There is a lot of work these days to try to make things easier to understand. Preachers are not immune to this trend. Pastors are encouraged to make the Bible easy for people to understand. Making the Gospel message more accessible to more people is a worthy effort. However, I wonder if in our efforts to make things easy to understand could unintentionally make them easy to forget?

When I was in college, my university gave laptops to all incoming students. In part this effort was to make note-taking easier. Years later, studies have shown that taking notes by hand rather than typing them is better if you want to retain the information. Likewise, using slightly difficult to read fonts promote better recall. Sometimes when things are easier to do, they are easier to forget.

There is a push in some areas of the world to promote something called Dysfluency. This is the process of making something slightly difficult in order to promote greater recall, retention and integration. (Clarification: dysfluency is not the same as disfluency).

I wonder what it would look like for us preachers to embrace dysfluency when it comes to preaching and teaching the scriptures.