Preaching a New Way

Tyler, thanks for showing us the process you follow in preaching. Question for you: if you were the audience listening to this sermon and wanting to take notes, what would be the key points (not necessarily in outline form) from the sermon that you would write down to help you to remember the sermon and the application?

INTRO seems like a pretty good sermon evaluation/prep tool, among others. One preacher who regularly did a great job from my point of view as a listener had a simpler tool. Ask yourself three questions: What do I want them to know? What do I want them to feel? What do I want them to do? … this isn’t comprehensive and doesn’t address the issue of handling the text correctly at all, so a variant I prefer is more along the lines of: What does the passage want us to know? What does the passage want us to feel? What does the passage want us to do? (Resemblance to orthodoxy, orthopathy, orthopraxis is not coincidental.)

There’s some ground between true “audiobook commentary” preaching and “leaving a lot out.”

I don’t take the position that every sermon should be one-text and focused on every word in that text. That doesn’t work at all for narrative or poetry, for example. And I think pastoral leadership requires at least the occasional topical message.

I’m also OK with looking at a text, seeing multiple truths and topics in it (that are really there) and choosing one to emphasize per the need of the congregation at the time.

But there are risks…

• Listeners can get distracted by the bits you decided to skip. ‘Mental dialog: Why didn’t we talk about this? What does this phrase mean?’ The skipped bits might even seem to contradict the parts you didn’t skip.
• If we always choose an emphasis we want and never identify and preach the emphasis of the text (this is not always possible w/certainty or high confidence, I realize), we risk hobby horsing.
• Keeping a close relationship between assertions/emphases and the text not only imparts the core of the message but also teaches hearers how to interpret Scripture. It’s sad to waste that opportunity on a regular basis.

That said, my own habit has been to look for the emphasis, truths, applications in the text and select what to emphasize and shape the message around that, a good bit of the time. But I also try to be very textual (lot’s of “look at this word” and “look at this phrase” and “why am I saying X? Notice verse 10” etc.), explain my reasoning concisely, and at least acknowledge what I’m skipping over. In narrative, sometimes it’s kind of a “I’m going to skip over several verses here to help us manage the time and stay focused this morning” etc. Other times, it’s closer to “There’s an interesting phrase in v.3 we can’t go into right now. Hopefully we’ll get to it another day.”

What I want to say above all else is “It’s really the Book that matters, not my thoughts.” I want to communicate that by how I interact with the Book, not by saying “it’s really the book that matters.” Their relationship with the Word is going to matter long after my message and long after I’m gone.

[Aaron Blumer]

INTRO seems like a pretty good sermon evaluation/prep tool, among others. One preacher who regularly did a great job from my point of view as a listener had a simpler tool. Ask yourself three questions: What do I want them to know? What do I want them to feel? What do I want them to do? … this isn’t comprehensive and doesn’t address the issue of handling the text correctly at all, so a variant I prefer is more along the lines of: What does the passage want us to know? What does the passage want us to feel? What does the passage want us to do? (Resemblance to orthodoxy, orthopathy, orthopraxis is not coincidental.)

My sermon delivery has been tremendously shaped by the book Text-Driven Preaching. One of the insights I gleaned from the book is to write the main points of your sermon as an application. In other words, your sermonic points should do more than just describe what is happening in the passage, they should call for a response from your congregation.

After listening to Kuruvilla’s sermon that Tyler shared, I’m intrigued as to how someone in the congregation would take notes based on how the narrative was presented. To me, Kuruvilla’s sermon lacked an organizing structure. Instead, it seemed more like a random assemblage of exegetical points / details. I gleaned that Mark was presenting the woman as a disciple par excellence and contrasting her to Jesus’ own disciples. Kuruvilla showed what made this woman’s faith better than the faith of the disciples. However, Kuruvilla’s sermon lacked an organizing structure to help his audience process and remember the flow of the narrative and subsequent application. His best attempt was to describe the pericope as a sandwich / hamburger.

That being said, I come to the text with an analytic mind that looks for relationships and a logical thought process. Sermons that lack points, guideposts, or some sort of framing tend to be less helpful to me as I’m making notes and thinking about application to my life.

I used to be much more critical of other preachers and their styles than I am now. The thing is, God uses all kinds of styles to accomplish his purposes. If you look back to, say, chrysostom, I don’t know anyone who uses his style today. Are we so arrogant to say God can’t use that style, or didn’t use that style? I don’t think so. I have my own style, with many influences. I don’t follow any one particular “preaching guru”. I’ve read a good number of them, pick up hints here and there.

in the end what we are required to do is be faithful to God’s word and preach the gospel. If a man does that, I don’t criticize his style

I appreciate Tyler posting about his preaching journey. It is both instructive and helpful to me to see how other guys make and present the cake. It’s also a good reminder that expository preaching is not a style but a methodology. Each expository preacher needs to find his own “voice” or style. Too many guys want to imitate their preaching heroes instead of learning from their heroes and developing their own voice.

Tyler’s posts help us also understand that we need to constantly sharpen our preaching blade. I certainly need sharpening. The biggest weakness in my preaching is lack of application. That is why I switched over to an application-focused sermonic outline. That forces me to think in terms of application when I preach through a pericope.

So again, Tyler, thanks for showing us the process you follow in preaching.

[Don Johnson]

I used to be much more critical of other preachers and their styles than I am now. The thing is, God uses all kinds of styles to accomplish his purposes. If you look back to, say, chrysostom, I don’t know anyone who uses his style today. Are we so arrogant to say God can’t use that style, or didn’t use that style? I don’t think so. I have my own style, with many influences. I don’t follow any one particular “preaching guru”. I’ve read a good number of them, pick up hints here and there.

in the end what we are required to do is be faithful to God’s word and preach the gospel. If a man does that, I don’t criticize his style

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzaKOV_h-xY

The Biggest Step the IFB Needs to Take

Mark’s point is part of what I was trying to get at. Growing up, I heard faithful expositors on Sundays (sometimes topical but still expositors) and often in school chapels, but also in school chapels I heard the R.B. Ouellette approach: little or no relationship between the assertions and the Scripture portions they supposedly derive from. (An no, Mark, that sort of preaching is not unusual for R.B.)

Ward is a lot more sanguine about the whole thing than I tend to be. Maybe that sort of handling of Scripture is less damaging than my instincts tell me it is…. but I can’t feel that deeply.

So, it’s just a passion of mine that when I preach or teach, I want them to not only get my point but also get how I got it from Scripture.

About note taking…

During high school, someone decided all students needed to take notes on every sermon in chapel and at church during the week. That typically meant at least 5 a week for me in those days. It didn’t take long to discover that some preachers had an organized message and some didn’t. So for the latter, you just wrote down random thoughts that stood out during the message.

I’m not convinced that lack of clear structure meant these were bad sermons. Some were, some weren’t. But that’s a bit of a modern expectation, and some guys were quite effective despite having no structure I could identify. Still, though it’s a modern expectation you have to preach in a culturally effective idiom. But do people even still expect clear structure? I’m not sure that’s any longer the case. But it’s moot in my case. I can’t preach without one.

Aaron, your experience is very much like mine. I took notes on about six sermons a week for many years. I later realized that this was some of the best possible training for ministry. I saw other men struggling with sermon structure, but I had analyzed the structure of hundreds of sermons before I began to preach regularly. For me, structure came almost as naturally as breathing. I think that practice, first an assignment, then a habit, was more valuable to me than any course on homiletics.

Bob Jones, Jr. advocated sermons without an obvious structure. He was a master orator, but I believe congregations learn and grow better when they look for the structure of sermons. In fact, my wife will sometimes complain if she hears a sermon where the structure is not clear. To her, such a sermon seems poorly prepared. I once taught a class in homiletics in a local church Bible Institute. Some men found sermon outlining difficult. Others did so with ease. Usually those who excelled were men whose own pastors made their sermon structure clear.

Bob Jones did not teach that one should not have structure, but that it should not be transparent. Well and good for some people, but for those who themselves teach SS or preach, learning by the example of others is probably the best training they can receive. For that to happen, the structure needs to be obvious.

[Aaron Blumer]

I’m not convinced that lack of clear structure meant these were bad sermons. Some were, some weren’t. But that’s a bit of a modern expectation, and some guys were quite effective despite having no structure I could identify. Still, though it’s a modern expectation you have to preach in a culturally effective idiom. But do people even still expect clear structure? I’m not sure that’s any longer the case. But it’s moot in my case. I can’t preach without one.

As a listener rather than a preacher, I think a sermon has to have at least some structure if it is to accomplish it’s purpose. It doesn’t have to be so clear that I can make an immediate outline of parallel points. Like you, I had to take a lot of sermon notes when I was younger. I no longer do so, as I find that while trying to write down the last point made, I often miss the current one. That’s not ideal. I can’t listen well to follow the arguments if I’m spending too much time recording them. (And, it’s even harder to do if the sermon has no discernable structure when I’m trying to decide what to write down.) My wife likes taking notes, and I can refer to hers later if I need them.

However, a topical sermon needs to support the points the preacher is making about the topic, and an expository one has to bring out the point(s) of the passage. If the sermon has no structure at all, but meanders around, it really doesn’t do its job for the listener. A good sermon must needs be true to scripture and well argued, and hence, a good sermon will have a structure that eventually becomes clear, even if it’s not immediately obvious like 3 parallel points with sub-points. Good oration can be interesting to listen to, especially if the speaker is captivating, but if it doesn’t make and support an argument (whether or not I agree with the argument made), I think it was an overall waste of time.

[Aaron Blumer]

Mark’s point is part of what I was trying to get at. Growing up, I heard faithful expositors on Sundays (sometimes topical but still expositors) and often in school chapels, but also in school chapels I heard the R.B. Ouellette approach: little or no relationship between the assertions and the Scripture portions they supposedly derive from. (An no, Mark, that sort of preaching is not unusual for R.B.)

I’ve never heard of or read R.B. Ouellette, but if what Mark describes is true, his preaching is nothing more than spiritualizing. This kind of preaching was rampant in the large IFB church I attended out of college. People were amazed by all the “spiritual truths” that various guest preachers would pull out of the text they preached. Many of these men had honorary doctorates and were known as revivalist or evangelistic preachers.

To Mark’s point, when someone actually spent the time to understand the text being preached, most of what these noted revivalist preachers said came from their imagination instead of the Scripture. Regardless, they received numerous “amens” during their sermons and were invited back year after year because of their “powerful preaching.”

I agree with Mark and Aaron. This type of preaching is dangerous to the health of the church. This type of preaching fuels all sorts of aberrant doctrines in IFB churches (KJVO being the most notable).

Good words to remember:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXM1ev5BI9o

I thnk this paragraph summarizes the objection(s) to what Tyler is presenting both in his sermon and the link to Kuruvilla’s

After listening to Kuruvilla’s sermon that Tyler shared, I’m intrigued as to how someone in the congregation would take notes based on how the narrative was presented. To me, Kuruvilla’s sermon lacked an organizing structure. Instead, it seemed more like a random assemblage of exegetical points / details. I gleaned that Mark was presenting the woman as a disciple par excellence and contrasting her to Jesus’ own disciples. Kuruvilla showed what made this woman’s faith better than the faith of the disciples. However, Kuruvilla’s sermon lacked an organizing structure to help his audience process and remember the flow of the narrative and subsequent application. His best attempt was to describe the pericope as a sandwich / hamburger.

The interesting thing to me is that the writer objects that he could not take notes from the sermon, yet he fully grasped the meaning of the sermon himself. He got the main idea (I gleaned that Mark was presenting the woman as a disciple par excellence and contrasting her to Jesus’ own disciples). He recognized the supporting evidence for this main thrust (Kuruvilla showed what made this woman’s faith better than the faith of the disciples). And though he complained that the sermon had inadequate structure, he knows the structure of the biblical paragraph itself ( [he] describe[d] the pericope as a sandwich / hamburger). If I preach a sermon and my audience comes away knowing my main point, understanding the elements of the passage that contribute to the main point, and understand the structure OF THE TEXT, I don’t care if they get my sermonic structure or if I have one. Those things are secondary to understanding the text itself.

I think this “new homiletic” is kindof like watching a movie. At the end of the movie, rarely if ever have I taken notes so that I can produce an outline of the plot. But if the movie was interesting and I followed the story, I can usually give an accurate summary of the movie. .When preaching didactic sections of scripture, I think outlines are a fine thing. But in narrative sections, I think this “new homiletic” more effectively communicates the truth of scripture.

I have to admit I’ve seen more narrative passages awkwardly carved up and ‘ruined’ in sermons by the traditional outline route than by the ‘no discernable structure’ route. I’m sure I’ve done it a few times. So I’m not for saying we need to structure narrative preaching the same way as didactic passages. My only push back on ‘new homiletic’ is that there’s always a tendency toward a trendy overreaction dynamic. So, in conservative evangelicalism—as in all things human—we see something that’s a problem or not as good as it could be, then overcorrect by pushing an alternative that rejects both the good and the bad in the ‘old way.’” Then eventually the cycle repeats, swinging back the other way.

So I guess what I’m saying is that there isn’t any need to say always preach narrative with a traditional outline or never preach narrative with a traditional outline. The core commitment needs to be to correctly understanding the text and what it means and then to effectively communicating what a particular congregation at a moment in time needs to see in that correct understanding. It can be done with or without this or that sort of structure.

When I preached through Acts I didn’t find it difficult to identify a strong theme in the text and shape the delivery around that using a traditional outline while retelling the story (though not always: sometimes the group already knows the story well, and so I didn’t really retell it). When I preached through 1 and 2 Kings, though, that was far more difficult, because sometimes a thematic unit has quite a lot of verses in it. So you find yourself preaching three chapters in one sermon. So I got more creative with those. At the time, I’d attended some workshops on narrative preaching at a conference. They were helpful in some ways but I walked away convinced that I could not preach narrative the way they were advocating (it was much closer to this ‘new’ homiletic though we’re talking a decade ago at least). The key is to let the story dominate, but I couldn’t do that without a structure that was comfortable for me in delivery.

So my view on narrative is that a preacher needs to find a mode of delivery that is comfortable for him while being diligent with the text. If they do, they’ll get out of the way and the story will dominate. So, my advice: let the story grip you. Make sure it grips you. Then communicate the way that works for you. If you do that, there’s no way the story is going to fail to dominate. (And I think it works for the audience too, regardless of the official structure of the message.)