Preaching skills and processes are taught in homiletics classes. It is important to remember that sermon construction is a process. It is much like the preparation and delivery of a speech, but is sufficiently different to gain its own category. Sermons grow forward from Scripture texts with embellishment by a speaker, or from life back to Scripture injunction. This is a vital perception – the genuine sermon has a text from sacred writing, and encourages a verdict response to self and God from listeners. A speech does not usually relate to a sacred text. It may have a secular text. It is not presumed to refer to divine preference, but may. The process of the sermon assumes that God is at work, through the speaker, who is thinking God’s thoughts after him. That claim is based on the belief in the authority of scriptural text that should not be violated of its meaning.
Sermons are sometimes divided into categories: 1) Expositional; 2) Textual; and, 3) Topical. In polls asking both lay and clergy to identify the types, there was rather uneven judgment about what category applied to this or that sermon type. Among evangelicals there is general feeling that the expositional sermon is the best. Among liberals the topical sermon may be more common. Contests on type do not really help. Each type has its place, if it is well constructed and faithful to a text that is believed to be from God who gives force to what is spoken. A topical sermon chooses a theme and develops it using biblical references as well as secular, and concluding with the over-all teaching of the Scriptures relative to the theme. Such a sermon is common for Mother’s Day, for New Year’s Day, and the like. The textual sermon grows out of a single verse or two that embraces an idea or action that mixes the theme of the text with arguments and illustrations related to the specifics of the textual theme. One word is usually dominant, with modifiers related logically to that word. An example might be taken from John 3:16 on the process of the redemptive experience. The expositional sermon includes a passage of Scripture of some length, perhaps a chapter, and develops the ideas of the complete extended passage. An example might be all of the 23rd Psalm, or First Corinthians 13. All sermons have similar factors in them. Sermon listeners have heard sermons of excellence from each type, and poor ones from each. A competent pastor ought to win the Christian congregation so to trust him in all this. He would do well to invite two or three mature elders to offer insights that improve his work.
As suggested in these pages, the force of sermons is currently underestimated. During the mid- 1920s, Harry Emerson Fosdick, preached a sermon entitled: Will the Fundamentalists Win? Controversy was brewing nationally on faith orientation. There was serious discussion going on, partly fueled by evolution debates. A man in Fosdick’s church had the sermon printed without Fosdick’s permission, and distributed it across the country. The manner in which it was offered virtually guaranteed a fight, misrepresentation, and identifications of churches into various camps of Christian accent. The controversy raged, abated in our time. The term fundamentalist fell upon bad days and the word evangelical emerged to identify the conservative wing of the Protestant Church, the wing that accented individual decision-making to redemptive experience. There are those who believe in that process in all Christian institutions, and those who tend to leave the matter to the Church relationship or the keeping of Church ordinances. Affirmative, perceptive Christians recognize differences, and evaluate sermons on their biblical theory for belief and practice as clarified in Scripture and declared by the preacher. Excellent periods for the church in history included effective biblical sermons and lessons. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020