Leadership Journal

Naming the Baby
The right sermon title makes all the difference.
by Calvin Miller

I have some friends who waited five days after the birth of their third child to name her. She lay in her bassinet at the hospital with a Baby Smith bracelet, waiting for her parents to achieve some great "aha" moment. We friends, sympathizing with the poor baby, badgered them to name the waif. A grand sigh of relief went up on the fifth day when the name was at last announced. The child seemed suddenly a real person with real identity.

In times past, I have fallen in love with next Sunday's sermon as early as Monday. My enthusiasm for the coming homily was rampant. I sensed the Spirit moving all through my study. My preparation seemed imaginative and Spirit-driven.

But on Friday, by the time the bulletin went to press, Monday's infernal brainchild still did not have a name. Secretaries and office associates gathered around and badgered me to name the little pulpit waif, but alas, no name seemed worthy. Finally, out of time and in terminal desperation, I would rip off the "Baby Miller" sermon title and call it something mundane just as the laser printer was chomping at its chips. But I was never as proud of my panic-driven title as I wanted to be.

We name babies and sermons to give them identity and significance. Unnamed anythings are harder to love and harder to file (this is truer of sermons than babies). Furthermore, it is almost impossible ever to be proud of anything unnamed. In short, all significance waits on a name, and, as a famous umpire once said, "It ain't nothin' till I call it."

From text to title
Ah, but how to title the sermon well?

Some titles are derived from the sermon's dominant illustration. Examples of this might be Russell Conwell's "Acres of Diamonds" (a famous self-help sermon), Peter Marshall's "Keeper of the Springs" (a Mother's Day sermon), or Tony Campolo's "My God Is a Party Animal" (a sermon on being compassionate to social outcasts). But overall, titles derived from dominant illustrations lose their punch.

In 1902 at the Hunter (Oklahoma) Baptist Church, a small parish I served in the fifties, Elder D.P. Rowe preached a sermon called "The Devil's Tracks in the Blackberry Patch." My grandfather, who recently died at 102, talked about the sermon for the next 90 years. The title stuck with Grandpa for nearly a century, proving how important titles are. But the sermon was apparently named after an illustration, not the text, and hence its biblical connection has not survived.

I first came to the notion of moving from text to title four decades ago in a seminary homiletics class. We were all assigned to prepare a sermon on Romans 2:16, about the coming time when God will judge the secrets of all hearts. I named my sermon "Apparent Acrimony" (sadly, only a B+ title). A classmate named his sermon on the same text "The Inevitable Expose." How I disliked him for picking the very title I had been looking for. (It would surely have come to me in time.) From that time forward, I never forgot how important it is to link the title to the text.

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