Once I heard a physician preaching in a service that celebrated all the members who served in any capacity in the healing industry, from orderlies to surgeons, nurses to general practitioners, desk clerks to pharmacists. Amazing testimonies came from the congregation, not to downgrade medical care but to affirm the power of faith. The questions involved them in the service. At one worship service I led, the children's choir provided the music. After they sang I asked the children to stay and talk with me in the chancel.
Children can be candid, trusting and sometimes embarrassingly honest.
We laughed and cheered with their stories, and clapped when the conversation concluded. Years later both the children and the congregation happily remembered this. The questions did help us listen, and the stories of each became the struggles of all. This invitation can ignite an amazing public. Great sermons engage the preacher with the places where the congregation hurts, or the hardness we deny, or the blindness of the soul.