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Otherwise Thinking

~ a blog by John McClure

Otherwise Thinking

Tag Archives: boring sermon

Humor and Preaching

04 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by John McClure in Views from the Street

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

boring sermon, comedy, entertainment, fool, humor, jokes, laughter, preaching, Preaching Words: 144 Key Terms in Homiletics, sermon illustration

Many preachers are excellent humorists. Not only are their sermons entertaining, but these preachers seemed to love getting a laugh – and they don’t feel that their sermons “work” unless they get a laugh or two.

There is good biblical precedent for humor. Sarah laughed when she discovered she was to have a child at an old age. God laughs in Psalm 2:4. Some of Jesus’ parables seem to want to get a chuckle. Both Henry Ward Beecher and Charles Finney were humorists in the pulpit. William Willimon, in the Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching, argues that humor can assist the preacher in “taking God a little more seriously and ourselves a little less so.” Charles Campbell and Johann Cilliers, in their wonderful new book Preaching Fools: The Gospel as a Rhetoric of Folly, argue that laughter can be, in fact, a socially and politically subversive activity in the pulpit.

It seems to me that humor has several homiletical advantages:

1) it connects the preacher and the audience. There’s nothing like sharing a good laugh to put us all in the same boat.

2) it “breaks the ice” and puts the audience at ease.

3) it can promote authenticity – taking ourselves with a grain of salt, in order to shift the focus onto God.

4) it can help us subvert the status quo – showing the seams and edges, and even the dark underbelly of many of the sinful systems that enslave us.

Several potential problems seem to accompany humor in the pulpit, however.

1) it can focus too much attention on the preacher who is trying to communicate (sometimes desperately): “Look, I’m a funny, likable person!”

2) it can be forced – unnatural to the preacher’s own personality and style. This is especially true when stock jokes are told.

3) it can work at odds with the purposes of Christian communication – shifting the genre of communication to “barroom banter,” or “office party,” or “comedy club routine.”

4) it can dislocate the sermon’s “point.” We’re so busy laughing and sharing a good mutual “wink,”  that we forget what the message is about.

When humor is not used for its own sake, however, and is relevant to the idea being expressed, it can have tremendous communicative power. And when it is used well in preaching it expresses the shared humility of both preacher and listener before a God who topples all of our self-serious agendas.

For more on this topic, and 143 other homiletical topics, see my book Preaching Words: 144 Key Terms in Homiletics. 

Please Tear Your Sermon in Half!

04 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by John McClure in Views from the Street

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Beginning the sermon, Bible and Preaching, boring preaching, boring sermon, homiletical method, self-disclosure, sermon illustration, Sermon Introduction, sermon preparation, sermon set-up, text-to-sermon

Ok. Maybe not exactly in half. But I’ve listened to lots of sermons over the years, and I’m worried about the way we begin sermons. I have to say that about three fourths of these sermons would be dramatically improved if the preacher started about two pages (or about 3-5 minutes) into the sermon. I don’t know what it is, but most of us love the “wind-up” not realizing that we are not baseball pitchers; sermon wind-ups are usually sermon “wind-downs.” Here are the most common “wind-up/wind-downs.”

  1. Re-hashing the biblical text. The preacher in this mode drags the listener through a long, expanded, or “imaginative” re-hashing of the text. No. This is not an exposition or interpretation. I’m speaking about a non-interpretive re-hashing of the bits and pieces of the text. Sometimes this never ends and lasts the entire sermon. The preacher forgets to have anything to say to us – or what is commonly called a “message,” and seems to assume that we’ll “get it” if we hear the old, old story re-iterated.
  2. The sermon “set-up.” In this mode, the preacher spends a few minutes exegetically framing the biblical text – providing what the preacher considers useful background information – some interesting tid-bits, mostly exegetical by-products.
  3. Touring the cutting room floor – In this approach, the preacher tells us how he or she arrived at this message – strolling us around the room and pointing out all of the fascinating options left behind on the cutting room floor.
  4. Climbing to higher ground. In this mode, the preacher tells the listener all of the ways she or he has heard this text preached in the past – leading us to the superior ground of their own interpretation.
  5. The rapport story. In this mode, the preacher decides to tell a personal story. This is not a story told about someone or something else, narrated through the lens of the preacher’s experience, but a story about the preacher’s experience (of self, other, family, sports, memory, life, etc.). This story might contain a catchy thematic hook designed to capture our interest. Often, the story goes on interminably. No matter what they are supposed to be illustrating, these wind-up stories seem to be saying something else, namely: “Welcome to my world – please like me and be my friend while I preach this sermon.” When this occurs over and over, genuine sermon content is sacrificed to a rather contrived rapport-building exercise. 
  6. The message grope – In my experience this is the most common “wind-up/wind-down.” When beginning to write the sermon the preacher didn’t really have a clue what to say. The preacher just started writing or speaking, hoping a message would pop out. By the time a message finally arrived, several minutes had been wasted groping one’s way toward it, and most of the energy of the sermon had evaporated. For whatever reason, rather than removing this material, it is kept.

Anton Chekov’s famous advice to writers comes immediately to mind: “Tear out the first half of your story; you’ll only have to change a few things in the beginning of the second half and the story will be perfectly clear.” This is serious and solid advice for many preachers. Once we’ve written the sermon, or organized it and preached it through a few times extemporaneously, it is a good idea to ask ourselves whether, in fact, the sermon would be better if we started it further in – on page two or three. If we did this on a regular basis, I believe we’d avoid many of the “wind-up/wind-downs” that currently sap the energy at the beginnings of our sermons.

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John McClure

Recent Posts

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