I am, by nature, a skeptic.  When someone tells me something will be the greatest __________, I question it right out of the block.  So, a few years back when I was told that The Passion of the Christ was going to be the greatest evangelistic opportunity of all time, I had a great deal of doubt about that claim. 

I joined the rest of the evangelical community and watched the movie.  It was well done and touched me.  It clearly demonstrated the death of Christ.  Yet it left non-believers, generally, unmoved.  Why was that? 

It could be that we as followers of Jesus had information that gave the movie context.  That context made it meaningful for us while for everyone else it was just a guy getting pummeled for no apparent reason.  Many made the assumption that non-Christians would have the same reaction as we did because we suffer from a syndrome author’s Chip and Dan Heath call, "the curse of knowledge."

Check out this example from a book I am hooked on, Made to Stick.

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: "tappers" or "listeners." Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as "Happy Birthday to You" and "The StarSpangled Banner." Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. (By the way, this experiment is fun to try at home if there’s a good "listener"
candidate nearby.)

The listener’s job in this game is quite difficult. Over the course of
Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs: 3 out of 120.

But here’s what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent.

The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?

When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head.
Go ahead and try it for yourself-tap out "The Star-Spangled Banner."
It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the
listeners can’t hear that tune-all they can hear is a bunch of
disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code.

In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the
listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song
obvious? The tappers’ expressions, when a listener guesses "Happy
Birthday to You" for "The Star-Spangled Banner," are priceless: How
could you be so stupid?
It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given
knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine
what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t
imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather
than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we
find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge
has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge
with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of
mind.

From the book:  Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Wow!  That is it right there.  That is one reason why non-Christians frequently do not respond to that which we share.  We assume so much.  We assume the
same world view.  We assume the same view of Scripture.  We assume the
same way of processing information.  We assume they will react to facts
as we do.  We tell them Jesus is the answer but we are not answering their questions.

How much is our teaching the same way?  How much knowledge do we
assume and therefore leave some of the people who need our sermons the
most, confused?  How stupid do we as followers of Jesus appear when we
bob our head to music that the rest of the world doesn’t hear?

This book goes on to list some ways that ideas "stick".  I am not finished with the book yet, but if it is true the implications for how we
preach and lead are profound.  I recommend going out and buying it (or heading to the library and checking it out).  It
is not a Christian book, but I venture to say you may learn more about
preaching and leading from it then a number of the preaching and
leading books on your local Christian book store shelf.

Our ideas matter and we owe it to our churches, to ourselves, and to Jesus to do everything we can to make them stick.