The Traditions of the Pulpit

The first Christian sermon was not planned. A noise like a rushing wind drew a crowd; people from more than a dozen nations heard Galileans speaking their languages; some were amazed and asked, 'What does this mean?' and others mocked, 'They are drunk on new wine!' (Acts 2:12-13). Then 'Peter stood up with the Eleven, lifted up his voice, and addressed the crowd' (2:14). Every part of that sentence matters. He stood with the others, not alone. He raised his voice, because it was an open-air crowd. And the verb for addressed is the same one Luke used in verse 4 for the Spirit-enabled speech of the disciples. Luke wants you to hear the sermon as part of what the Spirit was doing that morning, not as a break from it.

Now look at its shape. Peter begins with the crowd's misunderstanding and corrects it with a plain fact about the hour: 'It is only the third hour of the day!' (2:15). Then he turns to scripture, but he does not read it and explain it in order. He says, 'No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel' (2:16), and uses Joel to interpret what they have just seen. He tells them what God did through Jesus, what they did to him, and what God did next (2:22-24). He quotes Psalm 16 and argues about it like a teacher in a synagogue: David 'died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day' (2:29), so the psalm must be about someone else. He quotes Psalm 110. He drives to a conclusion: 'Therefore let all Israel know with certainty that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ!' (2:36). And when the hearers are cut to the heart and ask, 'Brothers, what shall we do?' (2:37), the sermon becomes a conversation, and Luke tells us 'With many other words he testified' (2:40). We have a summary, not a transcript.

Every tradition in this lesson has claimed this sermon, and every one can find itself there. It explains scripture carefully, so the expositors claim it. It is built around a theme, the identity of Jesus, so the topical preachers claim it. It is spoken in response to the Spirit's dramatic work, and it calls for immediate response, so Pentecostals claim it. It ends in dialogue, with the hearers answering back, so the traditions of call and response hear themselves in it. It begins from the situation of the hearers and the question they are asking, which is what life-situation preaching insists on. The honest conclusion is that Peter's sermon was not following any of our categories. It was proclaiming Christ from scripture to people who needed to hear him, by the most direct road available that morning.

That does not mean every form is as good as every other, or that there is nothing to learn from the traditions. It means that no tradition owns the New Testament pattern, and that each of them is a way of doing, in a particular setting, what Peter did on the day of Pentecost. The rest of this lesson takes them one at a time and asks two questions of each: what does it do well, and what does it tend to neglect? Every one of them neglects something. You will find out which weakness belongs to your own tradition, and the most useful thing this lesson can do is make you a little uncomfortable about it.

Expository preaching, in the sense most people mean, takes a passage of scripture and makes its meaning and message the meaning and message of the sermon. The passage sets the agenda. John Stott, in I Believe in Preaching (1982, published in America as Between Two Worlds), argued that expository describes the content of a sermon rather than its style: any sermon that opens up what the text says, whatever its length or structure, is expository, and any sermon that uses the text as a launching pad for something else is not. On that definition Peter's sermon is expository, though it covers three texts and no whole book.

Lectio continua, continuous reading, is the practice of preaching straight through a book of the Bible, passage by passage, week after week. It is old. John Chrysostom, preaching first at Antioch and then as bishop of Constantinople from 398, gave series of homilies through whole books: some ninety on Matthew, nearly ninety on John, and thirty-two on Romans, among many others. His homilies explain the plain sense of the text phrase by phrase and then turn hard on the conduct of his hearers, and they earned him the name later given him, Chrysostom, golden mouth. Augustine preached through John's Gospel and expounded the whole Psalter, much of it in sermons. On 1 January 1519, Huldrych Zwingli began his ministry at the Grossmünster in Zurich by announcing that he would preach through Matthew from the beginning, setting aside the assigned readings of the church year, and that decision is usually treated as one of the opening moves of the Reformation in Switzerland. John Calvin preached in Geneva through book after book, often several times a week, and from 1549 a scribe was employed to take his sermons down. In the twentieth century Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached on Romans on Friday nights at Westminster Chapel in London from 1955 to 1968, more than twelve years, and reached chapter 14.

Its strengths are real. The preacher cannot avoid the passages he would rather not preach, which is the best protection there is against a pulpit that only ever rides its owner's favourite subjects. The congregation learns, over years, how to read a book of the Bible: they hear an argument developing and a story unfolding, and they begin to read that way themselves. The preacher is spared the weekly question of what to preach, and saves his energy for preparing it. And over a long ministry the people hear what Paul called 'the whole will of God' (Acts 20:27), or at least much more of it than they would otherwise.

Its weaknesses are just as real. At its worst it becomes running commentary, a list of observations on each verse with no single message and no clear demand, and the congregation goes home informed and unchanged. It can be very slow, and a series that takes three years through one letter may mean that a congregation hears almost nothing of the Old Testament for a decade. It assumes a settled congregation that comes every week; in a church where many attend once a month, or where people move constantly for work, the continuity that is its greatest strength is lost on most hearers. It can neglect the occasion: a funeral, a disaster, an election, a famine. And it can flatten the different kinds of literature in scripture into one method, so that a psalm is preached like a paragraph of Romans. None of these is fatal. Each is a weakness that a preacher committed to this method must actively guard against.

Textual preaching takes a single verse, or part of one, and draws the sermon out of it. Charles Spurgeon, preaching to thousands in London in the second half of the nineteenth century, did this more often than not, and his printed sermons, issued weekly for decades, carried his voice around the world. A textual sermon on a verse like Romans 1:16, 'I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes', can be focused, memorable and powerful, because the whole sermon presses one phrase into the hearer's memory. Its weakness is that a single verse, taken alone, can be made to say almost anything, and the textual preacher is always tempted to hang his own outline on a verse whose context would not support it.

Topical preaching starts with a subject and gathers what scripture says about it. At its best this is doctrinal preaching: a sermon on the Trinity, on justification, on prayer or on the resurrection, drawing on many texts so that a congregation sees how the whole Bible teaches one truth. The Reformed churches in the Netherlands and elsewhere built this into their year by dividing the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 into fifty-two Lord's Days, so that a congregation would hear the whole of Christian doctrine preached through every year. Topical preaching also answers urgent needs: a series on marriage for a church where marriages are failing, a sermon on suffering when the whole village is grieving.

In the twentieth century the American preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick pressed the case for beginning with the hearers' problems. In a 1928 article in Harper's Magazine titled 'What Is the Matter with Preaching?', he argued that most sermons began with a text and its background and only reached the congregation's real life at the end, if at all, and he remarked that only the preacher still seems to think people come to church desperately anxious to discover what happened to the Jebusites. His alternative, often called life-situation preaching, begins with a real problem in the lives of the hearers and brings scripture to bear on it. Fosdick was a liberal Protestant whose theology many of the preachers who borrowed his method would reject, and that is worth knowing; but his complaint about sermons that never arrive in the hearers' lives is one that every tradition has had to answer.

The strength of topical preaching is that it can teach doctrine whole and meet people where they are. Its weakness is that the preacher chooses the subjects, so the congregation hears only what the preacher thinks it needs, and scripture is easily reduced to a set of proof texts gathered to support what he already meant to say. When a topical sermon cites ten verses and has studied none of them in context, the text has become a pretext. The remedy is not to abandon topical preaching but to do the exegesis of every passage it uses, and to let at least one passage govern the sermon rather than decorate it.

In the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran traditions, and in many Methodist and Reformed churches as well, preaching usually happens inside a liturgy whose readings are set in advance by a lectionary, a calendar of scripture readings for each Sunday and feast. The Catholic Church introduced a three-year Sunday lectionary in 1969 after the Second Vatican Council, and the Revised Common Lectionary of 1992, closely related to it, is used by many Protestant churches around the world. Each year centres on one of the first three Gospels, with John read in each year, and Sunday by Sunday an Old Testament reading, a psalm, a New Testament reading and a Gospel are set out together. The Council's constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), in its fifty-second article, describes the homily as part of the liturgy itself, in which the mysteries of the faith and the guiding principles of Christian life are explained from the sacred text through the course of the church's year.

A homily is typically shorter than a Protestant sermon, often ten to fifteen minutes, and it is one part of a larger act of worship that moves on to the Lord's Supper. It usually takes its starting point from the Gospel of the day, and it is shaped by the season: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. Its strengths are considerable. Over three years the congregation hears a great deal of scripture read aloud, including passages no preacher would have chosen. The church year carries the whole story of Christ, from expectation to birth to death to resurrection to the sending of the Spirit, through every congregation every year. The preacher is protected from his own hobbies, as in lectio continua, but in a different way. And the sermon is kept in proportion: it serves the worship of God rather than standing at the centre as a performance.

Its weaknesses are the other side of the same things. A short homily cannot do sustained teaching, and a congregation that only ever hears ten-minute reflections may not learn how to read a book of the Bible for itself. The lectionary chooses passages, and in doing so leaves some out; certain difficult texts rarely or never appear. In the Catholic lectionary, and in one of the two options the Revised Common Lectionary offers for the long season after Pentecost, the Old Testament reading is chosen to match the Gospel, which can teach a congregation to hear the Old Testament only as a prelude to the New. And where the preacher is not well trained, the homily can drift into general spiritual encouragement with little contact with any text. Preachers in these traditions have answered these weaknesses in different ways, and some preach expositional sermons on a lectionary text, which is a reminder that the categories in this lesson are not walls.

The African American preaching tradition grew from the faith of enslaved people in America, much of it practised in secret in what the historian Albert Raboteau, in Slave Religion (1978), called the invisible institution. Its preaching has several marks that its own teachers have described. It is dialogical: the congregation answers the preacher aloud, with amen and well and say it, and the preacher answers them, a pattern of call and response with roots in West African practice and in the spirituals. It is deeply narrative and imaginative, retelling the biblical story so vividly that the hearers stand inside it. It has always spoken to suffering people, and it reads scripture with special attention to the God who delivered Israel from Egypt. And it moves toward celebration. Henry Mitchell, in Black Preaching (1970) and Celebration and Experience in Preaching (1990), argued that the sermon should end in celebration of the good news the text proclaims, often in a heightened, musical delivery called whooping or tuning, so that the hearers do not only understand the gospel but rejoice in it. Preachers such as Gardner C. Taylor and Martin Luther King Jr. carried this tradition to the attention of the wider church.

Its strengths are ones many traditions lack: the congregation is never merely an audience, the whole person is addressed, mind and feeling and body, and the sermon refuses to leave suffering people without hope. Its weakness, which its own teachers have named, is that celebration can be manufactured. A preacher can reach for the musical close every week whether or not the text has earned it, and the congregation can learn to respond to the sound rather than to the word. Mitchell himself insisted that celebration must grow out of the good news of the particular text, not be added to any sermon as an ending. Cleophus LaRue, in The Heart of Black Preaching (2000), argued that what lies at the centre of the tradition is not a style of delivery but a way of reading scripture, centred on a sovereign God who acts on behalf of those who are marginalised. That is the right test to put to any preacher in this tradition, and in any other: is the delivery carrying the text, or replacing it?

Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity has grown faster over the last century than any other Christian movement, and much of this track's readership comes from it. The modern Pentecostal movement is usually traced to the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, which began in 1906 under William J. Seymour, a Black holiness preacher, and spread rapidly across the world. Its preaching expects God to act during the sermon: to heal, to convict, to fill with the Spirit. It quotes 1 Corinthians 2:4, 'My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power.' It is full of testimony, it is often participatory, and it nearly always calls for response. It has made preachers of ordinary people with no formal education, as the apostles were called 'unschooled, ordinary men' who 'had been with Jesus' (Acts 4:13). Its weaknesses are the ones its own scholars have named. Where preparation is seen as unspiritual, exegesis can be thin and the text a starting point for whatever the preacher feels in the moment. Celebrity preachers can become unaccountable. And the prosperity teaching that promises health and wealth to the faithful has spread through parts of the movement; Gordon Fee, himself an Assemblies of God minister and New Testament scholar, published a sharp critique of it in The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospels (1985).

Finally, preaching in oral cultures. Many of the world's people, whether or not they can read, learn and remember mainly by hearing: through story, proverb, song and repetition. Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy (1982) showed how differently oral cultures think and remember compared with cultures shaped by print. Missionaries and church planters working among oral learners have developed what is often called Bible storying, telling the biblical narrative in order from creation to Christ, carefully and accurately, so that hearers can retell it; Trevor McIlwain's chronological Bible teaching, set out in his Building on Firm Foundations series for New Tribes Mission, was an early and influential form, and Chronological Bible Storying grew from it as a more purely oral method. A Lausanne Occasional Paper titled Making Disciples of Oral Learners (2005) brought the question to wide attention. Its warrant is strong: most of scripture is narrative, Jesus 'did not tell them anything without using a parable' (Matthew 13:34), and Psalm 78 commands the telling of God's deeds to the next generation. Its weakness is that some of scripture is argument rather than story, and the letters of Paul are hard to tell as stories; a church that only ever hears narrative may not learn to follow an argument like Romans 5. The best oral preachers meet this by telling the story and then drawing out its teaching in the proverb and repeated phrase that oral hearers remember.

Using your phone, find and listen to two sermons from traditions different from your own: for example, one expository sermon from a Reformed or Baptist church and one from a Black church or a Pentecostal church; or one Catholic or Anglican homily and one sermon from your own denomination in another country. Many are free to hear online. As you listen, note in your notebook how each one begins, how it uses the Bible, how the people respond, how long it lasts and how it ends. Then write one thing each sermon did better than the preaching you usually hear, and one thing it neglected.

Then write the fourth and last paragraph on your page, under Before I preach. Title it: How I will preach. Name the form of preaching you will begin with, most likely the one your church uses, and the reason it fits your hearers. Then name its characteristic weakness, from this lesson, and write one concrete thing you will do to guard against it. A preacher in the lectio continua tradition might commit to preaching an Old Testament book every year; a Pentecostal preacher might commit to writing out what the text says before praying about what to say; a lectionary preacher might commit to preaching through one whole letter in the weeks after Pentecost.

You now have four paragraphs on one page: why you preach, what you will not say, who sent you, and how you will preach. Read the whole page aloud once. It is not a sermon, but it is the ground a sermon stands on. Keep it in the front of your notebook. In the next module you will choose the passage your own sermon will come from, and you will want this page beside you when you do.