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The Art and the Argument

crisis in Preaching

Widespread dissatisfaction with preaching cuts across our churches. The disenchantment began to boil to the surface almost a generation ago. Young and old alike complained of preaching that was lost in abstraction, buried in jargon, and frozen in formula words incapable of firing the courage or of forging the answers needed for an age of unprecedented change. Thoughts too lofty to touch the realities of life precipitated criticism, the like of which American preachers had not endured since battles over slavery eroded public reverence for pulpit robes. Preachers cried for answers. Experts studied, surveyed, and assessed.

Clyde Reid offered the perspective of religious professionals:

(1) Preachers tend to use complex, archaic language which the average person does not understand; (2) most sermons today are dull, boring, and uninteresting; (3) most preaching today is irrelevant; (4) preaching today is not courageous preaching; (5) preaching does not communicate; (6) preaching does not lead to change in persons; (7) preaching has been overemphasized.

Reuel Howe spoke to laypeople and catalogued similar complaints:

(1) sermons often contain too many complex ideas; (2) sermons have too much analysis and too little answer; (3) sermons are too formal and too impersonal; (4) sermons use too much theological jargon; (5) sermons are too propositional, not enough illustrations; (6) too many sermons simply reach a dead end and give no guidance to commitment and action.1

The crisis continues. These seminal surveys and many subsequent studies have triggered an explosion of works advocating novel approaches to preaching. Baby and bathwater often seem flung out the back door together in this rush to develop new forms. Time will tell whether the new approaches have enduring value. What is obvious now is that few seem satisfied. The willingness of so many to experiment with so important a spiritual task highlights how desperate many consider their situation. Both pulpit and pew echo the concern that too many sermons have no direct connection with everyday life.

This book contends that preachers who properly develop and use life-situation illustrations in expository messages already possess a powerful corrective for the crisis in contemporary preaching. Such illustrations live where people live. They communicate meaning by common experience and, thus, do not allow biblical truths to fly over heads or reside in the surreal world of doctrinal jargon and abstract principle. Through this vehicle, true communication takes place and sermons themselves are filled with vibrant life.

Definitions

Preachers searching for illustrative materials soon find a variety of options available to use in their messages. The array of alternatives can itself create important questions about the types of illustrative content that best suit a sermon. The following hierarchy ranks such material by its complexity and relative emphasis on “lived-body” (i.e., descriptive) details:2

An Illustrative Hierarchy
Novella
Allegory
Parable
Illustration
Allusion
Example
Analogy
Figure of Speech

The illustrative materials listed lower than “Illustration” on this hierarchy are characterized by their brevity. Figures, analogies, and examples can add rich expression to a sermon, but they do not involve listeners to the same degree as do true illustrations. A quote from an ancient saint or a statistic from a contemporary newspaper may add interest to a sermon, but neither carries the listener into a tangible understanding of a message as effectively as a full illustration. On the other hand, the categories of illustrative material higher than “Illustration” usually have greater length than is appropriate for sermons or reflect a particular literary genre conforming to conventions not typical of most sermons.3 The aspect of the hierarchy most ideally suited to relevant preaching—preaching that communicates the powerful and living Word of God most effectively to its audience—is illustration.

A brief definition of true illustrations is as follows: Illustrations are “life-situation” stories within sermons whose details (whether explicitly told or imaginatively elicited) allow listeners to identify with an experience that elaborates, develops, and explains scriptural principles.4 Through the details of the story, the listener is able imaginatively to enter an experience in which a sermonic truth can be observed. The preacher tells the what, when, where, and why of an occurrence to give listeners personal access to the occasion. He encourages each listener to see, feel, taste, or smell features of an event as though he or she were bodily present in the unfolding account. Then, along with these sensory details, the preacher also suggests the emotions, thoughts, or reactions that would typify the experience of one living the account.

These life and body descriptions create the “lived-body” details that distinguish true illustration from mere allusion or example. In both allusion and example the speaker refers to an account, whereas in an illustration the preacher invites the listener into the experience. The lived-body details flesh out the illustration in such a way that the listener can vicariously enter the narrative world of the illustration.5 It is true that listeners can supply details out of their own imaginations to experience a concept to which the preacher refers in an example or an allusion. The categories cannot be strictly drawn. The point is that in examples and allusions the listener primarily supplies the lived-body details, whereas in true illustrations the preacher supplies them.

Illustrations, therefore, lead listeners into events. In an example, the preacher says, “I have observed . . .” In an allusion, the preacher says, “This reminds me of . . .” With an illustration, the preacher says, “I’ll take you there.” In essence, when the preacher illustrates, he says, “You will know what I mean by comparing this to a memory from your life,” or “Live through this new experience with me so you will know.” This means that illustrations, however briefly expressed, reflect life-stories. Whether the account is new to the listener or conjured from memory, the preacher verbally re-creates a slice of life that defines a sermon’s ideas.

historical overview

It would be incorrect to suggest that ours is the first generation to discover the value of using illustrations in preaching. We need but glimpse the best preaching of practically every era in the history of the church to discern illustrations’ value. With rare exceptions the most esteemed preaching has consistently relied on the vision of the inner eye.

Had not the apostle Paul punctuated his words with images of the full armor of God, the race course, and the altar to an unknown God, we would strain to remember his instruction. Had not Jonathan Edwards dangled sinful spiders over the pit of flame, no one would know “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” If William Jennings Bryan had not decried, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” his political “sermon” would have been forgotten the next day. If Martin Luther King, Jr. had not led us through a “dream” and onto a “mountaintop,” the march on Washington might have become nothing more than a ragged hike across a majestic mall.

Books have extolled the sensory appeals of Charles Spurgeon, the images of Peter Marshall, the characterizations of Clovis Chappell, and the human dramas of Harry Emerson Fosdick. None of these men, of widely varying theological perspectives, preached in times dominated by visual electronics, yet they dressed their sermons in strong illustrative images with powerful results. Prior to our contemporary “age of visual literacy,”6 these preaching giants tapped something deep and fundamental in human understanding. We are just beginning to discover in scientific terms what this fundamental something is.

Hidden Prejudice

Many recent studies support the use of sermonic storytelling and illustration by citing the long tradition of their use. Contemporary insights into the narrative structure of Scripture have spawned a spate of books and articles defending the use of stories in sermons and organic “story sermons.”7 Other works explore the role of storytelling and illustration in various preaching traditions in order to prove their use is neither novel nor damaging.8 Unfortunately, such an appeal to past works potentially reinforces a hidden prejudice that these devices are the preaching forms of preliterate, unlearned, or folk cultures and are thus ill-suited to today’s sophisticated audiences.

The twentieth century’s classic textbooks on preaching often stereotype illustration as primitive or elementary. Henry Grady Davis reflects this attitude in his Design for Preaching, the most widely used homiletics textbook of the last hundred years:9

Again it is contended that illustrative stories are necessary to supply interest, to give the human touch, and to make the message relevant to concrete...