Looking Ahead: 21st Century Trends in Preaching
From The Forum Magazine, Spring 2015 - view the full issue here
Not so long ago, a good many pundits and prognosticators predicted the demise of preaching. Skits, dramas, videos, and other multimedia would replace the staid (boring) spectacle of one person talking at a congregation for 25 minutes.
But something funny happened on the way to this predicted homiletical revolution: preaching not only survived, but in some of the largest churches in the country, preaching took on an even higher profile. Sermons by popular preachers like Rob Bell grew from 25 minutes to around 50 minutes in length. Yes, in many places video clips and the use of slideware buttressed sermons, but the sermon itself remained firmly in place as a verbal art form.
Even so, the cultural and congregational landscape has changed in significant ways. “Audience” expectations are higher than they used to be. A century ago the sermon as delivered by the pastor was the only formal public form of speech that most people encountered in a given week. Preachers had the market cornered! There were precious few opportunities for the average Christian to draw comparisons. Today, however, people are routinely exposed to slick communicators on television, expert speeches by politicians, and, yes, also the sermons of high-profile pastors like Tim Keller that can be downloaded or viewed on YouTube. The bar has been raised in the minds of many people as to what counts as an engaging sermon, and a good bit of this ties in with sermons that have a narrative shape to them.
For this article I was asked to ponder some possible trends in preaching. With the help of the leaders of ten peer groups for the Center for Excellence in Preaching this past year, I would predict that preachers are going to have to become much more skilled in the art of storytelling.
A corollary prediction to this would be that such storytelling will need to be contextualized to each individual congregation. People today expect the sermon to speak not to the needs of humanity (or even of the church) in general but to their particular needs in the time and place where people find themselves. In what follows, I will briefly unpack both predictions.
Stories
It is now pretty well documented in homiletical circles that the major shift in preaching across the last 40 years was the move from deductive preaching to inductive. Deductive preaching is often characterized (and perhaps caricatured) as the old “three points and a poem” format in which a central idea was introduced in the beginning (“Today we are going to talk about justification . . .”) and then systematically unpacked in sermons that tended to be information-heavy and aimed more at the head than the heart. Deductive preaching ruled the day when the preacher could rely on a congregation’s automatically granting him authority to speak knowledgably on the subject at hand based on the preacher’s education and role.
But then came the 1960s and a wide-scale questioning of traditional authority structures. As Fred Craddock detailed in his landmark 1971 book As One Without Authority, preachers who were sensitive to where the cultural winds were blowing began to sense that authority could no longer be merely asserted: it had to be earned. One of the best ways to accomplish that was to preach sermons in which the authenticity of the preacher was established through the preacher’s appeal to shared experiences. When the preacher was able to demonstrate that she also understood life’s trials from the inside—when the preacher could name the questions and the struggles that real-life people in the pews also wrestled with—then the congregation was willing to grant the preacher the authority to speak into such matters. And when the corresponding word of grace was then brought to bear on such situations of real hurt and doubt and crisis, then the congregation would listen because such grace was not a concept or a mere idea: it was something the preacher also experienced in the throes of real life.
But what better way is there to convey real-life experiences than through the avenue of storytelling? What better way to show in just what ways God remains active among his people today than through anecdotes and vignettes drawn from everyday life where grace bursts through in surprising ways? To preach well today, then, preachers need to know not only where to find the stories that connect with people but also how to retell those stories effectively inside the sermon.
However, being a good storyteller is by no means automatic for most people or for most preachers. That is why I always worry about preachers or students who seem unable to tell a joke. We’ve all met people who are lousy joke-tellers. They leave out key details and so have to start over or they backtrack just before getting to the punchline or they tell the punchline but no one finds it funny because the joke-teller left out that one detail necessary for the joke to work. But what is a joke if not a miniature story? If you cannot tell a joke well, you probably cannot tell a story well, and if the person in question is a preacher, he or she may tend to deliver sermons that feel narratively flat to many listeners. This will be so not only on account of the sermon’s having few if any stories inside of it but also because the whole shape of the sermon lacks a sense of beginning-middle-end that moves forward the way a good story does.
Some believe that the 21st-century is seeing a renaissance in storytelling. Some of the most popular radio shows and podcasts now are premised on the art of storytelling. Think of “This American Life” on NPR, “A Prairie Home Companion” with Garrison Keillor’s signature stories from Lake Wobegon as each show’s highlight, the Moth Radio Hour, or Pixar films where it is the quality of the story even more than the quality of the animation that grips the hearts of children and their parents alike.
Our culture is steeped in stories. Thus, preachers need to be good storytellers.
Context
But even that skill will not be enough, because as congregations diversify across denominations (but equally so within denominations), preachers need to become anthropologists who can exegete a congregation as well as a biblical text. My father-in-law, Isaac Apol, graduated from Calvin Seminary in 1951 and served eight congregations between then and his retirement in 1987. But although each congregation my dad-in-law served was a bit different from the others, I doubt that he ever wondered what “kind” of CRC congregation he’d be serving next. For the most part congregations from coast to coast were fairly uniform in terms of liturgy, style, expectations, and membership. But today’s seminary graduate faces no such certainty. Congregations are now often significantly different from one another. The needs and expectations of a church in California may be quite hugely at odds with the needs and expectations of a church in the Midwest (and possibly even of another church in California!). Preachers today need to understand how and why some styles of preaching will work well in some places even as they will fizzle out somewhere else.
This may well be a key to effective preaching, though along with many of my seminary colleagues I confess that it is not yet clear how we can help seminarians/future preachers become good at this kind of contextual insight. But if storytelling is now a needed skill to effectively communicate the Gospel, then knowing the right kinds of stories to tell based on the cultural and emotional climate of any given congregation comes in as a close second for prerequisite 21st-century preaching skills.
Fred Craddock was a storytelling preacher par excellence. Fred died in the spring of 2015, leaving behind a legacy of having shaped untold numbers of preachers through his writings, instruction, and example. In his book Preaching, Craddock displayed his own sensitivity to the need for sermons to evoke the ethos of a story when he suggested that any given sermon may not need what we sometimes refer to as “illustrations” if in fact the whole sermon has a narrative shape to begin with.
“If [the sermon] possessed unity of thought, movement toward its goal, and language lively and imaginative, parishioners may speak of the sermon’s illustrations when, in fact, there were none . . . Just as some very humorous people seldom if ever tell jokes, just as good storytellers do not have to tell stories all the time, so the preacher who leads listeners down interesting and well-illumined streets does not have to load the sermon with illustrations. Actually, in good preaching, what is referred to as illustrations are, in fact, stories or anecdotes which do not illustrate the point but rather are the point” (Preaching [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984], p. 204).
And that is a point all preachers need to heed!
