Preacher, What’s Your Style?

Learn to develop your preaching voice.

Members of pulpit committees often share with me their findings as they travel from one church to another in search of a new minister. I am constantly amazed, and frequently amused, at the comments about minister and sermon. Laymen seem to have a sixth sense about preaching that we ministers do not have. The sensitive member of the pulpit committee can put his finger on the heartbeat of a sermon and determine almost instantly its effectiveness or lack of it. One such person said recently: “That was a helpful sermon! I can’t analyze the reason for it, but it did something to me that never happened before.” The result was that the young minister was asked for an interview.

A critical need of our day is effective communication from pulpit to pew. Ideas tend to be meaningless symbols until they have been charged with personal experience, with reality. The preacher must face his task objectively as he develops his ability to speak as man to men on behalf of God. In preacher’s language, the minister must develop his own style through which he can project his thoughts and emotions to his listeners.

Every would-be preacher must go through a period of imitation. He emerges from seminary classes with notebooks full of sermons, outlines, illustrations, and biographies of great preachers, past and present. Somehow he can identify with many of them. Others leave him cold. Carefully he attempts to build his thought around those persons and ideas that speak most effectively to him. This seems to be natural in the process of developing a preaching style.

But the day must come in the life of the budding preacher when he blooms into preaching maturity. This will not come about until he has found himself in terms of his own personality and purpose in the ministry.

Our sermons should meet a felt need in the lives of those who hear. Life for many a parishioner has become humdrum, meaningless, and even frightening. As preachers of the Good News, we must command the best and highest from our own lives and from God’s Word in order to create meaningful dialogue between our hearer and his God. This good news must become relevant to the lives and problems of those who hear.

How are we to do this? Not every sermon we preach will be a masterpiece. But every sermon must be creative and alive. Ability to think of new ideas will increase as we broaden our intellectual, social, and emotional horizons. We can heighten our creative insights through perpetual study of the arts, especially music and literature, and through travel and associations with people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Much of our homiletical creativity will take place, however, during hours of study and preparation as we reflect on problems and people in the light of God’s Word.

We may feel at home with one type of preaching and lost in the woods with another. A popular type of preaching in our day has been the “spiral” sermon. The preacher starts at the bottom of the spiral, speak in narrow terms, then slowly and unostentaciously lengthens the radius of his turn, until at last he reaches his conclusion and climax. The traditional sermon form, on the other hand, has been that of outline-structure, which presents a series of logical statements progressively geared to bring the hearer to a climax.

Much of our preaching falls on deaf ears because the preacher has not been Spirit-charged and has made little attempt to charge the hour with authentic ideas that will elicit rapport and response.

We cannot substitute flowery expressions and ornate adjectives for clarity and vividness. Let’s forget the multisyllabic words in preaching. Let’s cut those high-sounding theological phrases to everyday speech. Let’s crop those long sentences into two or more shorter ones that will stick to the gummy side of the hearer’s memory.

If we want to avoid insult from well-meaning parishioners, we had better invest in a copy of Rudolf Flesch’s How To Be Brief—even if we have to pawn our golf clubs to buy it!

Our style of preaching will become our own as we say precisely what we have in mind through the fullness of our own personality. We must attempt to recreate the same emotion that we feel deeply within, that many of our parishioners have felt but are inarticulate about.

Then we shall become preachers with a style of our own. Even more, we shall be following the Apostle Paul’s advice to young Timothy: “… stir up the gift of God which is in you” (2 Tim. 1:6).

James Lewis Lowe, pastor of the Third Baptist Church of Philadelphia, is a graduate of Tennessee Temple College (A.B.) and Crozer Theological Seminary (B.D.).

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