Image Mapping a Sermon:

Using Delivery Insights From The Ancients

The Chapel at Tinkers Creek and Crosspoint Drama Scripts

If you've ever searched for directions from MapQuest or other online directories, you'll find your answer in two formats: either a turn-by-turn set of steps, or a visual map of your starting point and destination. The answer you prefer tells you something about how you like to process information. If you like accuracy and precision, you'll go with the step-by-step textual instructions. If you like flexibility and multiple options, you'll print out the map and decide your own exact course.

The map metaphor illustrates two ways to think about sermon preparation and delivery. For centuries, at least in the Western world, sermons have been organized, composed, and delivered with textual orientation similar to the MapQuest textual directions. We prepare from textual sources (whether printed or online), we compose on pad or screen, and we carry some textual outline to the pulpit with us. We're so used to connecting preaching and writing, it's hard for us to imagine the task without its entrenchment in literacy.

It wasn’t always so. There was a time before literate orientations became so dominant (with the development of the printing press), that preaching was conditioned by a more oral context. That is, the preparation was done via both written and oral sources. Preachers worked through homiletic material outloud and in dialogue. Their fluency was forged not so much by careful wordsmithing of a written text or outline, but by talking through their sermons in a variety of formats and shared contexts. When it came time for delivery, they relied not so much on text as on memory. Not word-for-word memorization as we think of it, but devices to jog the memory to complete a pre-planned mental “route.” This ancient oral practice, familiar to many cultures, but documented in detail in classic Greek and Roman rhetoric, can proceed not only from a textual outline, but from a iconic map containing just a few (4-6) sequenced images that are easy to recall in the midst of speaking.

This sermonic “roadmap” has many advantages over its textual counterpart. Besides being easier to remember, it’s also, like a MapQuest map, full of options. That is, the sermon knows where it starts and where it ends, but its course along the way can vary depending on the actual conditions of the room. A textual outline locks the preacher into a pre-fabricated progression. A map allows the preacher to change course, adapt the route mid-sermon, and still arrive at the same place. Since the preacher never develops dependence on a manuscript or outline, there’s nothing from which to “wean” oneself. There is freedom and a sense of confidence.

What conditions would call for this kind of homiletic agility? How about a bored or confused audience? The orally conditioned preacher learns to scan the audience and read body language as signals of either comprehension or confusion. The preacher is able to add or delete material as necessary, without losing track of the desired destination. But how in the world would we learn to become so flexible? How do we gain the confidence to change courses in the middle of a sermon?

When the Romans prepared speeches, they went through a complex series of questions that were designed to unfold the issue before them in a thousand different ways. They verbally and mentally learned to turn a subject inside-out to discover possible ways to frame their arguments. They called this the stage of Invention and it literally grounded them in their subject so well, that they could speak on it extemporaneously if the moment required. They "owned” their subject at such depth that it gave them fluency and comfort with the subject at hand.

Homiletically, we could also prepare in this way. Not merely preparing for what we guess we’ll need to say, but also grounding ourselves in the subject (whether it’s Patience, or Lust, or God’s Sovereignty) so well that we have way too much material to ever fit into the 30-minute time frame. The Greeks called these common lines of thinking “Topia” or “Topics.” But whatever you call it, that kind of preparation is part of stocking what I call the larder. All our homiletic preparation stocks a mental warehouse of possible lines of reasoning, illustrations, applications, metaphors, and explanations of the Scripture text at hand.

Mapping a sermon, then, is simply extracting the best things from the larder that we anticipate will communicate the most effectively. How do we know what will be most effective? By speaking now. In talking through the material now, we actually compose the sermon orally instead of with paper and ink (or inkjets). We clarify our own thinking in the process of speaking, and discover ingredients that flow naturally. In this sense, illustrations are not seen as inferior or optional, but essential in planning the route. With textual outlines, content is king, and illustrative material is always sprinkled in after the content is set. But in an oral framework, the illustrations are not distinguishable from “pure content”, just as form and content are inextricably co-mingled.

So, if a preacher is reading the room and finding that the items that made the “cut” onto the roadmap are not doing the job, there are other options in the larder. The preacher can pull out something that didn’t quite make the first “mapping” but can be pressed into service instantly. So the route changes, without affecting the destination.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. But so is the tedium of writing out an entire manuscript or crafting a precise outline. Both ways are a lot of work, but they represent different kinds of work. The textual preacher is best prepared to turn out a position paper on the passage or subject of the sermon. In fact sermon manuscripts are still very popular ways to preserve and present a sermon. But the orally based preacher is best prepared to meet the demands of an event - a live room with a responsive audience.

People have a kind of credibility detector built into them. They know whether a preacher is parroting somebody else’s sermon or outline. They may not be able to put their finger on it or articulate it, but they know. They know, as does the preacher, when the passion is feigned and the applications borrowed. Literacy not only allows, but by its nature sometimes encourages second-hand preaching.

But audiences also know the opposite. They know when the heart and the mouth are vitally connected. They know when the preacher really believes what he says. They know when the thoughts and emotions are erupting from the mouth in an original way. They know it deep inside, and they can smell its opposite. The Greeks called that kind of credibility ‘ethos.’ It’s a credibility that arises from the speech itself. They knew it was absolutely crucial to have ethos if one wished to be taken seriously.

It’s my contention that ethos is better built in oral frameworks than in written ones. The reason we don’t have more compelling preaching is that the preachers don’t really believe what they’re saying in a convincing way. They don’t believe it because they’ve grown accustomed to the luxury of literacy that does so much of the homiletic work for them.

None of this, by the way, is new. The best thinking on powerful and persuasive speaking has been documented for roughly 2,400 years from the Greek mind of Aristotle (among others) and the Roman adaptations in Cicero and Quintilian. That means the apostles and early church fathers lived and communicated in a time when good speaking was of the highest order. It would not be hard to argue that the best sermons of the church have already been preached, and that modern homiletics has never equaled its ancient counterpart.

If you don’t believe that, read a transcription (the only method of access to most ancient sermons is via scribes who “short-handed” the sermons as they were being spoken) of one of Augustine’s sermons and be amazed that he delivered that sermon extemporaneously, according to the text of the day and the needs of that moment. Imagine a preacher today so grounded in Scripture and theology, with so full a larder, that he could speak comfortably, authentically, and compellingly for as long as an hour or for as little as 10 minutes.

As we move steadily toward post-modernity, the answer for appealing to a contemporary audience is not in visual coddling of techno-tricks like movie clips and PowerPoint, but in the pre-modern ethos that flows from an orallygrounded preacher who is alive in the room and navigating the sermon by means of a simple mental map as illustrated below.

Sample Sermon Outline

Psalm 96

• Testimony About God (vs. 1-5)

• The Witness of Song (vs. 1- )
• The Witness of Words (vs. 2b-3)
• The Witness of Creation (vs. 4-5)

• Obligations to God (vs. 6-12)

• Ascription (vs. 7-8)
• Worship (vs. 9a)
• Trembling (vs. 9b)
• Testimony (vs. 10)
• Rejoicing (vs. 11-12)


• Accountability to God(vs.13-14)

Sample Mental Sermon Map - Click here for full image

Dave McClellan is a pastor, preacher, teacher, and writer. Besides his home at The Chapel at Tinkers Creek, he teaches for Indiana Wesleyan University and publishes the Crosspoint line of church drama. His undergraduate work was in Speech Communications at Grace College, with graduate work from Denver Seminary (M.Div.) and Duquesne University (Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Communication). He’s currently writing his dissertation on oral homiletics.