More Power in the Pulpit

How America's Most Effective Black Preachers Prepare Their Sermons

Cleophus J. LaRue

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781611640069
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In this companion and sequel to the best-selling Power in the Pulpit (2002), which has sold over 11, 000 copies, more of America's best-known and most influential African American preachers describe how they go about preparing their sermons. Each preacher also presents a sermon that highlights his or her particular method of sermon preparation. This book is an excellent how-to manual for pastors and students, presenting sage advice and wisdom on the art of preaching and an inspirational look at the work of some of the most prominent figures in the life of the black church.

1
The Presence and Power
of Christian Preaching

WILLETTE ALYCE BURGIE-BRYANT

I believe that Christian preaching is ideally a manifestation of God’s own Presence, with power to have temporal impact from an eternal point of origin—that origin being the Word. If I had to craft a definition of Christian preaching, I would say that it is God’s Word to a people in a particular moment, rooted and grounded in Scripture, directed by the Holy Spirit, transmitted through the personality of the preacher, proclaiming the love, grace, glory, power, work, care, purposes, and invitation of God in Jesus Christ.

Preaching is so potent and mysterious a phenomenon that my cumbersome definition hardly begins to capture what Christian preaching is and what it seeks to accomplish. The preached Word is something beyond the words of the preacher, since the preacher cannot control what listeners are hearing. As a preaching professor told me when I was in seminary, “You can control the message, the words that go forth, but you cannot control the meaning that develops in the minds of your listeners.” Each listener’s ear takes the message and translates it into that listener’s life language, and God is in the midst of the listener’s translation process. As a singularly compelling and dynamic preacher once advised me, “In the preaching moment, do not concentrate on the congregation; focus your attention on God. That is your job. If you do your job, God will see to it that the congregation gets what He knows they need.”

All this has led me to conclude that preaching is a marvelously complex Word meeting between God and us, a meeting where things happen to God’s glory, to the Kingdom’s advance, and to our edification.

A dear brother in ministry once suggested helpful metaphors for the way creative sermon-preparation energy flows through two different types of temperaments: there are “Sergeants,” and there are “Surfers.” Sergeants are those to whom it seems natural (even if not easy) to abide by a regular, preplanned routine of prayer, study, and productivity. As the military title suggests, Sergeants are generally regimented in the way they live their lives. For example, Sergeants may be prone to having their devotional time at the same time each day; they may do a predetermined type or quantity of reading each week or month; and they may determine to execute the various preparatory tasks of their ministry on a predictable time table. Surfers, on the other hand, need the “tide” to come in for them to function at their fullest potential. Just like beachcombers do not legislate the tempo of the waves, Surfers’ best work is fueled by a rhythmic rush of Spirit and creativity over which they have no control. When the tide rushes in, a Surfer is prolific and indefatigable, often accomplishing in days what a Sergeant might take weeks to hammer out. Oh, but when the tide is out, a Surfer is challenged, if not bereft: spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional energies hover at bare subsistence levels. During low tide, a Surfer is sustained only by the tidal pools and puddles of inspiration and learning left over from previous big waves.

Both of these temperaments require discipline and faith in order to function well. Sergeants must keep plodding on in the absence of the energizing power of periodic peaks of excitement, while Surfers must apply themselves to maintain basic functionality between tides. Even during seasons when the ministry vineyard or the soil of the heart seem to lie fallow, Sergeants must keep faith that the disciplined dailyness of their efforts will bear fruit in time. And Surfers, in the lackluster, frustrating, and even frightening times between waves, must trust that God will send the tides at the right times, over and over again, so that life and ministry will be fulfilled according to God’s purposes.

On hearing the description of these two types, I instantly recognized myself as a Surfer. And I was enormously relieved because, up until that point, I had only heard of the Sergeant model and had been burdened all my life by the delusion that I was supposed to contort myself to function as a Sergeant. Now, I had the liberating sense that my task was not to be someone/someway else, but rather to be as faithful to God as possible in the context of how God had wired me as a Surfer.

As a Surfer, my devotional life has something of a seasonal quality to it. There are seasons when I am virtually obsessed with poring over Scripture, gleefully immersed in it, probing texts and reveling in the connections between texts and themes and concepts in the Bible. When I have reached a point of saturation, such a season may give way to a season of intense intercessory prayer, or it may transition into a season of ongoing, spontaneous worship throughout my days. Alternatively, I may find myself in a season of craving massive quantities of solitude so I can brood over the interior stock God has poured into me in recent seasons while I grope for insight and reach for deliverance. Another sort of season is one in which I find myself observing the world, reading voraciously, exploring a variety of areas of discourse. These and other seasons, each marked by the intensity of its own particular spiritual and intellectual appetite, come and go like tides in my life. The two constants, I must say, undergirding all these seasons, are the Bible (read or remembered), and prayer without ceasing. The transitions between seasons are a bit disconcerting, as I find myself in between one tide and the next, unable to focus on anything in particular and finding it difficult to be productive. At these times, indeed, I walk by faith in the One who loved me and gave Himself for me. It has been gratifying and calming to learn that God lets none of these seasons go to waste in my preaching life, each season in its own way making invaluable contributions to the sermons He subsequently sends to me and through me.

Perhaps because I am a Surfer, I have found that I do not approach sermon preparation the same way on a consistent basis. That is not to say that there are not some consistent practices that are important to my sermon development process; it is just that my approach is not predictable. Sermons are “conceived” in a variety of ways, and sermon “seeds” burst into my spirit and consciousness and lay claim to me from a variety of directions. The direction from which a sermon comes often determines, then, my starting point and approach. For example, sometimes while I am studying or meditating on Scripture, a fact, phrase, word, or image will arrest me. Occasionally a sermon will be conceived as I ruminate or pray over a particular problem—my own, someone else’s, or a community’s—and the Holy Spirit draws my attention to a biblical text that speaks, perhaps unexpectedly, to the dilemma of how to most faithfully face the difficulty at hand. Sometimes a biblical text will illuminate the spiritual or conceptual connections between events, relationships, or circumstances that until then had seemed unrelated. And then there are the times when some gracious soul invites me to preach for a particular occasion or on a particular theme, and I begin then to query the Spirit of God as to what He would want proclaimed in that place on that day to those people. These are just some of the ways the seed of a sermon emerges or is planted in my consciousness and begins to swirl around in my soul like a growing fireball.

After a sermon is conceived, there begins a completely delightful journey of sermonic exploration and organization, as I work with the Holy Spirit to have the sermon grow and take on some particular shape. I have found that several disciplines have consistently served in the development of my sermons: prayer, meditation, exegesis, research, imagination, and vulnerability. The way the sermon seed is planted in my spirit seems to dictate to some extent the order in which these disciplines are engaged in a particular sermon’s development.

For example, if the sermon seed is planted by way of my being arrested by something in a biblical text, then I am first most inclined to “sit with” the text, prayerfully meditating on it to discern what insight, revelation, healing, comfort, or correction is clamoring to make itself known from inside the text. It is as if the text were very much alive, “living and active,” breathing and compelling me to crack it open to find what it wants to show me. God is calling me, personally and directly, through the text, bidding me to lean my ear, my heart, and my life closer to hear what Divine utterance He would grant.

As a way of entering into the possibilities embedded in the biblical text, during this prayerful meditative phase I may use my “sanctified imagination” to construct a version of the feelings, motivations, needs, and impulses of the persons and groups in the text. This helps me begin to grasp some of the ways in which the text connects with universal human experience via particular circumstances. Cultivating some insight into human nature, through my own experiences and through the study of disciplines like psychology, sociology, history, and other social sciences, is very helpful in surmising a plausible picture of the unspoken, unwritten dynamics and impulses that permeate and surround every biblical scenario.

In preparing to preach, I try to exercise an intentional attitude of vulnerability to the text in my own life, allowing its encouragement or censure, its deliverance or discipline, to begin to work on me. To be sure, I am convinced that if we preach only what we have attained, then surely we are poor preachers, and that of a god no higher than we ourselves. Nevertheless, I consider submissive vulnerability before the biblical text to be essential for the humble proclamation of the Word of God. In listening to other preachers, I have found that such submission to the text injects an authentic personal energy into the proclamation of the Word, and further ensures the authenticity of the preacher in the preaching of it. Preachers need not speak specifically about themselves in sermons, but if sermons are preached after the preacher has submitted to being critiqued by the text, the preacher can proclaim with personal authority that the Word is true, lending an “Amen” to the authority and power that the Word has on its own. I have found, sometimes to my chagrin, that my Lord often wants to send a Word to me before He sends it through me. Of course, there are times when the Word really is sent through a preacher without necessarily being intended to speak specifically to the preacher; but I am persuaded that it is a good thing to keep the ego in check by attempting to hear what the Word is saying to me before I preach it to someone else.

Exegesis is the biblical inquirer’s version of a treasure hunt. The meaning of one of Jesus’ parables can be completely transformed by knowledge of some peculiarity of first-century Jewish culture, and the significance of some biblical character’s words or actions might be hidden in plain sight until one understands more details of the historical context. Further interpretive vistas are opened when one does studies of key words in the Greek or Hebrew text—it is astonishing how much English translations obscure even while they communicate the Word of God to us.

In my view, an exegetical reading of the biblical text (which is a relatively modern phenomenon) must go hand in hand with a meditative reading of the text (which is how the Bible was read and understood for centuries before the Enlightenment). Not that both readings must say the same thing. Because it is sacred Scripture and because it is text, it goes without saying that there are any number of ways to read, hear, and interpret a particular pericope. But if the exegetical reading and the meditational reading turn out to be in conflict, it is then time for me to bear down in prayer, to find the deeper point of insight and understanding my Lord is trying to guide me to. I have once in a while been forced to abandon what I thought were some very comely and preachable phrases and rhymes when I discovered that a point I intended to make in a sermon was exegetically untenable.

There have been times when I have preached a sermon series. These sermon series were a boon to me as a Surfer, especially when the “tide” was out, because the series allowed me to sustain attention and momentum with the series itself serving as the “wave” I rode to the sermonic shore. Furthermore, there are few things more fascinating than what God will reveal when we return repeatedly to a text or a theme, asking again and again, “What else is there, Lord? What else will You show me?” The Bible is an endless depth, and preaching a series is a thrilling way to progressively plumb those depths in one specific area.

Where is the listening congregation in all of this? When invited by a pastor to preach to a congregation, I often ask about the nature of the occasion and its theme, the demographics of the congregation and the neighborhood, whether the pastor currently has any ongoing issues or concerns that are being addressed in the congregation, and other such background questions. Having access to these types of information enables me to be sensitive and informed as I try to discern what the Lord is communicating to me for the congregation’s benefit.

After having been an itinerant preacher for many years, I found that preaching as a pastor is quite different from “guest preacher” preaching. For the four years that I pastored, I had a peculiar role in my listeners’ lives as their undershepherd, and our relationship was a far more intimate one than can be cultivated on an Annual Day. As the Spirit led me to see the relevance of the Word to the intricate details of my people’s lives, Scripture would come alive to me even more, and I did my best to pass that life on to my congregation during the preaching moment each week, as well as during Bible Study time. The context in which we worshiped together—in a house—also affected the shape of my sermons during that period. My house-church sermons often had a more conversational tone, as it was fitting in such a small space to have more of a dialogue together in the Word, along with the traditional “call and response.” By preaching from both pulpits and armchairs, I have learned that there is a special energy and ambiance that can be obtained when saints gather in a space built and set apart for the worship of God, and another special kind of energy that emerges in a home setting, where Jesus Himself also did quite a bit of preaching. I have found that the worship setting does indeed affect the shape and rhythm of the sermons I preach, and I have seen God save and nourish souls through it all.

Birthing a sermon, like birthing a child, is sometimes painful. In the early stages of sermon preparation, I deeply enjoy the pleasure of savoring the biblical insights that simmer in my head while Gospel passion percolates in my soul. But it is often difficult for me to transition from these delights to the labor of choosing finite words and phrases to put on paper. As a manuscript preacher, I must repeatedly overcome the temptation to procrastinate at this point in the process. Delays at this phase are costly because every delay shortcuts the ripening of the sermon on paper that happens during the first, second, third, and subsequent revisions of the manuscript. This reality of sermonic ripening renders the preaching moment something of a still photo of a sermon that has, in effect, become a living organism, capable of growth and development, seemingly ad infinitum.

Though I usually birth sermons into manuscript, once in a rare while a sermon will alternatively come to me as an outline and then stubbornly refuse to flower into a manuscript, insisting on being preached from the outline. Still more rarely a sermon will drop almost full-blown into my spirit. Whatever a sermon’s “final” form prior to the preaching moment, it is important to me that I take the time to become thoroughly familiar with it. Ideally, familiarity combined with a very large (16-point) typeface ensure that I will be far more engaged with God and the congregation than I am with the paper in front of me when it comes time to stand at the sacred desk.

Once a sermon is born and revised, there is nothing else here on earth to compare with the joy of proclaiming and manifesting the Presence of God to His people in the preaching moment. As terrifying as it is to stand in service of such an awesome God, it is also most life-affirming to experience God, in spite of my flawed and surfing self, condescending to use me in His work to save, comfort, correct, heal, encourage, and deliver His people. I am grateful for the privilege, and my life is sustained by the grace of it.

Sermon: “You Are on God’s Mind”

WILLETTE ALYCE BURGIE-BRYANT

God sits high. But God is not sitting high and just watching the clouds go by. God sits high and is lifted up above every name that can be named for a reason. God sits high and lifted up above every principality and every power, above everything in all creation for a purpose. God sits high and lifted up above every demon and every destruction, above every disease and every distress; God sits high and lifted up above every imaginable sin and every affliction, for a meaningful purpose, and that purpose is so that God can rule and reign. God sits high because God is sovereign; God sits high and lifted up because only God is God, and beside God there is no other God. God sits up high, exalted in the heavens, swaddled in glory! God sits high—and God looks low.

God looks low because God is busy. God looks low … to make sure there’s enough seed to be found when it’s feeding time for the birds of the air. God looks low … to take notice every time a sparrow falls from the sky. God looks low … to design high-end fashions for the lilies of the fields, and for the roses in your front yard. God looks low … to count the hairs on your head, and my head. God looks low … to prepare answers to our prayers before we even recognize the need to pray. God looks low … to search us, and to know us; to see our lying down and our rising up; to get acquainted with all of our wonderful and nasty ways. God looks low … to see just which of the riches in glory in Christ Jesus each of us will need from moment to moment to moment, each and every day. God looks low … to wield the two-edged sword of God’s Word, a sword so sharp it could split the bone from the marrow, so sharp it can dissect the intentions of the heart, a Word so sharp it can separate the need from the want, the real from the illusion, the foolishness from the faith. God wields a sword so sharp it can separate the sinner from the sin. Yes, God looks low … and sometimes, to catch a glimpse of us in all our low-down-ness, God has to look really low. But thanks be to God—God looks low, anyhow.

God sits high and looks low: God sits high enough to be in charge, and God looks low enough to make a difference. But why?

Why should God bother to extend Himself across the span of the distance between East and West? Why should God condescend to fill the void between North and South? Why should God reach out His arms of mercy and stretch them out till one hand touches heaven and the other touches hell. Why should God simultaneously sit high and look low?

God sits so high and looks so low because you … are on God’s mind.

You are on God’s mind. You are on God’s mind… .

Listen to a story: The people of Israel had been overwhelmed by a foreign, hostile power. They were dragged away from the safe and the familiar; they were taken away from their homes and separated from their sense of independence. They weren’t sure if their exile was more ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1: The Presence and Power of Christian Preaching
• 2: Sunday Comes Early
• 3: Listening for God
• 4: Rightly Dividing the Word
• 5: Preaching: A Holy and Human Venture
• 6: How I Prepare to Preach
• 7: Preaching the Prophetic Contradiction
• 8: Preaching from the Overflow
• 9: The Power of Narrative Preaching
• 10: Devotion to Delivery
• Notes