Swimming with the Sharps

In Unleashing the Word, Adam Hamilton details his weekly plan for preparing, delivering, and evaluating his sermons. Speaking six times per weekend in an educated but largely unchurched community, Adam Hamilton believes that preaching can change lives. His purpose is considered and thoughtful: to build a Christian community where non-religious and nominally religious people are becoming committed Christians. In Unleashing the Word, Hamilton shares his plan for getting that done.

Hamilton pastors Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. He is a Methodist, and he is methodical. From sermon research and outlining on Monday, to final revisions for Sunday after the Saturday night services, Hamilton details his process. (This book comes with a DVD, allowing you to sample his finished efforts. First class and inspiring, this alone is worth the price.)

Central in his system is a study leave each July. He uses that time to create clarity for his long term preaching schedule. (Wish you had a planning retreat? Hamilton has included a letter for your leaders to help you get one. Did I mention this book was practical?)

While it goes a bit overboard on detail for my tastes, many will benefit from this no-stone-unturned approach. If you want to know how to interact with your worship team or just need a few ideas on how to respond to a bomb threat moments before the service starts, then dive in. I found his chapter on “Rethinking Prophetic Preaching” to be my favorite.

Better still, diversify your homiletical reading with some challenging preaching theory from Michael Quicke. 360 Degree Preaching comes from a 30-year veteran of preaching on two continents. Formerly head of Spurgeon’s College in London, Quicke is now a professor at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Illinois.

Quicke postures a multitude of preaching definitions to eventually arrive at his own, which is surprisingly similar to Hamilton’s. Quicke insists we think of preaching as something that should come back to us. For him, preaching is not complete unless it begins with God, flows through us as we immerse ourselves in Scripture, passes that life-giving influence to our people, and the resultant blessings ripple back to us and ultimately to God.

That’s the 360. God gives the Word and it returns to him—full circle. Preaching to impart stuff is not enough; it must return something as well. (I think I missed that lecture in my homiletics class.)

As you’d expect from an academic, he covers the necessary theoretical issues. He treats with special attention the aural-oral context of the incarnation. Jesus the preacher never wrote a book. Instead he broke into a culture of stitched-together stories told to pass truths from one generation to the next, not to be printed and analyzed word by word.

Then Quicke details the development of 360-degree sermons, and he rallies with a finished message at the end. He employs the metaphor of a “preaching swim” to show how the 360 works. “It begins with immersion into a flow at the river’s source,” Quicke writes. “The river gathers strength as it widens and deepens, bringing life and health to people on its banks. …Preaching continues to owe its power to the preacher’s immersion in the deeper currents and tides of God’s Word.”

This exercise is not for wimps. It requires high levels of fitness and preparedness. Time to fully develop each of these stages doesn’t seem compatible with typical ministry demands. For example, the swim calls for the preacher essentially to memorize the manuscript. That may be beyond many who “swim” more than once a week. Still, I liked the book and believe it to be valuable. You can’t read it all at one sitting as you can Hamilton’s, but the message lingers longer.

Anthony Laird, Tucson, Arizona