Leadership Journal

I can think of no better way to show how insidious personal illustrations are to preaching than to share a personal illustration. I'm aware of the irony, but it can't be helped.

Trying to drive home a point about grace in a sermon I preached at my home church, I told about the time when my wife made me angry and I put my fist into a wall in our dining room. Unfortunately, I picked a place in the wall behind which stood an immovable two-by-four. I broke a knuckle. My wife, who had every reason to avoid me for a week or so, treated me gently and took me to the emergency room.

Any preacher worth his or her salt will know how to take this bare outline and milk it to the max. And I did. I inserted telling details and funny one-liners. I paused dramatically at the right moments to let the tension build. I ended with a nice turn of phrase that put the whole incident in a poignant cast. I mean, it was good.

Too good, apparently, because to this day, years later, people will remark, "I still remember that sermon you preached where you told about putting your fist into the wall."

They don't remember Jesus. They remember me. They tell me how vulnerable I was to tell such a story on myself. They tell me how much they laughed. They never talk about grace.

This sort of thing happens innocently, starting with the best of motives. A friend on the East Coast told me recently about his pastor. Apparently the man is a gifted communicator. He struts up and down the stage like a comedian at a night club. His sermons are always biblical in content, orthodox in theology, and aiming to bring people to Jesus Christ.

My friend has noted though how this pastor begins every sermon with a personal illustration. The illustration may be about something that happened to him in college, or to him and his wife on a recent trip, or to his kids (three boys between first and fifth grade). Lately this pastor has also been concluding his sermons with a personal illustration, and a few times, a personal illustration has been the hinge in the middle of the sermon.

My friend says he's slowly become aware that the medium has become the message—the sermon has inadvertently become a showcase of the pastor's life and faith—and this by a pastor who my friend describes as humble and desperate to win people to Christ.

Phillips Brooks once described preaching as "Truth through personality." Indeed. But with the flowering of the personal illustration, preaching often morphs into "the truth of my personality."

It was just a generation ago that the personal illustration was suspect. Homiletics professors frowned on the preacher bringing himself or his family into the sermon. It was unseemly, not serious exposition. But the 1960s introduced the therapeutic age. Today, the personal illustration is de rigueur. If you don't use personal illustrations, people wonder whether you are authentic.

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