If there is one thing I’ve been learning from teaching preaching over the years, it is that merely participating in a course, or a seminar, doesn’t help much on its own. Such participation does not lead to much transformation—unless there is practice-practice-practice and, better still, there are opportunities to pass-it-on to others.

This is one reason why I am such a believer in what we do in Langham Preaching. While we do have the seminars in which people participate, the focus shifts across to practice (with the ‘preaching clubs’) and passing-it-on (with the training of local trainers), something that many colleges and seminaries are still trying to figure out how to do well. 

It is also why I am such a believer in this book by Jared Alcántara, with its focus on ‘deliberate practice’ (5). The author is ‘half-Honduran’ (83) and it shows. He has lived in different worlds. This assists with his creativity and critique. Trawling back through the past decade or so, I cannot think of other books — apart, possibly, from the ones by Darrell Johnson and Tim Keller—that will sit more securely and enduringly in my bibliographies and lists of recommended readings than this one.  I ‘met’ Jared in 2020 when, as one response to ‘black lives matter’, I decided during lockdown to lean into an African-American preacher called Gardner Taylor. So I read Alcántara’s PhD thesis, Crossover Preaching…

And now, I’ve come back for more…

It is uncanny. Can we go back to Alcántara’s exhortation around ‘deliberate practice’? This book is about five areas which need practice, ‘the Five Cs’ (7). If I sat down with my memories and reflected on the persistent weaknesses I’ve encountered over the years, in a very different context to Alcántara, the five practices I’d stumble into would be much the same. That is what is so uncanny.

Before we look at the Cs, may I include a sentence from within the final handful of paragraphs in the book? It gives you a feel for the author’s purpose and perspective:

Most introduction to preaching books are method-focused, single author, monocultural, text-based, and monolingual whereas the book you have just read is consciously practice-centered, intentionally collaborative, strategically diverse, technologically interactive, and purposefully multilingual (191).

Yep, I can feel it from over here. You are getting excited about this book as well! It is such a fresh contribution.  And yes, he did write ‘technologically interactive’. This is because the book is supplemented with a website: www.PracticesofChristianPreaching.com.

OK, let’s take a quick look at the Five Cs…

Preaching Convictionally

It is about avoiding the rush to answer the How question before the What and Why questions are engaged. It takes me back to that Stottian mantra: ‘the secret of preaching lies not so much in mastering certain techniques, but in being mastered by certain convictions’. For Alcántara, there are “resolutions that ground conviction” (50-59), like “preaching that lives comes from living that preaches” (57) and “negative habits to resist” (60-63) — like workaholism, vanity, celebrity, arrogance, inauthenticity, prayerlessness (60-63). 

[NB: the introductory chapter, especially the need to avoid ‘pseudo-gospels’ (22-35) could readily be included in this ‘convictional’ chapter as well].

Preach Contextually

The contexts of the text do matter — historical, literary, biblical — but so also does the context of the listener. “Faithful preachers study the context in which they preach as diligently as they study the context of the biblical text from which they preach” (74). Preaching has a ‘local accent’ (74). This is where I’ve been frustrated, again and again. Those who claim to have the highest views of biblical preaching, with whom I’d expect to have such great fellowship, can be so disappointing. ‘Explain the Bible and the Spirit will do everything else’. I find this to be so disrespectful of listeners. It can lead to what Alcántara calls ‘quarantine preaching’, a rather apt phrase for today. These folks may even nod in the direction of Stottian ‘double listening’, but when you listen carefully, the practice is some distance from the theory.

Then, on the other hand, he also has some words for those who ‘idolize’ relevance:

… We tread on dangerous ground when we ignore movements in popular culture or when we underestimate its unyielding and subversive influence over those to whom we minister. A quarantine approach (to preaching) will not suffice.

That stated, we do not benefit from idolizing relevance either. Is expertise in popular culture always the best way to reach people? Not necessarily. There are many forms of relevance. We can still be relevant without knowing every cultural reference from TV shows, films, or music. Active investment in the lives of people is a higher and more genuine form of relevance — knowing kids’ names; sitting by bedsides in the hospital; remembering anniversaries, birthdays, and the passing of loved ones. In the end, the best way for a preacher to be relevant is to be present (84-85).

Three practices to lead the way? Interrogate Cultural Blindspots (91-94, helped enormously by his ‘half-Honduran’ identity — similar to how I feel with being kinda ‘half-Indian’!); Become a Congregational Ethnographer (94-96); and Listen to Listeners (96-98).

Preach Clearly

As the ideological postmodernism, swirling below the surface for decades, surfaced into popular culture over the last generation (or two), we’ve seen strange juxtapositions and random chaos enter fashion and music, architecture and poetry. OK. I get it. But to hide behind this distaste for structure on the way to creating sermons that wander through a few random, disconnected thoughts supplemented by a few slides and some video … this is far less convincing, especially with the beginner preacher.

Learning to be clear, long before we try to be clever, is a target at which to aim. For Alcántara, in an exceptional few pages, it is about “practice concise exegesis, use accessible language, develop a clear main idea, and commit to brevity” (113-128).

With the exegesis, we remain ‘tethered to the text’ (114). This starts with observing the text fully, which means slowly. “I compare it to walking down a street on which you normally drive. When you walk down the street, you slow down enough to notice things about it that you never noticed before” (115). Brilliant in its simplicity. I’m gonna use that one, again and again.

With the language, we don’t ‘talk down’ or ‘talk past’ people (115). We ‘write the way we speak’ (117, with six helpful guidelines on how to do this on pp 118-119). It reminds me of my enduring practice of preparing my sermon by speaking it aloud and then writing down what I hear myself saying. Then there are the zillion students whom I have urged not to have sermon notes that look like an essay (and the dozen who seem to have listened to me!). To this day, for this reason, I’ve never used the word ‘Hebrew’ or ‘Greek’, in a Sunday morning sermon. And then, when I started my decade of teaching preaching at seminar level in India, I asked a few older saints for some advice. ‘Tell them that when they graduate, the sermon is not the place to display their knowledge’, or their freshly-minted polysyllabic vocabulary.

With the main idea, we learn from Pixar. The author shows how the development of movies like Monsters Inc., Toy Story 2 and Up! was mastered by a ‘controlling … compelling’ (121) and clear main idea (122-123). It is not an option. Over the years, when students become stuck in their sermon preparation, descending into that brand of anxious panic known only to preachers, the way forward, invariably, is to send them back to articulate their main idea — because they don’t yet have one. They don’t know what they want to say. Hence, the panic…

With the brevity, we “make every minute count no matter the sermon length” (124). We have “an anti-verbosity bias’ (125). “An exhaustive preacher produces exhausted listeners” (125). “Remember that what is interesting to you is not necessarily interesting to your listeners. A lot of ideas do not need to make it into the final draft of your sermon, because they compete with the main idea” (125). Such good advice. But deleting such stuff can feel like cutting off a limb. One of my biggest regrets as a preacher, in those early years, is that I never saved those ‘limbs’ for use on other occasions. 

‘What Leonardo da Vinci Can Teach Preachers about Clarity’ (105-109). Ahh, that ‘simplicity is the ultimate sophistication’ (105). 

Preach Concretely

Yep, uncanny alright. This time it is the need to move beyond the abstract and the general, especially in our applications and illustrations, to embrace the specific and the concrete. Not easy. For me, it is the hardest of these five Cs. Alcántara makes a lot of Hayakawa’s advice to communicators about ‘climbing down the ladder of abstracton’ … which Alcántara illustrates in this non-abstract and concrete way — with Bessie!

Practices to lead the way? Focus on concrete details in the text (139-142); Focus on using illustrations to climb down the ladder of abstraction (142-148); and Focus on Using Specific Applications, by asking two questions: “How might this be heard by…?” (149-151) and “What does that look like?” (151-153).

More often than we realize, our sermons take off from the runway, stay at thirty thousand feet, and never land in the neighbourhoods where people live. To illustrate and apply effectively in a sermon means that we eventually find a way back down to sea level. If your genuine desire is to make your sermons more accessible to listeners, then strive to make them more concrete. If you remember to talk about Bessie, your listeners will thank you for it (153).

Preach Creatively

Alcántara takes a different approach here, by considering the ‘history of creativity’ and how the ‘lone-genius myth’ is a relatively recent aberration and a departure from creativity as a collaborative activity. “The modern Western idea of creativity with its individualistic, personality-based, lone genius bias comes to us as a recent phenomenon. The noun ‘creativity’ did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1875 and it did not become widely popularized until the 1940s and 1950s”‘” (161-162).

Practices to lead the way? Expanding our Imagination (164-170); avoiding Obstacles to Practicing Creativity (171-177, including a lovely section in praise of boredom!); and Cultivating Creativity in Preaching (177-183), including:

(a) Seek out diverse voices and perspectives

(b) Collaborate instead of isolate

(c) Recover some childlike creativity

(d) Engage the senses through images and visuals

(e) Observe daily lived experience

(f) Walk your way to creativity

(g) Produce from your thinking instading of thinking without producing

‘We don’t grow into creativity. We grow out of it. Often we are educated out of it’ (Ken Robinson).

What if preachers do not need to acquire creativity but rather need to regain the creativity they once possessed? What if in all our busyness, overscheduling, and chronic distraction, we have suppressed an instinct that should come naturally to us, especially as divine image-bearers? In our haste, what if we have forgotten to stop and listen to the music? (184).

nice chatting

Paul