Growing Edge - Christianity Today

IMAGINEERING THE SERMON

Warren Wiersbe on how to make your preaching more imaginative.

The preacher must develop the pictures embedded in the stories, metaphors, and even the words of Scripture. So believes Warren Wiersbe, former pastor of Moody Memorial Church in Chicago and teacher for the Back to the Bible radio broadcast.

Why? Because people act on the pictures hanging in the gallery of their minds. Our house, our car, and our word processor were all born in somebody’s imagination. So are acts of obedience and worship. We picture them first and do them second.

Steve Mathewson, a Montana pastor, visited with Warren Wiersbe about his recent book, “Preaching and Teaching with Imagination” (400 pages, Victor, $21.99).

MATHEWSON: Do you find preachers are comfortable talking about the imagination?

WARREN WIERSBE: Pastors often confuse imagination with fantasy or the imaginary. But imagination is the image-making faculty in our minds. It helps us penetrate reality and better understand it, while fancy builds an alternate world. Generally, you don’t find the imaginary in the Bible, but you do find imagination.

The point of my book is that the Bible is written with imagination. Take Jeremiah, for example. When he tells God’s people what’s wrong with them, he calls them a bunch of brides who have run off with the best man. He accuses them of drinking at broken cisterns. The biblical writers understood that the human mind is not a debating hall but a picture gallery.

MATHEWSON: What piqued your interest in the imagination?

WIERSBE: It started in the late 1970s when I began teaching as a visiting instructor in homiletics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. My students wanted a bunch of rules and formulas to turn a text into a message. I gave them the rules and formulas, but we did not accomplish much.

Then it dawned on me that maybe I should work in this area myself. So I began to read widely on imagination. In the process, I realized that appealing to the imagination was not just a gimmick or communication technique but a definite practice of the biblical writers.

MATHEWSON: Has using your imagination changed your sermons?

WIERSBE: I find myself using fewer formal illustrations. The ones I do use come from personal experience or reading. For them to be effective, they must be felt. Recently, I used an illustration from William Manchester’s book, The Glory of the Dream. During the Depression, a schoolteacher noticed a little girl who looked ill. The teacher said, “My dear, when you go home tonight, be sure you eat something, because you look ill.”

“I can’t,” she replied. “Today is my sister’s day to eat.”

Now that gets you. I urge pastors to keep themselves alive. Read alive. Live alive. Open up your spiritual senses to what you see, hear, taste, and feel. Then you’ll find illustrations that will touch the imagination.

MATHEWSON: But some would say pastors should stick to “preaching the Word.”

WIERSBE: That’s what I’m arguing for! Preaching is more than analysis and data. Information is giving out; whole communication is getting through. My challenge to preachers is to move out of the academy into the marketplace and to start communicating God’s truth the way God communicated it to us in his Word.

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Reviewer Steven D. Mathewson is pastor of Dry Creek Bible Church, Belgrade, Montana.

HONING YOUR CRAFT

The highs and lows of five new preaching books.

“The Empowered Communicator”

by Calvin Miller (Broadman & Holman, $17.99)

Highlight: Miller offers seven keys for more power in communication.

Lowlight: The book sometimes reads like a grocery list of “do’s and don’ts.”

Best Keeper: Create cycles of tension and resolution throughout the sermon to keep your audience’s attention.

“A Captive Voice: the Liberation of Preaching”

by David Buttrick (Westminster/John Knox, $12.99)

Highlight: Buttrick reconsiders the nature of preaching by taking a fresh look at the Bible, church, culture, and Christian identity.

Lowlight: Some working pastors might think it’s not practical enough.

Best Keeper: Build your sermon around a series of movements rather than merely making didactic points from a text.

“Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon”

by Bryan Chapell (Baker, $24.99)

Highlight: Chapell points wandering preachers back to Christ as the focal point of their preaching, supplying a detailed prescription of how to construct such a Christ-centered sermon.

Lowlight: His presentation seems unnecessarily academic for the reader who wants merely to sharpen his/her homiletical skill.

Best Keeper: Communicate only one idea from a passage of Scripture so listeners will be motivated to apply it to their lives.

“The 12 Essential Skills of Great Preaching”

by Wayne McDill (Broadman & Holman, $16.99)

Highlight: McDill gets back to the basics, explaining the fundamental study skills necessary for good preaching.

Lowlight: His approach may be too wooden for some and too elementary for others.

Best Keeper: Use fresh metaphors to draw pictures for your audience.

“Fresh Air in the Pulpit”

by D. Stuart Briscoe (Baker, $10.99)

Highlight: Through the generous use of Scripture and an abundance of personal anecdotes, Briscoe breathes new life into tired preachers.

Lowlight: Briscoe’s prescriptions may be too general for seasoned preachers.

Best Keeper: Vary the length of your preaching series.

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Reviewer Gary Preston is pastor of Bethany Church, Boulder, Colorado.

WAR AND PEACE

An insider’s look at the wars and rumors of wars in the church–and how to wage love.

“I am so tired of conflict that I’d move to another church, if I didn’t think that 90 percent of the other churches are in more turmoil than mine.”

That was a recent comment of a minister and friend who serves on the staff of a large and growing church. I imagine this observation reflects the feelings of many.

Robert Moeller’s “Love in Action: Dealing with Conflict in Your Church” (220 pages, Questar, $8.99) shows my friend’s comments are not an anomaly, but Moeller contributes more than an autopsy report. Moeller, a pastor and gifted writer, provides practical suggestions to pastors, staff members, and lay leaders regarding conflict resolution. His call to the ethic of love in the church is not a simplistic solution to the complex issue of conflict. In a section subtitled “Unleashing a Love Storm,” Moeller illustrates the meshing of acts of love with the discipline of prayer as a means of spiritual warfare of peace.

Even more significant are Moeller’s insightful observations regarding ways to avoid conflict. Using case studies and fictional stories, Moeller provides examples that are generally credible. The chapter, “How to Split Your Church,” is an extremely well-crafted chapter listing ten steps to create division. Moeller’s explanation of step four, “Speak the Truth or Practice Love but Never Combine the Two” is a classic discussion of the danger of making love and truth mutually exclusive. To express love without truth only postpones small differences until they have matured into major conflicts. To speak truth without love may infect the body with a low-grade conflict that will spread.

The author places church conflict in a cultural context when he writes, “One contributing factor to the lack of harmony in churches today is the loss of respect for authority.” He lists other cultural pressures and examines how the breakdown of the family contributes to the loss of authority. All this is helpful. Seeing conflict as part of the culture does not solve problems, but it does discourage leaders from seeking quick-fix solutions.

VICTIM OR VICTOR?

Love in Action raised for me a larger question about pastors and church conflict. The ministerial support groups I have recently attended, as well as the 23 seminary students I’m currently teaching, appear to be carrying an unnecessarily heavy load of self-pity, which is the fetus of uncontrolled anger.

I wonder if Moeller could have done more to mitigate this pastor-as-victim syndrome, which seems to be metastasizing in today’s therapeutically soaked climate. Moeller writes, “[W]hen a pastor loses his church, he loses more than a job. He loses his ministry, his identity, and his support system all at once.”

Although this may accurately describe how a pastor feels, should anyone’s ministry be totally defined by a single position? If our identity rests entirely on our being accepted and employed by a church, we might need to examine our definition of idolatry. On some occasions those attacking may not be muggers, but surgeons seeking to remove the malignant attitude that allowed us to see our selves as “the kept” rather than “the called.”

Love in Action is a critical work on a critical subject. Moeller’s four spiritual laws of building unity found in the final chapter soften the minister-advocacy role of the early chapters. Begin the book by reading the last chapter and read it aloud!

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Reviewer Gary Fenton is pastor of Dawson Memorial Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama.

THE FIRST THING FIRST

Defining your worship style is important, but not that important.

“How do I satisfy all the demands for ‘the right kind of worship music in our church,'” asked a pastor, “and yet deal with all the criticism about the change?”

That’s an important question, but it’s not the most important one, at least according to “Room for God? A Worship Challenge for a Church-Growth and Marketing Era” (208 pages, Baker, $11.99).

Author Robert Wenz, pastor of Derwood Alliance Church in Rockville, Maryland, warns pastors about human-centered rather than God-centered worship–seeking to please the worshiper rather than the One being worshiped. Yet he doesn’t unnecessarily bash church growth or seeker-oriented services (unlike other books of this genre).

“We must exercise creativity and wisdom in our outreach ministry,” writes Wenz, “but we also must guard against allowing marketing to dominate our thinking.”

He defines worship as “active communion with God in which believers by grace and through faith, focus their hearts’ affection and minds’ attention on humbly glorifying God in response to his character, his acts, and his Word.”

“True” worship, for Wenz, is based on Romans 12. “Our music is destined to be self-centered,” he writes, “if our primary criterion for selecting music is what we like. The sacrifice of worship that God desires is, in essence, a sacrifice of self. Sacrifice is a reasonable response to the mercies of God.”

Since no one music style is propounded in the Scripture, Wenz calls on readers to sacrifice their personal preferences. I found his comments refreshingly balanced. While he sees worship as central to the life of the church, he does not neglect evangelism, which he views as “the task of recruiting others to turn from worshiping false gods to worshiping the true God.”

Pastors might want to use Room for God as a discussion guide for their lay leaders frustrated over music styles and trends in corporate worship.

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Reviewer Donald L. Bubna is pastor-at-large of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, Salem, Oregon.

HIGH-TECH PREPARATION

What’s hot, what’s not, about NavPress software.

A perfect illustration–who can find one? The trouble with illustrations is, first, collecting them, and, second, finding the right one at the right time.

That’s why INFOSEARCH by Navpress Software (Sermon Illustrations, $69; Humor Collection, $59; Current Thoughts and Trends, $79) is so impressive. It gives us a number of handles to grab any given illustration out of an electronic database. Infosearch provides ways to deal with both dilemmas of illustrations: gathering them and finding the right ones among the flock.

Unfortunately, however, it does the second better than the first.

But first, the strength: With INFOSEARCH, I have several ready-made databases from which to choose–Sermon Illustrations, the Humor Collection, and Current Thoughts and Trends, among others. Written in DOS format, the databases are well laid out, easy to navigate with a mouse or by cursor keys, and immediately responsive (at least on my fast 486 computer).

For example, let’s say I’m writing a sermon on John 3:16. I can click on search and then click again on scripture. I get a screen on which I can type in “John 3:16.” Click again, and I immediately get 19 illustrations to browse. No waiting, no grinding machinery. Bam! They’re there.

Or, I could search by a topic word–love. That gives me 128 illustrations. Hmmm. Better narrow that search. I can search for love and God, and that gives me 62 illustrations. If I make it love, God, and world, I find 15 illustrations. After I read each one, I can just go on to the next one, or I can output the illustration to a printer or as a word-processor file to slip into a sermon manuscript, or I can stamp the illustration with the date I last used it, or I can even delete it from the database if it is one I’ll never use. All this works easily, with help screens to give instructions if the logical interface escapes my logic.

Now the bad news: many of the Sermon Illustrations appear to have come from another century. They are maudlin, sappy, and preachy. It’s hard to find one I would actually use in a sermon. The Humor Collection fares a little better. After several searches, I found myself chuckling now and then. The Current Thoughts and Trends material is excellent, however–nuggets taken from today’s journalism.

On the other hand, the software makes adding our illustrations to the database simple. Click on add and click again on regular, and we have a screen where we can input an illustration, its topics, and its Scripture references. Or, to make massive infusions of good material easy to do, Infosearch gives us a format to input a batch of illustrations as a single ASCII file.

I’ll be using this system to collect, search, and retrieve those perfect illustrations presently suffering silently in my card file.

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Reviewer James D. Berkley is contributing editor of LEADERSHIP and senior associate pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington.