“Do we really have to have one main idea for a sermon?” A pastor voiced his thought to me a few years ago. “It seems to me there are many ideas in the Scripture, and we should cover all of them.” I have had two conversations recently about the same subject. One pastor specifically asked about Abraham Kuruvilla’s argument against the big idea.
Is the big idea dead?
Many preachers today seem to follow a stream of consciousness as they meander from one thought to the next in their sermons, occasionally tying the idea to a biblical text. Homileticians have argued for centuries that sermons should be organized around a single main idea, a theme, or a proposition to be effective. However, some now question the concept of a central idea for a sermon.
Abraham Kuruvilla wrote an article in 2018 for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society entitled: “Time to Kill the Big Idea? A Fresh Look at Preaching.” I have great respect for Kuruvilla and have benefited much from his writing. I highly recommend Privilege the Text! His book, A Vision for Preaching, is excellent as well. Kuruvilla’s emphasis on finding the theological thrust of a pericope will help any preacher be more effective. He has the most extensive analysis of pericopes I have read, which I find very helpful. Having expressed those caveats, I remain unconvinced by his appeal to kill the big idea.
REDUCTIONISM
His primary argument is that a proposition, principle, or main idea reduces or distills the biblical pericope into a distillate that is then preached to the people, thereby losing much of what the text has to say in the process. Principlization tends, in his view, to interpose the preacher’s generalization between the people and the text instead of letting the text speak for itself. Kuruvilla is not against all reductionism in preaching but seeks to focus the message on the theological thrust of the passage of Scripture. He wants to protect the pragmatic thrust of the original author to guard our hermeneutics in preaching. What is the author doing by what he is saying? This thrust should guide our sermons so that the text speaks for itself.
All sermons, of course, interpose themselves to some extent between the text and the audience; otherwise, we would simply read the text without commentary. The moment we start explaining the text, we are interposing ourselves between the text and the listener since all explanations involve generalizations expressed in our words. The best sermons, however, seek to let the text preach itself as much as is humanly possible, so the big idea should reflect accurately what the thrust of the passage is. Therefore, reductionism is not an argument against all big ideas but against bad big ideas. The very act of preaching distills the pericope into our words. The issue is: does our distillation of the thrust of the passage accurately reflect what the original author intended?
BIG IDEAS: GOOD VS. BAD
Bad big ideas come from the preacher who uses the Bible as a resource to support what he wants to say. Kuruvilla is correct when he warns that such a big idea will “effectively depose the text from its rightful throne.”[1] Good big ideas derive from the text, demonstrating that the text is supreme, not the preacher. To accomplish this, the preacher must ensure that the pragmatic (theological) thrust of the specific passage drives the formation of the big idea. A good big idea emphasizes what God intended the specific text to do in our lives (pragmatics), not just what the text says in our words (semantics). The Bible should always be understood as transformative, not merely informative.
A pericope is a preachable unit of thought. The preacher selects a sliver of Scripture with a beginning and end to exposit, and the audience views the sermon as a stand-alone message for them. Expository preaching is unit of thought preaching. Each pericope is a unit (single) of thought (idea). We don’t preach units of thought but single ideas. Every pericope has a specific thrust that dominates the details of the passage. The big idea expresses the force of the specific biblical passage using the smaller ideas from the passage to flesh it out in the sermon. Every pericope, while sharing similarities to the rest of Scripture, has a unique, pragmatic thrust. Every sermon, therefore, should be unique and fresh, avoiding the dullness of sameness of much preaching.
A FINAL THOUGHT
The big idea is not the sermon. The rest of the sermon must flesh out the big idea while explaining the text. The big idea helps us map out the message. It gives shape to our explanation of the text. While it is essential that the big idea organize our message, it is less important that our listeners be able to repeat the big idea and more important that they grasp the main thrust of the passage. Most importantly, the preacher should bring the listener to the point of decision where the listener understands that God wants to change them in some way because of this text. God’s purpose from the Scripture is primary, not the preacher’s formulation of that purpose in the big idea.
RIP to the big idea? No! The big idea is not dead. Good preaching will always organize sermons around big ideas because God designed Scripture to express transformative ideas. The big ideas come from God. The small ideas come from us.
Our job is to preach God’s ideas, not our ideas.
[1] Abraham Kuruvilla, “Time to Kill the Big Idea? A Fresh Look at Preaching,” JETS, (December 2018) Vol. 61, No. 4, 833.
