Delivery

Corinth was a city that loved a speaker. Travelling orators, the men the Greek world called sophists, moved from city to city giving displays of eloquence, collecting fees and students, and being judged by the crowd on their presence, their voice and their skill in the set forms of rhetoric. Bruce Winter, in Philo and Paul among the Sophists (1997), gathered the evidence for how strong that culture was in first-century Corinth and argued that Paul's language in 1 Corinthians 1 to 4 is a deliberate refusal to compete on those terms. Duane Litfin, in St. Paul's Theology of Proclamation (1994), argued something similar from the side of ancient rhetorical theory: the orator's aim was to bring about belief by the force of his own skill, and Paul declined that aim because he believed faith produced that way would rest on the wrong thing.

That is exactly what the anchor says. 'My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power,' and verse 5 gives the reason: 'so that your faith would not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power.' The refusal is not of words, since Paul preached in words, and not of thought, since 1 Corinthians is one of the most closely argued letters in the New Testament. It is a refusal of a particular method, the method that makes the speaker the cause of the hearer's response. Paul did not want converts to the performance.

Read the verses around it and two things become clear that are often missed. First, Paul's opponents said he was bad at this. Their judgment was that 'his physical presence is unimpressive, and his speaking is of no account' (2 Corinthians 10:10), and in 2 Corinthians 11:6 he half concedes it: 'Although I am not a polished speaker, I am certainly not lacking in knowledge.' So 1 Corinthians 2 is not a gifted orator making a show of modesty. Second, Paul is still a careful communicator. His speech at Athens in Acts 17:22-31 opens from an altar in the city and quotes a Greek poet; his letters use rhetorical questions, imagined objectors and carefully built lists. What he renounced was manipulation and display. He did not renounce care.

The church has argued about how much craft a preacher may use ever since, and the most influential early answer came from a man who had taught rhetoric for a living. Augustine had been a professor of rhetoric in Milan before his conversion, and in the fourth book of On Christian Teaching he took Cicero's three duties of an orator, to teach, to delight and to move, and gave them to the preacher. His argument was that it would be strange for the defenders of truth to be unarmed while liars were trained, so the preacher should learn to speak well. But he set wisdom above eloquence: a man who speaks wisely without eloquence does good, and a man who speaks eloquently without wisdom does harm, and the preacher who cannot be eloquent should at least be clear and should live so that his life is itself a sermon.

So the lesson of the anchor for delivery is not that delivery does not matter. It is that delivery is a servant. A preacher who mumbles, wanders and cannot be heard has not achieved humility; he has made the message harder to receive. A preacher who works the crowd, pulls emotional levers and reaches for the response he wants has not achieved power; he has made the response about himself. Everything that follows in this lesson sits between those two failures. The question each time is whether the thing you are doing helps the hearers see the text and its Lord, or helps them see you.

There is a long and serious Christian conviction that the preacher should not come to the pulpit with his words already fixed, and that the best preaching is given in the moment by the Holy Spirit. It is held today across much of the Pentecostal and charismatic world, which means across a large share of the churches in Africa, Latin America and Asia, and it has older roots. The early Quakers, gathered by George Fox in the 1650s, refused a paid ministry that delivered prepared discourses and waited in silence until someone was moved to speak. The revival at Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, led by William J. Seymour, from which much of modern Pentecostalism traces its descent, was marked by preaching and testimony that arose in the meeting rather than from the study. A student who comes from these traditions should hear his own tradition's argument made properly, and a student from elsewhere should hear it before he dismisses it.

The argument begins with Jesus' own words. 'Do not worry about how to respond or what to say. In that hour you will be given what to say. For it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you' (Matthew 10:19-20). Mark 13:11 and Luke 12:11-12 repeat the promise, and Luke 21:15 has Jesus saying 'I will give you speech and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict.' Defenders of Spirit-led preaching grant that the setting is a trial, and reply that the passage still reveals how God works with his witnesses: the decisive words are given, not manufactured. If the Spirit can be trusted to speak through a frightened disciple before a governor, they ask, why would he be less willing to speak through a preacher before a congregation that has gathered to hear God?

They then point to how the word was actually spoken in Acts. Peter's sermon at Pentecost was not prepared in any ordinary sense; it was a response to a crowd asking what the noise meant, and about three thousand were added that day. In Acts 4:8 Peter speaks 'filled with the Holy Spirit' before the council, and the council marvels because they 'realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men' (4:13). In 4:31, outside any trial, the believers are filled with the Spirit and 'spoke the word of God boldly.' Stephen's opponents 'could not stand up to his wisdom or the Spirit by whom he spoke' (6:10). The pattern in the earliest church is speech that comes with the filling of the Spirit, and Paul's own account in the anchor is that his preaching came with a demonstration of the Spirit's power rather than with technique.

The argument also has a pastoral edge that is easy to underrate. The Spirit knows what the preacher does not: who in the room is grieving, who is about to give up, who came in carrying a knife or a bottle or a decision. A sermon fixed on Tuesday cannot know what happened on Saturday night. A preacher who is free to leave his plan when he senses he should can answer the need that is actually present. Defenders of this view tell many stories of a word given in the moment that reached exactly the person who needed it, and they argue that a preacher bound to his manuscript has made himself unable to be used in that way. Paul's warning 'Do not extinguish the Spirit' (1 Thessalonians 5:19) is read here as a warning against exactly that kind of over-control.

Defenders of this view also have answers to the texts the other side will raise. They do not reject study. Most Pentecostal and charismatic preachers read the Bible constantly, and they take 2 Timothy 2:15 and 1 Timothy 4:13-15 as calls to a lifelong immersion in scripture, which they gladly accept, not as commands to fix the words of next Sunday's sermon on paper in advance. They also point out that when Paul orders speech in the gathered church, he assumes that some of it will arise during the meeting itself: 'if a revelation comes to someone who is seated, the first speaker should stop' (1 Corinthians 14:30). His safeguard against the risks of such speech is that the others weigh it (14:29), not that it be written beforehand, and he ends by telling the church to 'be eager to prophesy' (14:39). On this reading, the protection scripture gives for Spirit-given speech is a discerning congregation, not a manuscript.

Finally, there is an argument from justice, and in much of the world it carries great weight. If good preaching requires hours of study, books, commentaries and written manuscripts, then good preaching belongs to the educated and the well resourced. But the apostles were unschooled, and God has always raised up preachers among fishermen, farmers and labourers. A homiletics that makes the written manuscript the mark of a serious preacher will quietly teach the village preacher who cannot afford a book, or who reads with difficulty, that he is second rate. The Spirit-led tradition has given the pulpit to people the academy would have kept out of it, and it argues that this is not a lowering of standards but the gospel's own pattern.

The opposite conviction is just as old and just as serious: that the preacher must study, plan and prepare his sermon before he preaches it, and that this preparation is itself a work of the Spirit and an act of obedience. It has been the dominant practice of most Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, Baptist and Methodist preaching, it is taught in most theological colleges, and it is also held by a great many Pentecostal preachers who study hard through the week. Its defenders, too, deserve to be heard at their strongest.

Their first argument is about Matthew 10 itself. The promise is given for a particular setting: 'they will hand you over to their councils and flog you in their synagogues. On My account you will be brought before governors and kings' (10:17-18). It is a promise to the persecuted believer on trial, who has no time to prepare and no idea what he will be asked, and it is meant to remove fear, which is what the verb merimnao means. Luke 21:14 makes the setting even clearer: 'make up your mind not to worry beforehand how to defend yourselves.' Defenders of preparation argue that taking a promise for the dock and applying it to the pulpit is to lift it out of its context, and that the weekly preacher, who knows his text days in advance and has time to study it, is in the opposite situation to the disciple who was arrested without warning.

Their second argument is the many passages that commend labour in handling the word. 'Make every effort to present yourself approved to God, an unashamed workman who accurately handles the word of truth' (2 Timothy 2:15). Timothy is told to devote himself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and to teaching, and to 'be diligent in these matters and absorbed in them' (1 Timothy 4:13, 4:15). Ezra 'had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD' before he taught it (Ezra 7:10). The Teacher of Ecclesiastes 'pondered, searched out, and arranged many proverbs' (12:9). Luke, writing an inspired gospel, did so 'having carefully investigated everything from the beginning' (Luke 1:3). And Paul in prison asks for 'my scrolls, especially the parchments' (2 Timothy 4:13). The Spirit, on this view, has never been opposed to study. He inspired some of scripture through exactly that kind of careful work.

Their third argument answers the appeal to Acts. Peter's Pentecost sermon was unplanned, but it was not unprepared. It quotes Joel, Psalm 16 and Psalm 110 at length and builds an argument from them, and that was possible only because Peter had heard those scriptures all his life and had spent three years with Jesus, who after his resurrection explained what was written about himself in all the Scriptures and opened their minds to understand them (Luke 24:27, 24:45), and then taught them over forty days (Acts 1:3). What the Spirit brought to mind was what had been stored there. Jesus promised that the Spirit 'will remind you of everything I have told you' (John 14:26), and you cannot be reminded of what you never learned. So, defenders argue, preparation is the way a preacher gives the Spirit something to work with, both in the week and in the moment.

Their fourth argument is about the hearers. A congregation that is fed week after week on whatever comes to the preacher in the moment is at the mercy of his moods, his favourite themes and his blind spots. Paul tells the Corinthian prophets that the others 'should weigh carefully what is said' and that 'the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets' (1 Corinthians 14:29, 14:32). Defenders of preparation argue that study is how the preacher weighs his own words before he imposes them on others, and that the claim 'the Spirit gave me this' is precisely the claim no congregation can test while it is being made. Preparation keeps the preacher answerable to the text.

Each side has a hard question for the other, and an honest student should feel the weight of both. The preparation side asks: when you say the Spirit led you to leave the text, how would you know if it was only your own enthusiasm, and who could correct you? The Spirit-led side asks: when you say your study is the Spirit's work, how would you know if it was only your own competence, and when did your notes last make room for God to do something you had not planned? Many preachers live somewhere in between, studying hard and holding the plan loosely, and both traditions have voices that teach that blend. But the blend is not a neutral settlement, because the two sides still differ over how often the pulpit moment should override the study and how much weight a sense of leading should carry against the plan. What is settled is narrower and still important: the Spirit who inspired scripture will not contradict it, laziness dressed as spirituality is a sin, and so is self-reliance dressed as diligence.

Whatever you think about the debate above, you still have to decide what you will carry into the pulpit. John Broadus, whose Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons (1870) was the standard American textbook for generations, sorted the methods into three. You can read a full manuscript. You can write a full manuscript and memorise it, which he called recitation. Or you can prepare your thought fully but choose the words in the moment, which he called extemporaneous preaching. In his usage that word did not mean unprepared. It meant prepared in substance and free in expression, and he favoured it for most preachers.

Reading a full manuscript has real strengths. Every sentence has been weighed, so you say exactly what you mean and nothing careless. You can time it. A nervous preacher is protected from going blank. Some of the most powerful sermons in history were read: Jonathan Edwards is usually described as reading Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield in 1741 from a manuscript held close to his eyes, and the hearers' response was so great that he could not finish. The weaknesses are just as real. Written sentences are longer and more complex than spoken ones, as the lesson Words for the Ear showed, and a preacher reading a page tends to look at the page rather than the people. Many congregations, especially in oral cultures, simply do not hear a read sermon as preaching.

Memorising a full manuscript keeps the precision and frees the eyes, but it costs a great deal of time, and when memory fails in the middle of a sentence the whole thing can collapse. It also tends to produce a recited sound, the voice of someone remembering rather than someone speaking. Few preachers sustain it week after week.

Preaching from notes, which is what Broadus meant by the extemporaneous method, is what most preachers in most traditions actually do. Charles Spurgeon preached to thousands from a single sheet of brief headings, and in his Lectures to My Students he treated the ability to speak freely as something to be cultivated, while warning students not to use it as an excuse for idleness. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in Preaching and Preachers (1971), argued against reading sermons and preached from notes, and he called preaching logic on fire: careful thought, prepared beforehand, delivered with the heat of the moment. It is worth noticing that the same book ends with a chapter on the demonstration of the Spirit and of power, in which he urges preachers to seek the Spirit's unction in the pulpit itself. A strong advocate of preparation was also a strong advocate of dependence in the moment.

Preaching with no notes at all is common in many parts of the world and is the expected practice in some traditions. Done well, it is not the same as preaching unprepared. A preacher who has studied the text, settled the main idea and the movement of the sermon, and rehearsed it until the sequence is in his memory can preach with nothing in his hand and lose nothing. Done badly, it is the source of the wandering, repetitive sermon that circles a few favourite themes and finishes when the preacher is tired. If you preach without notes, the test is whether you could write down your main idea and your movements before you stood up. If you could not, the problem is not the absence of paper.

A practical word for students without printers or good light. A single sheet of paper, folded once, written by hand in large letters, is enough for most sermons. Write the main idea at the top in a full sentence. Under it write each movement of the sermon in a few words, with the verse it comes from. Write out in full only the first two sentences, the last two sentences and any sentence you must not get wrong, such as a definition or a quotation. If you preach from a phone, set the screen so it will not lock, make the text large, and turn off every notification before you stand up. The best notes are the ones you barely need to look at because the sermon is already in you.

Ancient rhetoric counted delivery as the fifth of its five canons, after invention, arrangement, style and memory, and the Latin words for it were pronuntiatio and actio, voice and action. The order is a good one for a preacher to remember. Delivery comes last because it carries what the other four produced. It cannot rescue a sermon with nothing in it, but it can bury a good sermon so that nobody receives it.

Start with the voice. Many preachers speak without a microphone, outdoors, under a tin roof in the rain, or over a generator. You need to be heard at the back without shouting from the throat, which strains the voice and makes everything sound angry. Breathe from low in the body, not the top of the chest. Aim your words at the person in the last row. Vary your pace: slow down for what matters most and for anything complex, and allow yourself to move more quickly through narrative. Vary your volume, remembering that dropping your voice can draw a room in more than raising it. Above all, learn to pause. A pause after the main idea, or after a hard question, gives the hearers time to take it in, and most nervous preachers never stop long enough for anything to land. Drink water before you preach, and if you preach several times a week, rest your voice on other days.

Then the body. Stand where people can see you. Plant your feet; constant pacing and rocking distract more than most preachers realise. Let your hands move naturally when you speak, as they do in conversation, and keep them out of your pockets and off the pulpit's edges. Gestures should come from what you are saying, not be added for effect. The face matters most of all. If you are speaking of grief and smiling, or of grace and frowning, the hearers will believe your face over your words. You may have heard the claim that most of all communication is non-verbal, often given as an exact percentage. It comes from experiments by the psychologist Albert Mehrabian on how people judge feelings when words and tone contradict each other, and he himself said it does not apply to communication in general. The true part is simpler: when your words and your manner disagree, people trust your manner.

Then the eyes. Looking at people tells them you are speaking to them, not reciting at them. Look at individuals, a few seconds each, in different parts of the room, and do not let your eyes settle only on the friendly faces or only on the front row. But know your culture. In some communities, holding a direct gaze with an elder or a person of higher status is disrespectful, and in some, a man looking directly at women he does not know is improper. The principle is not a particular technique but that the hearers should feel spoken to. The lesson Knowing Who Is Listening applies here: ask a trusted older member what is natural and respectful in your setting.

Finally, be yourself, because nothing else is sustainable. Young preachers often copy the voice, rhythm and gestures of a preacher they admire, sometimes down to the accent. Everyone learns by imitation at first, and there is no shame in it. But the imitation should be of what is good in the other preacher, his clarity, his warmth, his reverence for the text, not of his mannerisms. Phillips Brooks, in his Lectures on Preaching given at Yale in 1877, described preaching as truth through personality, and whatever else that phrase means it means God chose to use your voice and not someone else's.

The anchor ends where many young preachers live: 'I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling.' The apostle Paul was afraid when he preached at Corinth. He had been run out of Thessalonica and Berea, mocked at Athens, and he arrived in Corinth alone. Acts 18:9-10 records the Lord speaking to him in a vision there and telling him not to be afraid, which tells you he was. Fear in the pulpit is not proof that you are not called, and confidence in the pulpit is not proof that the Spirit is with you.

Scripture is full of reluctant speakers. Moses protested that he was 'slow of speech and tongue' (Exodus 4:10), and God answered, 'I will help you as you speak, and I will teach you what to say' (4:12). Jeremiah said 'I surely do not know how to speak, for I am only a child!' (Jeremiah 1:6). Paul names the principle directly: 'we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this surpassingly great power is from God and not from us' (2 Corinthians 4:7). Your weakness is not a problem God is working around. It is part of how he shows that the power is his.

That does not mean nerves should be left untended. Most pulpit fear is fear of the unknown, and the cure for the unknown is practice. Preach the sermon aloud before Sunday, standing up, at the speed you will preach it, at least twice. The first time, you will find the sentences that look fine on paper and cannot be said. The second time, you will find the places where you lose your way. If you have a phone, record yourself and listen back, which the lesson Feedback and Growth will take further. Arrive early. Pray before you stand, not for a performance but for the hearers. Know your first two sentences so well that you can say them while your heart is pounding, because the fear usually eases once you have begun.

And remember what the anchor's last clause promises. The demonstration of the Spirit's power was not something Paul produced. It came while he was trembling. Whichever side of the debate in sections 2 and 3 you are on, you are not finally relying on your preparation or on your spontaneity. You are relying on God, who has promised that his word 'will not return to Me empty' (Isaiah 55:11). You do your part as faithfully as you can, and then you stand up and speak and leave the result with him.

Your practical step this week. Take the passage you are working on for your own sermon, or any short passage if you have not yet chosen one. Prepare a one-page set of notes as described in section 4: the main idea in a full sentence at the top, the movements in a few words each, and your first and last two sentences written out. Then stand up somewhere you can be alone and preach it aloud, all the way through, without stopping to fix anything. Record it on your phone if you can. Afterwards, write down in your notebook three things: the place where you lost your way, the sentence that was hardest to say, and one place where you rushed when you should have paused. Do it again two days later and see what changed.