Leave the Rest to God

Preaching is a unique combination of art and science. As an artist, the preacher seeks to be creative. However, creativity doesn't mean preaching in such a novel way that people listening can't recognize the words and stories that are embedded in their memories. In the name of novelty, I heard about a minister who preached the Christmas story from the perspective of the donkey on which Mary road to Bethlehem. This was a talking donkey who kept asking Mary how she was doing. It was creative. Nobody had thought about a talking donkey, and there's good reason why nobody had ever thought about it. Obviously, some of our listeners may know little or nothing about the Bible. The task of the preacher is to proclaim a sermon that is vivid and alive and contains some of the biblical text. Why not assume that the Bible can be interesting to people even without a talking donkey? Preaching is also a science. I don't mean that we take our words into the laboratory, but there are...

Sometimes, I hear people question the need for the viability of preaching in the times in which we live. "My preacher is so boring," she said. "Doesn't my preacher know how to conclude a message? The sermon goes too long. There were places where he could have ended the message." The congregation was finished at 18 minutes, but our minister kept preaching and finally ended with something that sounded like, "That's all, folks". I've been a preacher and a professor of homiletics for most of my life. I'm retired, which may make me irrelevant to anybody under 40. There's nothing like an old preacher telling a new generation that has grown up in a different world, "This is the way you should preach." But I'm still preaching, and until my spouse, who's been my most consistent listener over the years, tells me that I keep telling the same stories and she really wants me to sit with her in the pew, I'll continue to preach. ...