GET TO THE POINT!

All Open-Air preachers should learn to give various lengths of presentations from 2-20 minutes. Hecklers can understandably change this time from 2 minutes to an hour in a good open air setting. In the video below Ray Comfort does a great job of sharing a quick Gospel presentation without sounding like a human Gospel tract.

I beleive its better to do a shorter presentation that is CLEAR, CONCISE and HITS THE MARK then to ramble for 30 minutes to an hour (which I'm guiltry of doing) where the listeners have no idea what you're talking about. Once you get a solid "structure" you can add meat to the bones over time.

Here are some great guidelines from R.A Torrey on this topic:

"Don't be dull. Dullness will kill an open-air meeting at once. Prosiness will drive the whole audience away. In order to avoid being dull, do not preach long sermons. Use a great many striking illustrations. Keep wide awake yourself, and you will keep the audience awake. Be energetic in your manner. Talk so people can bear you. Don't preach, but simply talk to people."

"Dont read a sermon. Whatever may be said in defence of reading essays in the pulpit, it will never do in the open air. It is possible to have no notes whatever. If you cannot talk long without notes, so much the better; you can talk as long as you ought to. If you read, you will talk longer than you ought to."

"Don't talk too long. You may have a number of talks in an open-air meeting, but do not have any of them over ten or fifteen minutes long. As a rule do not have them as long as that. Of course there are exceptions to this, when a great crowd is gathered to bear some person in the open air. Under such circumstances I have beard a sermon an hour long that held the interest of the people, but this is not true in the ordinary open-air meeting."

"Don't be soft. One of these nice, namby-pamby, sentimental sort of fellows in an open-air meeting the crowd cannot and will not stand. The temptation to throw a brick or a rotten apple at him is perfectly irresistible, and one can hardly blame the crowd."

Remember guys:

Eye of the Tiger!