Sermon Central
When I was a kid I endured, like many of us, piano lessons that seemed interminable. I never came to enjoy the piano, because I didn’t practice enough and the sheet music kept the melody “out there.” I had trouble translating the notes on the paper to something natural and comfortable. Later on, after I’d abandoned lessons and sheet music, somebody taught me how to play a few chords by ear. I began to see that music can reside inside the musician instead of on paper. Playing by ear is a much different experience than playing off the page.
In studying the art of homiletics, I discovered that preaching is similar. A preacher can preach from notes or manuscripts, or they can draw upon something more internal that has been composed in the soul. I found that when I spoke about content that I had internalized and was very close to my heart, I felt more natural and comfortable and communicated better as well. But I also found that my literary homiletic background didn’t prepare me to “preach by ear.” I was taught to prepare sermons on paper and in private, and I didn’t realize there were any other options. Lately I’ve been exploring a more oral approach to preparation and delivery of sermons. This approach is more consistent with Jesus’ command not to “be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour.” (Matt. 10:19).
Hundreds of years ago, before the printing press changed the way we process information, preaching was different. Sure, preachers still scrawled out sermon notes. But there was no way to produce and store the volume of words we generate today with our word processors, hard drives, and printers. Print culture—the sense that information consists of words on a page—wasn’t dominant in homiletics. Instead of sermons sitting outlined on a pulpit, they lived inside the preacher and needed the preacher to voice them. The sermon flowed out of a different method of preparation and different model of communication. Scholars from the worlds of Biblical studies and rhetoric have identified this earlier model as “orality” and have recently begun to apply some of those principles to their homiletics.
But what difference does it make when it comes to actual preaching? Orally-sensitive preaching includes several overlapping factors which tend to defy bullet-points. After all, the whole concept of bullet points and outlines comes straight from the world of literacy and print culture. We want to see things quickly. It’s a visual summary, a “show” versus “tell” orientation. Orality presents information more like a connected story that is difficult to cut up into pieces. Nevertheless, here are some hallmarks of an oral approach.
Oral sermons start with the preacher and are vitally connected to the preacher’s own character and personal theology. We simply cannot take people where we haven’t been. We can try, but we won’t be convincing, because people have built-in hypocrisy detectors. They know when we’re just saying the correct theological ideas but haven’t tested them personally. But if greed has found a way into a preacher’s daily struggle with sin, it won’t be hard to explain it naturally without writing it out in advance. Reading and writing, while a great gift from God, allow preachers to parrot ideas they don’t really own. Oral preachers are able to explain practical theology on the spur of the moment, not because they have really good memories of what they’ve read, but because they’re striving to live the theology all week long.
Oral sermons are also prepared differently. While an oral sermon uses literate sources (the biblical text itself being the prime example), it moves relatively quickly from text toward oral composition. Instead of being written first and spoken later, it is spoken first. You actually compose your sermon out loud. You can do this alone in your study, but it’s better if you include other people in dialogue. This is not to say you’re preaching little mini-sermons to people all week; rather you are discussing the ideas of your sermon in a variety of venues to build confidence in your ability to speak naturally and easily about what’s most important. In short, you build it from the inside out. You also gain from receiving feedback from other church leaders, staff members, and your spouse. Plus, as a serendipitous side benefit, when you share your preparation, your preaching develops and trains your leadership as they participate in the process.
Most preachers would agree that we really don’t find out what we want to say until we begin to speak it aloud. It’s possible to write out a lot of stuff and still not know what you really want to say. But there’s nothing like speaking to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of a developing sermon. Oral composition doesn’t wait until Sunday to begin verbalization, when it’s too late to make changes. If Sunday is going to require you to speak, why not prepare for it now?
In addition, oral sermons are organized sequentially, so that one unit of thought leads naturally into the next. When the sequence is natural, it becomes easy to maintain the order in delivery. Most of us can tell a story, even a long story, without reliance upon notes. So the oral sermon becomes more like a 20-30 minute story than a lecture. Using a sermon “roadmap” can be helpful here: Instead of a bullet-pointed list, think of the sermon as a journey with a starting point and a destination and a few good stops along the way. A pastor can even map out a sermon visually so that it looks more like a flowchart or an actual road. It keeps him thinking of the whole message even as he works on the different points of it.
Oral sermons are unfinished until delivered, but don’t confuse this with “winging it” or an excuse for shoddy preparation. Oral sermons require as much time in preparation as their printed counterparts. But an oral sermon continues to evolve as a result of the audience and the conditions in the room. The actual word choice and syntax of the sermon are created in the moment. In other words, the oral sermon is delivered to people based on the energy from those people. As a result, the oral preacher can easily modify the sermon, and even depart from the prepared “roadmap”, if the moment suggests it. The openness in delivering an oral sermon lends to a more personal, conversational relationship between the preacher and the listener.
Eye-contact is a key factor in communicating a pastor’s sense of conviction and authenticity, and oral sermons allow preachers almost constant eye-contact with their audience. It’s almost impossible for a preacher to convince a congregation that a given point is absolutely vital while his eyes are buried in a pile of notes. The things we really believe, we say with both our mouths and our eyes. When free from written prompts, the oral preacher can build unprecedented rapport with his audience.
Oral sermons are not archived. We waste a lot of time and file space filing old sermons. Oral preachers need to start fresh each week, drawing upon the present moment and the week’s work to generate the flow of thought. Digging out a sermon from years ago simply won’t provide the necessary fuel for an oral sermon. It would be like trying to make that same magic vacation happen again. Each sermon lives its own life in its own venue. When it’s finished, it’s over. Even the same content preached a second time to a new audience will be received differently. The best archive is the mind and soul of the preacher, which grows and expands the longer one preaches. Each sermon contributes to a pastor’s mental pantry, filling it with meaningful metaphors, applications, illustrations and insights into biblical text. The pantry grows and becomes richer all the time, occasionally supplying something unplanned, but perhaps fitting for another sermon in another moment. It was Jesus who described the scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven as a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old (Matthew 13:52).
You might be thinking that, although this sounds intriguing, it’s just for the elite—those exceptionally gifted in thinking on their feet. But every preacher can move in this direction, perhaps not all at once but in gradual steps. It doesn’t require a radical change, just a move from total reliance upon text and screen to a more balanced use of oral resources and language natural to you. Become a little less like a scribe and a little more like an orator. Preaching by ear is simply building the sermon inside you, swallowing the sermon all week so that you’re really ready to preach. After all, isn’t that what preachers are supposed to be?
