The three most important things about preaching are that it should be:
- faithful to the text
- applied to the hearers
- interesting
Conservative evangelical preachers, in my experience, too often only aim for the first two.
A large fraction of the Bible is story. So why is there so little narrative preaching or preaching using lots of narrative that is also faithful? Jesus did it...
Why do so few books on preaching say that prayer is the most important element of preparation?
1 comment:
Surely the most important thing about preaching is that it is about Jesus Christ. At the extreme risk of building theology from anecdotes, there are plenty of great sermons that handle the Bible badly (Spurgeon?) and plenty of bad sermons that exegete the Bible correctly. Of course, the goal is great sermons that handle the Bible properly.
But your point still stands. As well as missing out on narrative, we often miss out on the richness of imagery that the Bible provides. Just think of the OT prophets and their bowls, floods, trees, tents etc etc. Conservative evangelicals have a tendency to 'explain' the imagery and turn it into an abstract proposition. I'm as guilty as the rest, although this sermon here (via my blog) was a bit more successful - I had some wonderful imagery to play with.
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