The first sentence in the ‘Series Preface’ will grab any teacher of preaching.

The Artistry of Preaching series gives practical guidance on matters that receive insufficient attention in preaching literature yet are key for preachers who seek greater creative expression in their preaching (vii).

The sentence grabbed me. I bought the series. One of my deepest concerns as a teacher is to help rightly-convicted biblical expositors to be less boring, by becoming more creative. Nothing is lost by doing so – and so much can be gained. As they are such little books, ranging from 97 pages to 157 pages, I set myself the goal of reading all four of them in 2018.

For a bit of fun, here is my ranking of them in the order of my appreciation of them.
[NB: Keep an eye on those subtitles as we move through them].

I’ve developed a ‘five corners’ model for preaching, with one of the corners being ‘the listener’. Issues like rapport, application and delivery receive attention. This book stabbed at my pedagogical conscience – “why are you not giving more attention to the importance of empathy?” Because of this book, I plan now to do so. Lenny Luchetti’s Preaching with Empathy: Crafting Sermons in a Callous Culture. It is not a case of either you have it or you don’t have it – because empathy can be enhanced, a “love for those to whom we preach” (xiii) can grow. This book lays the foundation before giving pages upon pages of helpful, practical and accessible suggestions.

Earlier this week I had yet another moan to yet another longsuffering class about the way preachers tend to harvest their illustrations from the internet. I am so weary of hearing Indian preachers fill their sermons with American illustrations. Why? Don’t they realise that pre-digested food is for robins and pelicans? No. No. No. Harvest your own stuff!

I like to help preachers do so in three ways: (a) Go for a walk outside the learning space and just … look. Trees. Houses. People. Things. Finding ‘the spiritually significant in the utterly ordinary’; (b) Soak in NT Wright’s For Everyone books. As a preacher, if we learn clarity best by looking over John Stott’s shoulder, then we learn creativity best by looking over Tom Wright’s shoulder (see here). Clarity and creativity, together with character, will take you a long way as a preacher. Then – (c) Develop a ‘prevailing image’ for every sermon (see here). It is in this third area that Peter Jonker’s Preaching in Pictures: Using Images for Sermons that Connect is going to be so helpful, as he builds his case for what he calls, a “controlling image”.

The Series Editor (Paul Scott Wilson) writes these words in his Preface to our third volume: “Today’s listeners are not content with the canned Internet illustrations that sound artificial and have a predictable moral” (viii). Hmm – just heard that somewhere. Rather, “they want stories rooted in the actual world in which people live, that depict life as they know it, and that can function as Jesus’ stories did, as parables and metaphors that bear God’s grace to their hearers” (viii).

So true … and along comes Scott Hoezee’s Actuality: Real Life Stories for Sermons That Matter. “Sermons need more reality” (xix). They need to be “as firmly rooted in the realities of daily life as they are deeply rooted in God’s word” (x). The key principle for Hoezee is that preachers need to be able to ‘show, rather than just tell.’ He lists practical ways of how to do this more effectively (1-29) – before launching into example after example, using Paul Scott Wilson’s trouble-grace model for preaching, of stories that ‘show trouble’ (30-89) and stories that ‘show grace’ (90-129).

Coming in fourth in my rankings is the Series Editor’s opening volume: Paul Scott Wilson, Preaching as Poetry: Beauty, Goodness, and Trust in Every Sermon. He may not be pleased! Fourth doesn’t sound so flash – kinda like just missing out on the bronze medal. However it is fourth because it assumes an understanding of postmodernism and it also assumes that it is a relevant issue. It ain’t necessarily so where I live and work. The author wades into deconstruction and Derrida and so the volume presents as one that is more complex – and it is.

However, this should not prevent readers from persisting. Basically, the book is a call to reconceive preaching as a kind of poetry, rather than a kind of math – art more than engineering, if you like. Beauty. Goodness. Truth. They all receive a section, each of which is divided into three parts: ‘Theory’ (this is where the reader needs a little knowledge of postmodernism); ‘Homiletics’ (this tends to be the fascinating section); and ‘Practice’ (as he applies his ideas to Christmas, Easter and Pentecost). While I would not share some of the author’s theological presuppositions, I am happy to listen and learn – and along the way there are some probing sections.

For example:
Guidelines for Preachers to Speak of Beauty Today (18-21);
Why Beauty Now for Preaching (30-32);
Ways in which postmodernism can be an ally (59-60);
Six conditions needed in order to speak about goodness (60-65);
Intertextuality and connecting to the larger story (78-82);
Possibilities for (postmodern) sermon structure (82-85);
Engaging with Contemporary Claims about Truth (106-111);
Six Practices for Faithful Imagination (120-123);
Changes for the Church in light of these shifts (130-133).

And wait, there’s more …

Coming in April 2019. Joni Sancken’s Words That Heal: Preaching Hope to Wounded Souls.


I’m not sure I can wait.

Hurry up, Joni.

Hurry up, Abingdon Press.

nice chatting

Paul