CLICKBAIT OR FREEWAY SERMONS: WHAT KIND OF PREACHER ARE YOU?

Posted on Jun 20, 2022 in BLOG |

Preachers often search the Bible to find some text that inspires them – that “will preach!” We want sermons with “pizzaz!” The result is that much preaching is driven by the audience more than the text. We are afraid we will bore people by talking about God and the Bible instead of their questions and needs. We are afraid that God-centered preaching will be old-fashioned and archaic. Text-driven preaching is becoming a dinosaur in the evangelical world.

What kind of preacher are you?

FELT NEED AND LIFE APP SERMONS

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) was the epitome of the “felt-need” and “life app” megachurch preacher of the early 20^th century. “Every sermon should have for its main business the solving of some problem,” he wrote.[1] Start with human needs and questions. Meet those needs and answer those questions in the sermon. This is the way to reach people from the pulpit, Fosdick argued, because “there is nothing that people are so interested in as themselves, their own problems, and how to solve them.”[2]

Much modern preaching is Fosdickian in methodology. He has won the day in our evangelical pulpits across America, even though Fosdick was an avowed liberal theologian. Many preachers claim, “You can’t preach expositional sermons today.” “People don’t care about Moses and Paul. People want to know what will help them solve their problems in the 21^st century, and answer their questions this week. We need to meet people where they live.” The result is that we hear many self-help, how-to sermons that focus on the felt needs of modern people.

DEVOTIONAL SERMONS

Devotional sermons have been around for a long time. Preachers go to the Bible looking for a fresh insight or some thought that inspires them without any rigorous study. The preacher attributes these insights to the Holy Spirit. Everyone wants fresh insights to preach. It sounds very pious and spiritual. It is also very popular. The preacher can stand on the platform and say, “God spoke to me this week” or “God laid on my heart to share this message with you today.” William Sangster, the 20^th-century Methodist pastor, wrote about devotional preachers, “The Spirit spurns their superstitious sloth!”[3]

Devotional sermons today often devolve into personal anecdotes and human wisdom. The text of Scripture is spiritualized, and the insights are personalized. The preacher talks more about himself and what God is doing in his life than he does about God and the Bible. We often learn more about the preacher than we do about Christ. The preacher seems like a normal person. The sermons are fresh and inspirational, so people enjoy them, but too often, the preacher becomes the message, not the messenger.

CLICKBAIT SERMONS

Social media has changed how we communicate. Sound bites rule the world. Our posts generate clicks if they are clever, controversial, humorous, or shocking. Messages must be summarized in 140-word tweets, and short posts in our news feeds. People love their memes – short, clever summaries in picture and word that capture complex issues and boil them down to simplistic generalizations. Everything is black and white. There are no grayscale conversations. Nuance and depth are lost to clickbait headlines.

Unfortunately, preachers are tempted by the culture to preach clickbait sermons. These are sermons drawn more from the news feeds than from the Bible. Biblical texts, when used, are often allegorized to refer to a modern person or situation. Shock statements get the attention of people, and humor attracts followers. Sermons become catchy, clever, and chatty. Preachers work hard to come up with one-liners that people will remember and sound bites that are interesting. What is missing is biblical depth. Sermons become bird bath sermons, an inch deep and a mile wide.

PANNING FOR GOLD SERMONS

Many preachers start out being conscientious in their exegesis. They don’t want to be guilty of eisegesis, reading their ideas into the text, so they cover their desks with books and examine the semantics and syntax of the Greek or Hebrew text. Examining all the historical and cultural details, they gather massive amounts of biblical data in their quest to discover gold. It is like panning for gold. We sift the gravel until we find the gold. We engage in a desperate search for gold nuggets embedded in the gravel that we can share with our people. Sunday comes, and we must distill what we have, even if it means preaching the sand at the bottom of the pan.

STRINGING PEARLS SERMONS

A favorite approach going back to the Jewish Rabbis was to take a text and add text after text to it with bits of commentary interspersed. The teacher would explain one text, then move to the next text and follow the same pattern. The sermon became a string of pearls. For example. Rabbi Meir preached on Deuteronomy 32:1 and added 32 related or parallel texts to explain the text.[4]

Many Christian preachers follow the same pattern of preaching. The preacher takes a phrase or even a word, then talks about what it means in Greek and takes the listener to 4 other parallel texts as part of the sermon. The result is parallelomania. We love our biblical comparisons and our spiritual insights. The sermon follows the text, phrase by phrase and verse by verse, with many parallel passages interspersed. Preaching becomes a running commentary with no cohesive message. We are stringing pearls together. The pearls of insight may be beautiful and helpful, but they don’t explain the biblical passage as a unit of thought.

FREEWAY SERMONS

Roy Taylor, a professor of homiletics at Reformed Seminary, once began a chapel message by saying he was going to preach a “freeway” sermon. He meant that he was going to preach a sermon that stayed on the highway and didn’t get off at any exits. As preachers, there are often many exits from the freeway of the text. We look at many exciting and interesting places to explore, but it is easy to become distracted from the unit of thought we are preaching.[5] We must avoid the distractions – the rabbit trails – and stick to the thrust of the passage. God-centered preaching helps us stay on the freeway because we ask what God wanted to accomplish with this text.

Am I using the Bible as a source or a resource?

David Helm, in his book, Expositional Preaching, says, “Some preachers use the Bible the way a drunk uses a lamp post, more for support than for illumination.” He calls it “inebriated” preaching.[6] It is easy to use the Bible as a resource for our preaching rather than the source of our sermons. If I am using the Bible as a resource, then I use the Bible to support what I want to say. The Bible sanctifies my ideas with God’s authority. I become inebriated with my ideas. If I am using the Bible as a source, then I seek to preach what the text says. I expose the text to the people. The thrust of the passage becomes the thrust of my sermon. I become inebriated with God’s ideas.

[1] Victor Parachin, https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/2019/06/Lessons-in-preaching-from-Harry-Emerson-Fosdick

[2] John Bishop, https://www.preaching.com/articles/past-masters/harry-emerson-fosdick-preaching-to-achieve-results/

[3] William E. Sangster, The Craft of Sermon Construction, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1951, 28.

[4] Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, 1:104-107.

[5] Dale Ralph Davis, The Word Became Fresh, 130.

[6] David Helm, Expositional Preaching: How We Speak God’s Word Today, Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2014, 24.