, it's like, if you speak and it's like, man, that impacts me, that's helping me. Then they go, man, I want to know more. I want to get more and more and more involved. I'm only hoping that the closer a person gets to me, the more they realize I'm exactly who I describe. So for me, I think authenticity proves itself over time. You don't have to look at. Authenticity is not a short game, it's a long game. It's a marathon. It's not a sprint. And so eventually, people are going to get close to you. And then when they get close to you, they're going to find out who are you, the person you present yourself to be. And so to me, I ask my kids all the time, I say, do you feel like the pastor at church and the pastor at home is the same? Because if you don't, I need to make some changes. I give them the opportunity to have feedback. I give, you know, you call my wife on the phone and say, hey, is he who he says he is? She's very authentic, too. That's a value that we've had. And if, once again, if that discredits me in some people's opinion, or if they think less of me, then so be it. They were going to think less of me eventually anyway.

Shortening the curve.

Yeah.

Nice. And one of the things, Manley, I love about you when you're presenting because you just. You just connect so well. And I admire some of the tools you use. Now, I don't know if this is something you worked on or if something you had naturally, but you tell such relatable illustrations and metaphors. Like, I remember in one of your sermons, you just talked about being a mall rat and going to stare at the picture in the Spencer gift store. That picture that eventually everyone could see but that one guy couldn't. And, like, you used that as just a simple, powerful, like, relatable idea to get across your ideas from the Bible. Like, is that a skill that came naturally? Do you hone it? Do you work on it? You're just so good. One of your talents of that you have.

Well, I think that there's been three things that have shaped that number one, when I was in fifth grade and seventh grade, my English teacher and homeroom teacher was Mrs. Susan Collins. And she, with fifth and seventh grade students, would have story time and she would read to us. And when she would read to us, it was the most engaging moment of my day. I absolutely loved it. And she would do all the voices and she would tell the story. And I learned from her the power of storytelling. Storytelling is one of the most engaging and entertaining things we experience. I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's marvel and done with special effects. When you hear a good story, it draws you in. And so storytelling is a critical component to me of speaking. And so studied storytelling, studied story writing. Wanna know how to do it better? Always looking to hone it. How can I make a little change? I learned that from her. Now, she engaged me because of her influence in my life. She engaged me in the seventh grade on the speech and debate team. But I was late to join. And so they had already assigned all of the different positions. And the way it worked is they were like, I don't know, five or six different categories, and everybody had already picked the ones that they wanted. And the only one that was left that nobody wanted, what was called impromptu and impromptu in speech and debate, you show up, they give you A topic, and then you get like five minutes to prepare, and then you deliver a one minute speech on that topic. I excelled really well in that because I have the ability to talk about something like I know what I'm talking about, and I've been studying this all my life, but I really just found out about it in three seconds. So I developed that skill early on and it gave me confidence to know that I could do that. And so that also requires some level of storytelling. Then I think the third thing is somebody had mentioned a book to me one time by a guy named Lee Lefebvre called the Art of Explanation. You guys are probably familiar with the concept of the curse of knowledge, where you can't possibly unknow what you already know. And Lee Lefebvre's got a real simple book. He was a video storyteller. And it's a real simple concept about really dumbing things down and that you have to connect to your audience. And when you know a lot about a topic, let's say you're at like an XYZ on an alphabetical spectrum. You think you're dumbing it down when you bring it to jkl, but you gotta bring it down all the way to abc. And so with storytelling, metaphor, illustration, he goes into a lot of how you go about doing that in that work is about understanding that it takes those things to explain difficult and complex concepts. Sometimes simple storytelling, simple metaphors, simple illustrations, they help to explain things much better than trying to use other words.

Do you have any tips for people on how to find that or how to use them? Any insights to help our listeners?

Yeah, I do, actually. You can leave out a lot more details than you think you can leave out. So what happens is that people tend to fail to exclude parts of a story that make it long and boring. So if you could just think about any movie that you like, ask yourself how much time passes in the story of this movie, then realize they told it in an hour and 40 minutes. And then you begin to understand all the things that you can skip, all the things that you can jump around in. And good stories to be told have to be written well first. And you, I mentioned this earlier. I think you give pastors too much credit when you say, man, I can't believe you come up with new concept every week. That is true. But you have to remember that I've got 1500 pages of source material that was written by God himself. It's a whole lot easier when I'm retelling a story Than it is to just come up with new concepts. And so I think that pastors have a unfair competitive advantage when your source material was written by the creator of the world.

It's funny, I think you said one time, how can I go and give a sermon about a sermon that somebody else gave in the bible already? You mentioned that in one of your sermons. Doing a sermon about somebody else's sermon already in the bible. That's really interesting.

Could I tell you guys a story that I wrote recently about a person that I did some work for and some helping, and it's kind of telling. It's their bio, but I can read it to you. It's only about three or four paragraphs, and I can explain to you what is happening in it. Would that be helpful?

Absolutely.

Sure. Definitely. Yeah, man.

Let me pull it up so I can get that. It'll take me a second. I think that when it comes to storytelling, the mistake that most people make is they have too long of an introduction, and then they take way too long to get to the good parts of the story, and then they fill between all the good parts with a bunch of stuff nobody cares about. And so I think the tip is to write the story, read it, and then have a person give you feedback of what you should cut out and what was unnecessary. And you want to make it as tight as possible. So this is a friend of mine. He builds houses for a living. He builds, like, real expensive houses. Okay. And this is a story that I wrote for him. Now it's his story. He told it to me, and I just consolidated. Okay. His name's Greg. I got an electric guitar for my 11th birthday. Twenty minutes later, I taught myself how to play Michael Jackson's beat it. By the time I was a junior in high school, I was making $75,000 a year recording high school bands and rappers in my bedroom in Kenner, Louisiana. When I reached my early 20s, I was bored with music, but had made enough money to build my own house. I got a cdl, borrowed my dad's dump truck, and I was off as my own general contractor. I felt energized. The passion I had lost for music I found again in home design. Same itch, different scratch. I enjoyed building that first house so much that I did another and another and another and started selling them as fast as I could build them. Soon enough, people started asking me for help to build their houses. I love what I do every day. Every house we build feels like I'm unwrapping that electric guitar all over again. I would love to make music with you. Give me a call. And he gives his phone number.

Okay, man. Like a story brand almost. Darren, that's great. That's fantastic.

So here's the thing about the story. I'll kind of give you, like, the science behind it that it takes to write a bio. It's no different than any other story that you're telling. Okay? So it opens up. I got an electric guitar for my 11th birthday. Twenty minutes later, I taught myself how to play Michael Jackson's Beat It. I don't go anything else into how did he learn how to play music? Was he a natural? Did he play it by ear, Right? No, it's like, did he watch a video? Did he have, like a. Did he already know how to play other instruments? I don't give him any of that. By the time I was a junior in high school, I was making $75,000 a year. Well, what happened between 11 years old and 16 years old? I skip all of that, right? How did he make $75,000 a year? Most people are gonna go into the details, right? I started charging him. He was recording bands is what he was doing, right? And so every time he would make money, he would buy more equipment until he had, like, a pretty nice studio set up. And so. But it's like, I don't go into any of those details. You jump down, I got a CDL and borrowed my dad's dump truck. Well, I don't tell you how his dad had a dump truck. What most people do is, well, his dad had a junkyard business, and because he had a junkyard business, he had a dump truck. It's like, man, none of those details matter. Get to what the point is, right? And when it comes to storytelling, that only happens from honing your craft. I know, Darren. I've heard you say a bunch of times, stage time, stage time, stage time. I don't know if that comes from Mark, where that comes from. Wherever.

That's Darren. That's Darren. It's all Darren.

It's like that is a concept about experience. If you want to tell good stories, it comes from experience of telling them. And the more you tell them, the more you begin to understand what it takes to make a story connect with people. And at the end of the day, that's what we like. We like to connect to people through stories. And it helps us to convince other people very quickly about things we want them to understand. Stories are way more powerful than facts, for sure.

That's so true. And I Want to go back real quick and put a little caveat here. When you were a little kid and you were in the speech and speech club, and you said you were given extemporaneous. You get five minutes. You could do it naturally. Please, no one think that what Pastor Manley is saying is just go ahead and wing it. No, no. He's saying he had that gift, but he still had to hone it. He had to learn. He reads books. He had to find better ways to deliver his messages. So don't think because you're pretty good on your feet, you can just get the idea out and just do it. Because I knew somebody about, I don't know, maybe 19 years ago who told me that, hey, I'm very spontaneous. I can do my thing.

I'll do it.

I said, darren, write the script. And it literally changed the way he presented. So I want to encourage you to understand. As cool and as smooth past a manly ears. He's not saying just always wing it. He's saying prepare it. He says, good stories have to be written well first. That's a keeper right there, Darren.

And he also wrote it down. You know, a lot of people won't take the time to do that, but when the words are in front of you, as you taught me, Mark, because I thought I knew better, shame on me. It helps you be more succinct. It helps you know what to cut and then what needs to be enhanced. What's missing? What are people curious about? And also, Pastor Manley, when you're talking about it and you're delivering that story to somebody, you're taking in that feedback. You're reading your audience, whether it's verbally, just on a phone or in front of an audience, and you can kind of see where you lose them or when they get lost or when they smile or lean in or turn to their neighbor, something like that. And that's how, you know, ooh, that's good. That's a keeper. So it's a. It's a process. It's a process.

I knew these two girls. They were sisters, and one was about 23, and the other one was probably 21. And the names were Heidi and Annie. And they. They had a little dancing school that they had started, and I went out and visited them, and they were friends. You know, we had built a friendship, and they were real excited because there was a workshop they were going to be taking, and they loved tap dance, and it was probably 20 years ago, and at the time, the top tap dancer in the world was a guy named Sabian Glover, and they loved Sabian Glover, and they were. They just loved him. And he was going to be coming to town, and he was going to do this workshop, and he was so excited. So the workshop happens, and then the next week, I see him and I go, hey, how was it? He was so excited to go, and he said, it was the worst workshop we ever been to in our life. And I said, really? He said, yeah. As talented as Sabian Glover is as a dancer, he's equally as terrible as a teacher. And the reason is because I find that there's two approaches. You know, there's the artistic approach, which people tend to think is like, kind of like, I'm gonna get inspired, then it's gonna be spontaneous. There's the scientific approach, which is where you go, okay, what steps are needed? How do we break this down? You're making a great mistake if you're a scientist who doesn't appreciate the artistic side or try to become better in the artistic side. And you're making a great mistake if you're an artist that doesn't try to understand the scientific side. I think it's about how you approach them. So for me, I do have a more spontaneous nature, but I've also learned the science behind the craft. And that's what makes you good at something, is to peek behind the curtain. I watch every single one of my sermons. I watch it, I look at myself, and I watch everything I did. And then I will take them and I'll use a transcription service and get them transcribed. Then you look at the transcription and you read it, and you ask yourself, did this make sense? And a lot of times you find how bad your speaking looks in written form, because you got by with charisma and humor and personality and your energy. And so if you're willing to do that and you're willing to analyze yourself and you're willing to break it down for the person that says that they're extemporaneous and spontaneous, go ahead and do something spontaneous. Record it, watch it after, get it transcribed, then read it, and you tell me that it couldn't be made better with working on it.

Pastor Manley, I'm so happy you said that because I heard a similar story from my co host many, many years ago, Darren, with that whole transcription idea.

Right?

Yeah. And I've also. I'm glad you said it, too. This made me cringe. One of our stagetime members is a pastor, and he said I asked him about preparing, and he's like, I don't prepare. I just get an idea and I pray about it and I let the Holy Spirit speak through me. And I'm like. I'm like, the Holy Spirit is unbelievable. And you could do a better job if you prepared. Just because you might have that one moment, a little bit of preparation. The Holy Spirit could do so much more through you. Breaks my heart.

I heard when I was a young man from some people that I respected, they said, until you've prepared, you're not actually ready to rely on the Holy Spirit.

Write that down, Mark, right there, man.

It's because at that moment you've known that you've done everything you could possibly do. So now it's up to God. And I'm all about relying on God. But the Holy Spirit can speak on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday in preparation for what's going to happen on Sunday. And I don't remember who it is, maybe it's Stephen King, but it's a very well known author. And he said, I write whenever I'm inspired. I just happen to be inspired every morning between 6am and 9am There you go. It's like there's some value in putting in work and preparation and then still walking into a setting that's spiritual and saying, I'm relying on somebody beside myself, but I don't need God to show up to bail me out. That's not really faith, right? I need God to know I took this serious enough that I prepared and did everything I could for it. And there's a parable in The Bible about 10 virgins that had lamps and five of them brought enough oil and were prepared and the other five didn't. And when they ran out of oil, they had to go looking for it. That's when Jesus shows up and he lets the five that were prepared into heaven. So to think that there's not a spiritual component of being prepared is just silly. You got to prepare, you got to work ahead of time and you have to take it serious enough that, okay, I look at my ability to speak in front of people as a gift and an opportunity. And I'm going to do everything I can to become the best I can possibly be. I don't compare myself to a lot of other people. I don't need to be like Darren or like Mark or like TD Jakes or anybody else. I just need to be the best version of me that I can be. And I want to be able to stand before God and say, whether you gave me 10 talents, five or one, I did everything I could with what you gave to me, preacher brother.

Wonderful, man. That's awesome. You know, I think about you as a minister of the gospel. And again, we're not trying to proselytize. Nice word, Aaron. Proselytize. Right.

Hold on. I got to go look that up.

Or to make converts. But I grew up in the church myself, and I'm looking at almost 60 years of my life here. And it seems to me that over the decades, as time goes by, more and more pastors have developed styles that are more conversational, more storytelling. And there are those who would argue that modern day pastors often use language that's less intimidating, less threatening, and less judgmental. As a presenter who's committed to preaching the gospel, do you feel concerned about what some may say is a slight dilution of the gospel in the way it's presented, or being the authentic pastor you are, you just kind of go for it, man.

Well, I don't think that you can be a good speaker without being a student of language. When we talk about the words that you use, certain words have more power than others. But at the end of the day, every single word is made up and is nothing more than a sound. And to be a human being means that we have the ability to attach complex meanings to sounds that are made. That's what language is. And to think that the purpose of language is to make a certain sound versus to establish a certain meaning, it's just a faulty concept to make. So I actually would argue that if you use words that don't have meaning to a person, then you, in fact, diluted what you were saying. I diluted what I was saying because dilution has to do with the meaning, not the sound.

So word selection is key. I'm so thankful you said that, because one of the things I always coach my clients on is choose your words effectively. Now, Darren and I will just back and forth because I am considered the word nerd in the duo. I'm the guy who would use one or two big words, and he'll say, mark, I don't get that word. And we kind of tease, but we know through our own experience that word selection, word choice, words mean things. And I really appreciate that perspective. So no matter who you are, preacher, teacher, executive, salesperson, coach, words have power and words have meaning. And how your audience receives what you say depends largely on the words that you use. That's gold right there, Pastor Manley. Thank you for that, Darren.

Yeah. And to take it a step even further, you know, beyond the Alphabet Itself, there's something called phonemes, which are not the letters, but the sounds that the letters make, right? And so, for example, like, take the phoneme soul, which is SL in English, okay? Now, it might be other letters in another language, but the sound remains the same. There is a lot of work that's been done about the science of the sounds themselves. So if you look in the dictionary and you look at all the words that begin with the soul phoneme, like slosh, slylum, sloan, slope, slippery, sloppy, they all imply movement. And so it's not even just the words themselves, what the meaning of those words are or what the meanings of those words are to other people, but it's finding what the sounds. It's the reason why alliteration works. You know, I went from being a pothead to a pastor. It's a lot more powerful than saying, well, I smoked a lot of weed, and then I went into ministry. Not just because it loses the alliteration, but because that. That P sound, that P phoneme is a certain type of sound, whereas the W sound is a different type of sound. The W and the M are actually the same types of sounds that we make. So really, choosing the words that you're using are incredibly important.

And, Manley, I love one of your sermons. I just love alliteration. We love foundational phrases. And you were talking about repenting, and you're like, repenting is not the guy in the street with the sign that says repent. And you went on to describe it, and you were explaining it, and then you came up with sanctify a French fry.

I was like, yeah, turn and burn.

Sanctify a French fry. And that stuff that I just picked up along the way, that stuff. I heard somebody else say that, and I connected it with something else. And then you put that in, and all of a sudden you have a real powerful idea that hits people, and you don't even give them time to recover from what you just said. And then you go to the next idea, and it's like, man, you just hit them real quick.

Bam. And I love how you make it so real, too. Like, going back to your authenticity. The other example I want to bring up is you touched the talking about, realistically what we're thankful for and then all the things that we take for granted. And you just came up and you said, I'm thankful for the guy who invented the toilet. Let's get rid of those poops. I'm like, how can you not connect with you? I just. I love that. That's one of the things I just admire. You're boom. So authentic.

Yeah, I'm a bit irreverent, too. That helps.

But again, look, I'm sure times change, and what was considered anathema in the past is no more acceptance as time goes by. And, you know, we kind of go through these changes where language becomes more accepted or certain words have different meaning over time. But I want to ask you one question, a technical question regarding your planning, your preparation, and how you prepare, how you get ready material. For example, are you constantly on the lookout for incidents? Hear people say, is your ear to the ground? I could use that in a sermon. Or how do you find a material where you get your illustrations, your ideas, to be creative besides your family?

Always looking for interesting perspectives. That's what I'm always looking for, is interesting perspectives. I went to the eye doctor. I had to get new glasses. They wouldn't use my prescription because it was more than 2 years old. So I needed a new prescription. I go in, and the lady's like. She's like, well, tell me your story. I said, look, I got glasses when I was about 25, and they told me my vision would probably get better, and I barely had enough. Like, I just had a little small amount of correction needed. I couldn't see when driving at night. And they gave me a small prescription. Then I got a stronger prescription and a stronger prescription, and so that's where I'm at now. And she said, well, I'm gonna do your test, but I can tell you you've already been overcorrected. I said, how can you tell? She said, well, if you got glasses when you were 25, your eyes don't get worse from there. What happens is they start bad doctors, bad ophthalmologists or whatever they'll give you. They'll correct your eye strain and not your lens. And so she does a test, and she says, yeah, you've been overcorrected. You were supposed to be negative, whatever, 50, and you were a negative 150 in your left eye and your right eye. You're supposed to be negative 75. And you were negative 225. You've been overcorrected. So I walked out and I said, I don't know where, but that's a sermon illustration right there. Right? When you get overcorrected, it's just as much of a problem as being undercorrected, you know? And so it's like, I didn't know how I was going to use it, but let me Fold that up, put it in my pocket because that's going to be used somewhere along the way. And they had an author, his name was Brennan Manning. And when I was brand new in church, I found out he lived in New Orleans and I had liked some of his work. So I sent him an invitation to come speak. And he came out to my little group of like 20 year olds, 20 of us or whatever it was, and he, somebody said something and he pulled out his back pocket, he had a stack of like 30 index cards and he wrote it down and all it was was quotes that he had come across that he was gonna use in his next book. And he didn't know where they were gonna go, but he was always just kinda, let me just write that down, let me get that. And I remember as a young man seeing that, going, okay, there's some value to that. So every time I'm reading something, every time I'm seeing something, every time I'm always going, like, how am I gonna use that? I don't know where I'm gonna use it, but I'm a save that I'm a story because I'm going to use that somewhere. And anytime there's an interesting perspective, I try to capture that.

And one thing that I'm just selfishly curious about, I've seen a few other pastors do it, but I know you've done it where you actually have the audience repeat a word out loud. What is the strategy or the reason behind that?

I don't think people are with me.

So you say. Because I know in the sermon that I watched last night, you use surprising. All right, Everyone say surprising. So it's to reconnect them.

Yeah, I feel like I'll use it a lot early on just to get people with me. But if there's a point in the message where I feel like people have lost the room, then I'll use that to re engage the room. And you got to remember, I mean, every presentation I have is going to be 30 plus minutes. That's a long presentation. These are not five minute speeches. So in a 30 minute presentation, sometimes you get to a place where you realize, man, I drugged this on too long, I better make an adjustment. And so it goes back to just engaging the room and then some. I mean, I have a large room with a lot of people, you know what I mean? For me, a small room is going to be 300 plus. So a big room might be 8 or 900,000 people. So when you got 1,000 people and somebody spills coffee. And then they get up and decide to go clean it. Or as a baby that's crying or somebody dropped their cell phone or phone starts ringing immediately as the speaker, you see everybody turning their head, what's going on over there? So I'll use it to re. I won't do it in that moment, but I'll let that moment die down and then I'll bring it back to kind of re engage everybody and to try to get their attention because I lost them to outside distraction.

Smart. And I know you got to get going. So you have another appointment. I have one more question I think is relevant to a lot of presenters. Right now you're in New Orleans, one of the hotspots, and your church has gone from live event to now you're streaming, which I know you were streaming before. But you as the presenter, how have you adjusted? Because I know especially you're so engaging in laughter. Like, how do you do it without getting that response from the audience?

Well, I did it poorly at first.

Authentic. Man to man is authentic.

I watch myself, like I said, on Sunday morning, I'm engaging with everybody chatting. Every presentation I've made, I've went back and watched. I looked at it and said I was not funny. That was not engaging. I was too in my content. I wasn't connecting. I think really the thing is about if you talk about connecting with people, you go, how do I connect on a screen? How do I connect to the camera? You got to. Looking at the camera is not easy, you know, I mean, even these zoom calls, right? Most of the time you watch it like somebody's gonna watch this. We're looking at each other on the screen, but we're not looking straight in the camera. When you look in the camera, it becomes more powerful, but that's not as comfortable. So you gotta train yourself to look straight in the camera. Don't look at the people. Ignore everything around you. That's one of the things that I'm working on. How do I get funny? Opening with a story or saying something that's engaging. I did something two weeks ago. I said, now, you know, because I'll do that, right? Because the way I'll do it is I go, all right, on three, I want everybody to say, opportunity. One, two, three. Opportunity. Two weeks ago, just trying to change it up. I said, all right, on three, I want you to say opportunity. One, two, three. Opportunity. You didn't say it, did you? You thought because I wasn't there, I couldn't hear you, you know. You know you break the camera, right? So you break the camera lens that's separating us. I said the week before that, I opened up with, hey, if you in your pajamas, can I get an amen? If you laying on the couch under the covers, can I get a hallelujah? I went through and people were typing them in. You know, amen, hallelujah, whatever. And so I think you do. You start. I'm looking, I'm experimenting, I'm exploring all the time of. All right, how do I connect with the camera? It's just me and the camera now. How do I connect? Because I don't have that. I don't have people laughing. I got a message today from somebody. This is. Let me see if I can pull up what they said. And it was a similar thing. They said, you had me laughing through the sermon yesterday. I hope you're out of the sweatpants phase. The anxiety message keeps speaking to me. I need it. I'm thankful to talk about it. It's real. I need to remind myself often of those six words. Thanks for being transparent. I'm sure you know that we need that from a leader. It makes us see that we're not alone and are jacked up in this couple of emojis. You know, that that's going. All right. Thumbs up. That's connecting. She hid about four things that I know what that means and that I referenced in the message. So I'm going like, all right, that means I'm connecting with people. They're laughing now. I can kind of read what I'm doing, but I watched the sermon and said, oh, I could have did that better right there. Oh, I should have said this like this. And I'm taking notes. I'm not going to present that content again. But the next time I present, I can take the principle and apply it to the next set of content that I'm going to have. Because again, my audience stays the same, but my content's always changing. But I can take certain principles that work no matter what and apply that into a different area. So that's what I'm trying to do right now.

Yeah. Real quick. This is my little gadget at home where I just put that little reminder of a Post it. But this is brilliant. This came from one of our members where she actually put a picture over the lens to remind her to make eye contact.

Yeah. And so basically what she's doing is she created a makeshift teleprompter. So if you're familiar with teleprompters at all, they use reverse Mirror, jing and ballistic glass. You put the glass over. I mean, beam splitter glass is what it's called, but they put the glass and it's kind of like on an angle like this, and your words pop up on the screen and you can see through it and look at the camera. Well, you can take that same concept and replace those words with a picture of a person interviewing you and then look directly into a camera and there's some video people that use that. So it is genius. She just created a resourceful makeshift teleprompter, if you will.

Manly. We know you gotta go. So, Mark, as you collect the keepers for today, Manley, how would people reach out to you? Or Celebration Church is your church? How would they find more out about your church or your service?

You can catch. You can catch all the content that we produce and the material that we have, and you can look and see whether or not I'm full of crap or I'm actually doing what I'm talking about Celebration church Kenner on YouTube and you can take a search of that, take a look at it. And we got all of our content going back for the last five years. So there's 500 videos for you to get lost in. Feel free to jump back five years ago and see what it looked like then. You can see less quality technology, and I'm a little bit skinnier and my hair isn't as gray, and you can see all of that as well. So we've been kind of capturing that. And I think the most important thing that I would say about all of that is when it comes to all of this technology and everything, connection trumps all of that. And even the quality that you're doing, if you can connect with the people, that's what's going to be really powerful. So focus on whether or not I'm connecting. That's my deal. Does this connect? And so the authenticity that I have is to connect. The humor that I have is to connect. The insight that I have is to connect. And if you're not connecting what you doing, you need to do something differently or you need to stop doing this.

All right, Mark Brown, what do we got for keepers?

All right, keepers nuggets. One. Own the silence. If you present there is a teacher, student relationship. Imperfect content to a connected audience is more effective than perfect content to a disconnected audience. Authenticity proves itself over time. It's a long game. Good stories have to be written well.

First.

I got a few more. Until you're prepared, you're not ready to rely on The Holy Spirit. Oof. I love that one. I like this one. I won't give the same content, but I can use the same principles.

Right.

Connection trumps technology. Connection trumps technology. That's it from here.

Yeah. I also love the one from Bruce Wilkinson that he quoted. He said it's a teacher's responsibility to cause the student to learn.

That's beautiful.

Pastor Manley Miller, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights from your experience. Really appreciate it. I'm a big fan. We love you. Go do what you do. And I know, I know you will in your own authentic way.

Well, let me say this, I know that you guys, your audience listening, they need to hear this too. They're in good hands because the two of you care significantly about the people that you're coaching and helping. Obviously, Mark shared. He's coached my dad. My dad's had nothing but positive things to say about both Mark as well as you, Darren and I've had the privilege of sitting and learning from Darren. The man's a tactician and he's made it easy for everybody to put it into practice. And so you keep on working, you keep on working, you keep on getting better. And, and I think that everybody listening is in good hands on a weekly basis. So I appreciate you guys doing this.

Thank you. And a big shout out. Thank you to your dad and your mom who raised your right, Chick Miller. All right, thanks for joining us. We'll see everyone else or hear listen to everyone else next week. Thank you, Pastor.

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