Genre

Red or Blue?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Today’s post is on the Cor Deo blog.  In it I ask a significant question for Bible readers and preachers alike.  When we look at the pages of Scripture, do we see red or blue?  There’s nothing political about the post, it deals with a much more important subject than that!

Also, remember that those who comment on any post on the Cor Deo site this month will be in with a chance of winning a free book – A Praying Life by Paul Miller.  All we ask is that you also share the link to the Book Giveaway page on facebook, twitter, by email or a web link – here’s the link to share:

http://www.cordeo.org.uk/book-giveaway-a-praying-life/

To go to the post, Red or Blue? – please click here.

How Long, O Passage?

/ Peter Mead / 6 Comments

When we have the freedom to pick a passage on which to preach, the decision can end up taking an inordinate amount of time.  Which book?  Which bit?  Typically my suggestion is fairly simple – “Pray, consider what the listeners might need, what they have been hearing lately and what you want to preach. Oh, and don’t waste 80% of your preparation time making your decision.”

But let’s say you’ve zeroed in on a potential passage, but you aren’t sure how much of it to preach.  Perhaps a narrative and a subtly connected transition section sit together.  Perhaps a paragraph in an epistle sits next to a connected paragraph (almost always true).  Perhaps you’re looking at a Psalm, and the adjacent Psalm seems well connected (not unusual).  What to do?  Here are some factors to consider as you make the decision:

1. Unity of the longer passage – Does it really hold together?  Is preaching the longer version going to drive in the focus, or will it dissipate it?  That is, will it feel like a higher-calibre bullet that penetrates deeper, or will it feel like buck-shot spraying further away from the target?

2. What time do you have to preach – We can’t get away from this, what you can do in fifteen minutes is very different than what you can do in forty.  (Not to say forty is always better, but it is much easier.)  So if you are preaching in a situation where time is restricted for whatever reason, then less passage means less explation necessary, which in turn means more opportunity to apply the text.

3. Need of the audience – What do they need?  Does the extra bit of passage add something that is really pertinent to them?  Perhaps it allows for encouragement alongside rebuke?  Perhaps it provides extra clarification on the real issue in the first part of the passage?  Perhaps it drives home the truth in some way?

4. Required amount of explanation – Some passages require a lot of historical, contextual, cultural explanation to make sense.  Others don’t.  If the longer passage adds an inordinate amount of explanation requirement, then it might be better to keep the passage shorter and get to the applicational content as well.  Your goal is not to impress people with your Bible knowledge.

5. Your personal preference – Sometimes it will be perfectly legitimate to simply ask, what would I prefer to preach?  And it probably will be necessary to study the whole passage for a while before you decide what you would prefer.

I am not saying we can ignore textual unit boundaries completely.  Narratives generally don’t like being broken, unless you can give a complete scene as a stand-alone.  Psalms generally like to hold together within themselves.  But preaching more than a narrow textual unit is often possible, and sometimes will be desirable.  Hopefully these criteria may be helpful.  There are surely others too…

Psalms: A Disconnect and a Nudge

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Point 1. At a recent preaching seminar the organiser admitted that he had only ever chosen to preach from the Psalms once.  He asked everyone present how much they choose to preach from the Psalms when they have the choice on what to preach.  The general consensus was almost never.

Point 2. Speak to any Christian who has been walking with the Lord for more than a few years.  Ask them what book of the Bible has been dear to them during the most challenging times in their experience.  Times of hurt, of doubt, of grief, of loss, of fear, of insecurity, of loneliness, of pain, of betrayal . . . the times when life was as life often is. The answer, time and again, will be the book of Psalms.

The Disconnect. People come to church in the midst of life in all its colour and complexity.  People are hurting, doubting, experiencing, struggling, suffering.  A significant proportion of people in our churches every Sunday are dealing with a significant level of life’s complexity.  Yet as preachers many of us seldom if ever choose to preach from the book that countless Christians have grown to love precisely because it does engage with the harsh realities of life in a way that we can identify with.  This is a disconnect.  (Not to mention the fact that when some do preach the Psalms, they have a habit of dissecting into theology-sized chunks that feel like an epistle in presentation – that’s something I’ve written about in other posts!)

The Nudge. Why not preach from the Psalms sometime?

Flat Preaching

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I recently was leading a preaching seminar where participants had the opportunity to preach and receive feedback.  The participant I listened to really did an outstanding job!  He preached the miracle at the end of John 4, and it was not a flat message.

Here’s what I mean.  There are tens of miracles in the gospels.  A lot of them are healings.  Chap with a problem comes to Jesus, Jesus says something, chap  trusts, Jesus heals, happily ever after.  They’re all a bit the same – if you preach them that way!  In reality each account is uniquely written with its own features and characteristics and context and purpose.

So in the miracle at the end of John 4, the writer includes several indicators pointing to his main thought in this unique passage.  He points the reader, consciously or sub-consciously back to John 2 and 3.  He points us back to Jesus’ earlier concern with people trusting in him, but his not entrusting himself to them.  He raises the matter of belief based on signs.  He underlines the issue of belief with a double reference to belief.  The writer is doing something unique in this passage.

So the good preacher will do something unique with this passage.  Actually, the good preacher will do the writer’s something unique with this passage.  (That last sentence probably needs to be read twice, cumbersome but deliberate!)  The task of the preacher is not to come up with their own clever message on the passage, but to really and truly and fairly and powerfully bring out the message of the passage.

How easily we preach a miracle story as just another miracle story.  Human interest problem, solved by Jesus, because Jesus is powerful and is the solution to the underlying sin problem, so let’s ponder the cross.  That’s fine, but sometimes it simply doesn’t honour the unique contours and features of the text itself.  Good preachers do.

Superior Ammunition. Really?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

In class last week we were discussing effective sermon delivery.  We brainstormed through the categories of verbal, vocal and visual presentation.  So what goes into effective verbal delivery – i.e. the words you choose to use?

One person mentioned the need for accurate and precise word choice, rather than lots of filler words and verbal pauses.  Absolutely.  If you spoke on behalf of the government you wouldn’t arrive with a, umm, you know, imprecise kind of, you know, message.  How much more when you speak as an ambassador of heaven?

Another mentioned the need for common language.  After all, despite what some may think, Jesus spoke in common language.  The New Testament was written in common Greek.  We need to communicate with the people who are listening to us.

Related to this is the importance of your motivation in word choice.  One brother mentioned the temptation to try to look well educated by choosing erudite terminology.  I stumbled across a great quote in Briscoe’s book, something like, “if you are consistently shooting over the target, this is not an indication of your superior ammunition, but proof that you can’t aim properly.”  Fantastic.

Preach the Main Point

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Last week I had the joy of teaching a group of church leaders in a class on preaching biblical narratives.  Once we had grasped the significance and power of plot in a narrative, we realized how purposeful narratives tend to be.  They aren’t a random assortment of preaching fodder as many see them.

It is easy to read a story and bounce off the details to preach personal hobby horses.

A passing reference to alcohol in the story of Nabal can easily become a tirade against alcohol in the hands of a careless preacher.  But that is not the focal point of the story.  The plot, when understood properly, pushes the careful preacher toward the heart of the issue (usually in some way related to the resolution of the tension in the plot).

And yet the beauty of narrative passages is that they don’t simply present simple truths, but clothe theological truth in the concrete realities of life.  While many Christians may choose to make every conceivable matter into a black and white simplistic issue, biblical narratives engage us in the complexities of real life.  Daniel didn’t eat the meat offered to idols.  Aha! There it is, biblical support for total separation from anything I deem to be worldly!  Hang on, in the same passage he isn’t fussing about being labeled with a Babylon deity’s name.  Complex.

Narratives are such powerful parts of Scripture.  They present, engage and drive home a central truth in very vivid and heart-stirring ways.  Yet they don’t lay comfortably in our simplistic constructs for life, choosing rather to stretch our faith and our thinking by their complex depictions of human motivation, faith, and experience.

Preaching and Story – Part 5

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

So this post is really an extension of implication four in the series we have been considering on the impact of narrative in our preaching.  Much more could be said, but this will be the last in this specific series.  So to review implication number four:

4. When preaching “non-narrative” sections, consider how they are snapshots of a narrative. We saw how two genres are, by definition, largely narratival – both history and gospel (including parables, of course).  But what about the five “non-narrative” genres?

So a psalm was written by someone in response to God’s work, or in gratitude for a particular moment of deliverance, or in the tension of particular situation, either individual or corporate, or to guide others in the tensions of life.

Prophecy, as we know, is not all about foretelling the future, but often more about God’s heart being revealed in respect to the present.  Either way, narrative is there . . . either God’s response to the tensions and problems and reactions and dangers of the present, or God’s explanation of kingdom hope shining at the end of the current tunnel.

Wisdom literature is shot through with the tensions of a fallen world, with the challenges of human folly as we so easily pick foolish paths in the midst of the situations we face – glimpses into the story of humanity.

Apocalyptic, despite all the caveats and careful explanations that seem to overwhelm the text so often these days, is a revelation of reality, present or future, the unseen becoming seen, and it is shot through with narrative features – and then I saw, then he said, and then, and then, so the dragon waited, then the world celebrated, then the judge came, and then, and then.

Epistle, of course, is a snapshot into a narrative – that apostle’s attempt to bring the gospel to bear on the present situation of the recipients.  We have to look at the occasion that prompted the writing of the letter, and we need to look for any hints as to what transpired in response to it.  A glimpse into the narratives of life lived in a fallen world.

At some level there are aspects of narrative pervading every passage in the Bible.  How does our preaching reflect that?

 

Preaching and Story – Part 4

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

So we have been thinking this week about the role of the Bible story in our preaching.  We haven’t thought about how the individual stories relate to the big story as a whole, the redemption history, as it were.  Perhaps that would be worth a post at some point (actually I know it would because some preachers seem so eager to fit everything in its macro context that the particular text they claim to be preaching gets lost or somehow reworked so that the actual message of the text is lost in the mix . . . but that is for another day).  We have considered the importance of entering into the narrative, and trusting the narrative to offer more than illustration and introduction, and thinking through how to increase the impact of a narrative by retelling and revisiting it before moving on.  Now to the final implication in this series.  This weekend I should be returning from Asia and will be looking forward to seeing what comments have been sparked by this series!

4. When preaching “non-narrative” sections, consider how they are snapshots of a narrative. There are three main types of literature in the Bible, and about seven major genre.  One of the three types is narrative, the most common one, but still leaving two non-narrative types (poetry and discourse).  A couple of the genre are narrative (history and gospel, including parables), again with lots of page space, but also leaving five that are non-narrative (psalm, prophecy, wisdom, apocalyptic, epistle.)  But stop the bus for a minute!  Are these other types and genres non-narratival?  Aren’t poetry and discourse both snapshots into a narrative?  Discourse, be it epistle or speech, is given in the context of a narrative situation.  And it may be harder to accurately know the context that gave rise to a particular poem, but human nature leads us to wonder and often to reconstruct such a narrative (be careful not to then interpret a poem in light of a reconstructed narratival context, but why not tap into the emotional setting of a fallen world that sparks such poetry?)

I will extend this series by one post and tomorrow consider the five supposedly non-narratival genres to see how they are, in fact, more narrative-ish than we tend to think!

Idea to Idea, or Outline to Outline?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Some preaching methodologies suggest that the main idea is what crosses from textual study to sermon preparation. Others suggest that the outline of the text crosses over to form the outline of the sermon. Which is right?

Both, but with qualifications.

The idea is in charge of the message, the outline is not. Remember that the main idea of the passage was what the author was seeking to communicate to the recipients, and he chose to do so making choices about genre, structure, details, etc. Everything after the idea is a matter of authorial strategy. As we prepare to preach, our goal is to firstly grasp the main idea of the text, process that idea so that it takes into account the needs and situation of the listeners, and then consider how to form a sermon that will effectively deliver that main idea.

The outline of the text is not boss, but it does matter. In my approach, I teach a narrowing focus in the textual study that culminates in the defining of the main idea of the passage. That idea is then influenced (in certain respects) by an overt awareness of the listeners which determines the purpose of the message, and then the message idea is then in charge of the subsequent decisions relating to strategy (including the message structure, the illustrative details, intro, conclusion, etc.)

Having said all that, when it comes to the structure or outline of the message, where do I begin? With a contemporised outline derived from the passage. In effect the work done on the idea is also done on the outline.  So why don’t I overtly state that in the 8-stage process?

The outline of the passage is a starting place, but it does not always have to be obeyed. My default approach is to follow the strategy the author used by following the order and structure of the passage in my message outline.  However, I don’t feel restricted by this approach.  Sometimes the contemporary listeners are in a different place to the original recipients.  Sometimes they need differing strategies to drive the main idea home.  Perhaps extra info is needed, or a different starting place, or perhaps a different ordering of the content of the passage.

The passage outline is the place to start when it comes to the message outline, but it is not a requirement.  (However, I do feel constrained by the main idea of the text as I work at the level of main idea – hence my approach that emphasises the progress from passage idea to message idea).

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Single Verse Sermons

/ Peter Mead / 4 Comments

The site received this comment from Peter D:

I have been studying Charles Spurgeon’s sermons. He would often take one scripture and expound on it from every direction he could, would that be thin blooded? I’m preparing a message for later this month and want to focus on one verse within Psalm 63 – it sticks out to me and brings the whole psalm to life, for me at least. In your opinion is it best when dealing with psalms to preach the whole psalm in it’s entirety or can focusing on one part bring it to life for the members?

This is a good question.  Regarding the Psalms I would suggest it is always important to study a Psalm in its entirety, but it may be effective to focus on one part if that seems appropriate for the situation (i.e. when covering the full text in a longer psalm would prove overwhelming or unachievable). 

But what about single verse sermons? Certainly in the past there were many more preachers who preached on single texts, often going from those texts to a sometimes comprehensive canon-wide presentation of the pertinent doctrines suggested (or sometime not suggested) in that text.  Sadly there are many who try to copy the approach of a Spurgeon without achieving a comparable level of personal spirituality and biblical maturity.  There is certainly a place for doctrinal preaching, as well as better and worse ways to do it.  Perhaps there should be a post on that subject sometime . . .

But what can we say about single-verse sermons?

1. If a single verse is a complete unit of thought, great!  For instance, many proverbs stand alone as a complete unit of thought and can be profitably preached as such.

2. If a single verse conveys the main idea of the unit of thought, great!  In some passages there is a single thought that encapsulates the main idea of the passage and it might be effective to preach the verse, while choosing how much of the context to refer to at the same time (depending on situation of sermon, listeners, etc.)

3. If a single verse conveys a significant proportion of the main idea of the text, this might be effective.  As above, the surrounding context will need to be brought into the message in some way or other, but appearing to preach a single verse may work well.  In Peter’s comment above, I noticed how he still tied the single verse to the message of the Psalm as a whole, which makes me think it might be very effective.

4. In a topical message, a single verse may act as sectional manager for that section of the message, but that manager must not act autonomously from the influence of the full unit of thought.  That is, the verse must be understood in its context.

5. If a single verse is used without awareness of context, or to preach a point it wouldn’t give if understood in context, or if preached without studying the context . . . well, please don’t.