The Homiletical Plot, by Eugene L. Lowry, Knox, $4.95; Between Two Worlds, by John R. W. Stott, Eerdmans, $12.95; Building the Word, by J. Randall Nichols, Harper & Row, $9.95.
Reviewed by Ralph L. Lewis, chairman of preaching and worship, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.
Preaching good sermons today is tougher than ever. Listeners, once passive, now feel free to question, challenge, disagree, or boycott. Their great expectations pressure the preacher to improve yesterday’s best efforts. But how?
Answers come from many directions. No single expert can hope to provide all the creativity required for effective communication in today’s ministry. But three recent books make helpful contributions, each confronting preaching from a different angle.
Of the three, The Homiletical Plot covers the most new territory. Eugene Lowry’s innovative book is also the shortest and least expensive. Lowry, associate professor of preaching and communication at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City and for thirteen years a local church pastor, questions practices considered almost sacred by traditional homiletics.
“I was taught to ‘tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them,'” says Lowry. “Nothing could be more fatal for a sermon!”
That’s like giving the punch line first, he says, or like a novelist telling “who done it” on the opening page.
He confronts the common “assumption that sermon organization evolves out of the logic of content.” Formal education has often squeezed preachers into the mold of scientists who scrutinize content to the neglect of craft, culture, and human condition. Preaching, he says, is more than a lecture put together on an assembly line. Preachers are not Ford workers reaching for interchangeable nuts and bolts-or interchangeable anecdotes and prooftexts to build sermons that all have the same basic shape.
“Imagine what the prodigal son story would have been like,” Lowry prods, “had Jesus organized the message on the basis of its logical ingredients instead of the journey of the son.”
Confessing his own involvement in the engineering science of sermon construction, Lowry charges that most “sermon architecture” classes teach preachers to organize the pieces into parallel points, hoping the symmetrical form would have life in the end.
Homiletics has swallowed whole the thought patterns of the Greeks, for whom words were definitions. But most of the Bible reflects Hebrew thinking, a verb-based language where words were descriptions. Under Greek influence, preachers try to head off all possibility of misunderstanding, to make the message as unmistakable as possible. But the result is that the sermon is shucked of its life and staked out as an abstract, propositional statement. Jesus, in his parables, was willing to risk misunderstanding for impact.
“There’s almost always a sudden change whenever the speaker launches into a narrative,” Lowry says. “There is something almost automatically captivating about a story that catches our minds and makes us forget to breathe until it’s over.”
Ambiguity is not an evil to be shunned but a tool to be used-the needed first element for any sermon. Remember the puzzled responses when Christ talked about living water and being born anew? When a biblical theme is thrown against a life problem, questions are raised. In the tension produced by the clash of these ingredients, sermons are born.
A sermon is a premeditated plot and the key ingredient is ambiguity, a sensed discrepancy, a homiletical bind. In its presentation, the sermon always begins with the itch and moves to the scratch-from the human predicament to the solution born of the gospel.
Lowry’s process, with its imaginative outline, spells bad news for those who sleep in church. First, the preacher pulls the rug out from under the listeners by introducing the conflict (what Lowry calls the “Oops!” stage). Then, analyzing the ambiguity raises even more questions (the “Ugh!”). Discovering and disclosing the clue to the sermon’s apparent conundrum builds listener loyalty (the “Aha!”), and then the congregation celebrates the gospel (the “Yeah!”) before the ecstasy of the final stage (“Whee!”) holds them to anticipate the consequences or enjoy the happy ending.
Even this outline, Lowry warns, can become a routine, “cookie cutter” sermon structure. He discusses variations, preparation, and preaching options. I can’t imagine any preacher not preaching better sermons as a direct result of reading this hundred-page book. It deserves far more headlines than it’s been given to date.
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A second book, Between Two Worlds: The Art of Preaching in the Twentieth Century, takes a bit more traditional approach to preaching but offers some timely help.
World-renowned preacher and scholar John Stott defends expository preaching as both necessary and possible. His massive book comes close to cracking peanuts with sledgehammer impact by using more than 500 footnotes (count ’em) and chapters fifty pages long. But he softens the blows with anecdotes and personal insights.
Citing numerous biblical figures as models for contemporary preaching, he then chooses the nonbiblical metaphor of bridge-building to span the gulf between the biblical world and the world today.
Stott is convinced preachers today need all the encouragement they can get. Extensive theological and biblical proofs prop up his assertions for expository preaching, but his personal commitment to the sacred task surfaces on every page. Obviously he not only practices what he preaches, he preaches what he publishes!
“Begin situationally instead of biblically,” he suggests, “with topic instead of text. Start where people are-not where we hope to take them.”
He says you can hear the clicks all over the church as people turn off the preacher who doesn’t capture and keep their attention from the first sentence. If that’s true with the committed Christians who flock to hear Stott, how much more it is true for the rest of us who face some nominal Christians in our churches each week!
Stott’s gentle spirit, his Christian commitment, and biblical scholarship bring us a strong case for faithful preaching. This defense of the expository method is broadened by his strong case for audience adaptation.
The final chapters deal with the preacher-his sincerity, earnestness courage, and humility-a needed accent in a day of fuzzy morals and flimsy doctrine. The age-old concept of the speaker’s ethical appeal, publicized periodically since Demosthenes, surfaces again-happily and necessarily. The good sermon comes from the good person speaking well on the Good Book, with good attitudes, good sense, good character, and good will.
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In contrast with Stott’s cordiality, Nichols quickly takes a confrontational stance toward traditional homiletics. He accosts our comfortable clichs with insights from his experience as professor and director of the doctor of ministry program at Princeton Seminary.
Evangelicals can profit by the honest encounter his banter brings. He speaks to conservatives and liberals alike when he says invitation, not explanation, is our goal.
“We proclaim the gospel rather than scratch our heads in public about it,” he says.
He deplores the folly of explaining the menu to a hungry person. Healing is the point-not clarity, happiness, freedom, or illumination alone. He warns our usual exegesis may be orthodox, benign, and too often unspeakably boring. Beware the vicious cycle of “applying uninterpreted scripture to unchallenged thought.”
Preaching includes the language of formal theology, the language of religious experience, the language of feeling, the nonverbal language of the body. Many sermons, he insists, miss the connectives needed to relate the sermon to life because “in short you have to break the eggs.”
Digestion rather than memory must serve as the purpose for sermons. He deplores the view of preaching as “a kind of adversarial process between preacher and congregation” when people actually want to be allowed to communicate. He sees listeners as yoke mates rather than sparring partners in the task of keeping the congregation fed. His guided tour on “How to Listen to a Sermon” helps us contract with our hearers in the discovery/digestion process. His sermon worksheet gives probing questions to guide our preparation from launch pad to target.
Nichols summarizes his book’s concepts in a Bill of Rights for congregations.
People in the pew should be given credit for:
Recognizing and prizing imagination in preaching.
Empathizing with the preacher.
Wanting to share the biblical experience.
Seeking consciously and actively a personal connection between their life situation and the words you are saying.
Appreciating being allowed to share the dynamics of sermon preparation itself.
Sharing, forgiving, and even growing from your homiletical duds.
Being open to conflict and controversy in preaching.
Being able both to enjoy and benefit from a sermon.
Perceiving and valuing the sermon and other elements of worship.
Wanting to learn the language of religious experience and expression.
Preaching every week is a challenging task. These books do more than remind us of its significance-they offer helpful tools so that both preacher and congregation will benefit from the weekly encounter.
Your First Church: Getting Started Right
Beginning Your Ministry by C. W. Brister, James L. Cooper, and J. David Fite, Abingdon, $6.95
Reviewed by Steve Harris, pastor, Evangelical Baptist Church, Sharon, Massachusetts
I happily remember my last days in seminary. All the exams (and practice sermons!) were finally over, and the call had come from our first church. It was time to celebrate with family and friends, load up the Ryder truck, and-we were off! I remember the exhilaration, the sense of adventure, the fun. I also remember being scared to death.
Beginning Your Ministry reassures the freshly graduated seminarian that such fears are not uncommon. In fact, this brief but helpful book puts the young pastor in touch with the feelings, concerns, and expectations that are a natural part of the crucial transition from classroom to congregation.
This book is the story of twelve seminary couples from the class of ’74 and how they made their transition. They formed the nucleus of the “Young Ministers Project,” a study cosponsored by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Selected at random from three degree programs (pastoral, education, and music), the twelve couples’ reactions and adjustments to ministry over a five-year period serve as the backdrop for this book.
Why a five-year study? The authors (two Southwestern professors and a denominational leader) use compelling statistics from previously published studies to substantiate their claim that the first five years in ministry are the most critical.
One of the authors, C. W. Brister, explains: “We wrote the book because we sensed a great need for it. I’ve been at Southwestern for twenty-five years, and in sending my students out into the world of ministry I’ve developed quite a cache of young friends across the country. I’m interested in what happens to these young people.
“The book’s been well received and has already led to some positive changes here at the seminary. For example, we’ve established a more careful orientation program-we require a full week of orientation, spouses included, at the beginning of the seminary experience.”
Taking into account the various methods for matching pastor with parish, the book gives helpful advice for those facing that challenge: “Getting started professionally as a minister involves the majestic and the mundane, aspiration and frustration, mystery and minutia, singleness of heart and infinite flexibility.” Stay calm, they add; a good dose of patience works wonders.
When searching (and being sought), there are some practical matters to attend to: investigate the church-and its community-for yourself; read job descriptions carefully before accepting a call; know the physical and financial realities of the situation. In other words, “Look before you leap!” And throughout the entire process, remember that God is near. “Praying for a place of ministry and persisting in making oneself available go hand in hand.”
Having begun in ministry, many suffer what the book calls “first-pastorate syndrome,” a painful affliction of finding yourself “somewhere between holding on and letting go” of seminary. The seminary campus and the pastor’s study are two different worlds, as one of the study participants quickly found out: “We discovered that adjustments in a first church are similar to those in the first years of marriage where different family backgrounds . . . sometimes clash.”
Perhaps most helpful is the book’s identification of common areas of stress. Four of the most critical are:
The crisis of competence. The young pastor finds out that “he is no longer a ministerial student, for whom all sins are covered by the cross, but a minister-in-residence whose sins are identified and criticized by certain members of the congregation,” (a crisis shared by the pastor’s wife, they add).
The clash of idealism and realism. One example: the idealism of perfect sermon preparation and the reality of having to produce every week.
Fears and frustrations. The study revealed that beginning ministers are filled with more fears than they usually admit. On top of the list: the fear of failure. “I am at a loss,” lamented one pastor, “as to how to determine whether or not I am being an effective minister.” That desire to succeed often shows up in frustration over the growth of the church and in motivating parishioners to “get more involved.” The authors concluded young pastors often “assumed too much responsibility for the growth of the church.”
Role development. One common source of stress is finding the right “hat” to wear. “There are a multiplicity of roles placed upon the young minister,” write the authors, adding that “those roles are often ill-defined and totally unrealistic.”
How can the pastor-and his family-cope with these and other stresses? Discussions among the twelve couples identified dozens of helpful suggestions: trust in God; develop intimate friendships within the church (the authors say it is worth the risks involved); locate resource books; develop proper time scheduling; create and maintain good staff relations; pursue continuing education (an entire chapter is devoted to planning correctly for it); and find meaningful outside interests to divert attention for brief periods.” (One of my parishioners recently asked me, “Pastor Steve, what are you doing for fun in your life?” I wonder if my friend realized what an encouraging and helpful question that was.)
If there is one critical need above all others in the life of a young pastor, it is learning how to maintain a healthy family life. In their chapter on “Establishing Priorities in Life” (well worth the price of the book), the authors boldly confront the need for a pastor to give his wife and family the time and attention they deserve.
“Many of the lessons we relate in the book we learned firsthand,” recalls Brister, who entered the ministry after a career in radio, journalism, and teaching (economics at Louisiana State University). After a pastorate at Haltom Road Baptist Church in Fort Worth, he was invited to teach at Southwestern Baptist Seminary.
“I had prepared myself to be a local-church minister. I liked it. But early I realized the problems young ministers face. The biggest thing I faced as a new pastor was the shock of realizing you have to take so many others into account when making decisions. If you’re just giving steerage to your own life, and just considering your family, that’s one thing. But suddenly all your parishioners are, in a certain sense your extended family. Decision making becomes complicated when you get a clash of wills. All the emotional highs and lows of a congregation rub off on the minister.”
Brister says the idea of the book has been well received. “We’re talking of following up the study with a ten-year review of these same couples.”
The book concludes that “given the destructiveness of American culture and the vigorous demands of the professional ministry, the young pastor needs large doses of compassion.” Beginning Your Ministry becomes just that-a very tangible expression of compassion, a positive, practical help for the beginning pastor who heads down that sometimes overwhelming, at times frightening, but so often gratifying path we call the ministry.
Renewal: Cosmic or Cosmetic?
Furnace of Renewal by George Mallone, InterVarsity, $5.25
Reviewed by Scott A. Wenig, college-career pastor, Bear Valley Baptist Church, Denver, Colorado
Despite the wide circulation of church renewal books in the 1960s and ’70s, a full-scale ecclesiastical reformation has yet to happen. Some renewal has occurred, but has the change been cosmic or cosmetic?
In an effort to keep alive the spark of genuine renewal, George Mallone has provided a refreshing vision for the church. While many renewal books emphasize structural change, Mallone advocates spiritual refinement in the furnace of God’s purifying love. His book, Furnace of Renewal, combines an insightful critique of the church’s present condition and the pastoral practices that Mallone has found helpful in eleven years of local-church ministry in British Columbia.
Using the Book of Malachi as his foundation, Mallone finds the prophet’s emphases remarkably appropriate for church renewal today. He focuses on areas such as worship, the nature of church leadership, the necessity of giving, and the problems of divorce and covetousness. The last two chapters center on the role of the Holy Spirit in refining the people of God.
The greatest hindrance to renewal? Christians quenching the Spirit. Mallone’s goal: to help churches release the Spirit in worship, giftedness, and ministry.
“The reaction to the book has been interesting,” says Mallone. “People are having a hard time deciding if I’m an evangelical or a charismatic. I’m an evangelical in theology; I’m a charismatic in my belief that all the spiritual gifts are available today.”
But Mallone is quick to make some distinctions.
“The Holy Spirit is more than just a doctrine,” he says. “I was deeply influenced by British charismatics such as David Watson and Michael Green, but they’re a lot different from some of the loony Pentecostals in America. British charismatics are deeply rooted in conservative evangelical theology but don’t deny the practice of spiritual gifts.”
If Mallone, a teaching elder in the Christian Brethren movement, is hard to label, it’s because his spiritual development has been shaped by widely diverse forces.
“I had a Martin Luther conversion,” he says. While a student at East Texas State University, he was given a copy of Living Letters-the Book of Romans. Reading it alone one night, “I got converted at 6:23.”
He dropped out of the university to take a semester at Dallas Bible College before returning to East Texas State. Upon graduation, he joined the staff of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship but left to work with street people when the Jesus movement of the early 1970s hit Texas.
“There were 15,000 young people converted to Christ in Houston in the first few months of 1971,” he says. “My wife and I were on staff at a Presbyterian church, but we lived in community with 25 young people in a large house next door to a vacant lot.”
During those days, the seed thoughts that eventually would blossom into a book began to sprout.
“We held rock concerts in that vacant lot and did a lot of individual witnessing,” he says. “We were led by four elders, but everyone was being equipped for ministry. For a while we were seeing two to three people a day come to Christ. I began to think, If it can work in a house of street people, why can’t it work in the church?”
By that time, he had seen not only what the church could be, but also what it shouldn’t be.
“When I first became a Christian, I attended a church and intuitively knew something was wrong-even though I’d had no previous experience with which to compare it. The church provided good Bible teaching, but it was all ‘doctrine in the frontal lobe’-not a lot of relationship to life. They emphasized the Word, but not worship-they preached, but lacked significant relationships. I knew something was missing.”
From Texas, Mallone moved to Vancouver, studying at Regent College and becoming a teaching elder at Marineview Chapel. Eight years later, when Marineview planted a new church, Emmanuel Christian Community, Mallone became the teaching elder there, and in the past three years has seen the congregation grow from 45 to l50.
“Furnace of Renewal is a reflective, not a prophetic, book,” he says. “The topics in the book-divorce, separation, giving, worship-are treated because that’s what’s actually going on in our congregations here.”
What does the future hold for churches and renewal?
“We may be on the verge of another Great Awakening,” Mallone says. “But it won’t come because of our efforts at church renewal. It will come because people are insecure, needy, scared of the collapse of the economy and the family. They’re ripe for the gospel.”
Furnace of Renewal, with its emphasis on releasing the Holy Spirit to meet the needs of people, will anger some and cheer others. Hopefully, its creative and timely call for spiritual refinement will be heard. Perhaps then the long-awaited cosmic renewal of the church will come.
Hearing Is More Than Listening
Caring Enough to Hear and Be Heard by David Augsburger, Regal, $4.95.
Reviewed by William G. Enright, pastor, Second Presbyterian Church, Indianapolis, Indiana.
Words have their seasons. Caring seems to be a word in fashion. The problem with fashionable words is that they may also become faddish. David Augsburger, however, is not one to turn caring into an easy clich.
In this, the third of his “Caring Enough” series, the Mennonite professor/counselor reminds us that caring is a way of living. To care is to pursue an arduous life, for “caring is coming as close to another as is possible without violating the other’s freedom, dignity and self-responsibility.”
Augsburger, who teaches pastoral care at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries in Elkhart, Indiana, spends many of his weekends leading marriage enrichment retreats, often with pastors and spouses. “I wrote the book after sensing that hearing was a major problem area for many in church leadership,” he says. “Our communication patterns are a parable of how we view relationships. If we communicate vertically, one-way, that is how we relate to people as a whole. But if we can enter into true dialogue with one another we can build a climate of mutuality.”
The thesis of this book is that if one truly cares, one must care enough to listen to the whole person. “In listening we become truly with another. In caring we become truly for another. Being with and being for are the two central elements of loving relationship.”
Augsburger lists six steps essential to the hearing process:
1. A willingness to give another my attention.
2. An openness to perceive the other’s views and values.
3. A readiness to suspend judgment or evaluation.
4. A patience to wait for the other’s own expression of thoughts and feelings.
5. A genuine empathy that seeks to take the other’s position for the moment, to see the world as the other sees it.
6. A commitment to work toward a dialogue that enriches us both.
This book attracted me for several reasons. First, I like Augsburger’s style. He writes with verve in both a confessional and personal way. This mix gives his writing a quality of authentic magnetism. To dramatize both the inner yearnings and the inner barriers within two people who want to hear and be heard, he writes:
“He was an emotional photographer. He had photographed her at moments of perfect lighting, retouched the shadows, air-brushed the flaws, and penciled in hopes, dreams, fantasies of who she was, what she would become. All unaware he also tinted into the picture the anxieties, fears, and prophecies that were from deep within himself. When he was with her he did not see her, he saw his picture and he responded to glimpses of its beauty or reacted to its distortions.
“She was an emotional artist. She had painted a portrait of him from her own inner collection of dreams to be realized and dangers to be evaded. When in his company she was not present or in his presence. The pictures met, the illusions communed, the tapes of recorded expectations blended. At times there were flickerings of reality, flashes of clarity received with both joy and fear. As the ability to sustain this open awareness without reference to the pictures was acquired, bit by painful bit, the joy of immediacy overcame the fear of powerful presence. (I look back on the remembered picture with amused and amazed eyes, for I was he.)”
Second, I appreciated the format of the book. Each chapter begins with a page of captivating quotations and concludes with three practical sections. One opens the door to biblical study, providing passages for reflection and dialogue. A second section offers a checklist for personal pondering and growth. The third offers exercises for group process and discussion.
Between the bookends of each chapter are graphic charts and diagrams. Augsburger uses subtitles as more than channel markers; they are handy summaries of the chapter contents.
Other than the six brief Bible studies, this book keeps God and Scripture offstage, centering instead on human feelings and behaviors. When asked about this approach, Augsburger, a former pastor in Virginia as well as radio speaker on “The Mennonite Hour” for eight years, replied, “My primary focus was on practice, not theory. This is a book about how people work out their discipleship; it reflects on what they do and how they do it. I’ve lifted principles from the whole of Scripture rather than highlighting and possibly distorting individual verses.”
Finally, I appreciated the book’s pointed reminder. I found myself jabbed as a preacher. It is easy for me to forget that even preaching is dialogical. If I want to be heard by the people in the pew, I must also make certain that I am hearing them.
Copyright © 1983 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
