How playwright Tetsuro Shigematsu has transformed my homiletics classes
His advice: be yourself, be underprepared, be weird.
Recent decades in American preaching have attempted several routes to solve the problem of the dull sermon. Fred Craddock suggested we preach narratively. Don’t boil a biblical text down to abstract “points,” but rather, present the Bible as the Bible presents itself: narratively. The problem is none of Craddock’s students could do this as well as Craddock could. Except Barbara Brown Taylor, who did it so well that it was discouraging to us mere mortals.
Tom Long has seen a reaction against such nondoctrinal preaching. His students are not allergic to doctrine and not entertained by stories. They tend to preach, well, three-point doctrinal sermons—of the very sort that Fred Craddock once reacted against.
Meanwhile, evangelicals influenced by Andy Stanley approach a sermon with one “big idea,” illustrated with a big introductory story meant to hook hearers into listening.
