Jack Mercer

Life-Situational Preaching

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Life-situational preaching has as its starting point the personal concerns of its audience. It seeks to bring the hearer into the Word of God by making connections between Scripture and the hurts and issues of life.

The Starting Point. Life-situational preaching arises from the problems of life and seeks to touch the listener at the point of his or her personal concerns. Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), pastor of New York’s historic Riverside Church from 1926 to 1946, and closely associated with the development of life-situational preaching, called it “personal counseling on a group basis.” Whereas expository preaching begins with the biblical text and seeks to apply it to life, and topical preaching begins with a subject and seeks to make it relevant to life, life-situational preaching begins with life itself and seeks, in the words of one life-situational preacher, “to find a need and meet it; find a hurt and heal it.”

Fosdick summarized the method involved in life-situational preaching this way: “Start with a life issue, a real problem, personal or social, perplexing the mind or disturbing the conscience; face that problem fairly, deal with it honestly and throw such light on it from the spirit of Christ, that people will be able to think more clearly and live more nobly because of that sermon” (Twenty Centuries of Great Preaching, Vol. 9: Fosdick to E. Stanley Jones, 16). The aim of life-situational preaching, then, is to bring hope and healing to the listener in the midst of the problems of life.

The History and Future of Life-Situational Preaching. The roots of life-situational preaching are difficult to trace. In one sense, a case can be made that all the New Testament Epistles, especially those of Paul, addressing as they did the issues of the early church, are a form of life-situational preaching. Another perspective, however, is to see life-situational preaching emerging from the theological and existential context of its foremost popularizer, Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick was a self-avowed theological liberal, influenced by such theologians as Walter Rauschenbush and Frederich Schleiermacher, who took as their starting point the experiential and social dilemma of humanity rather than divine revelation. It is little wonder that Fosdick, champion of liberal theology at the turn of the century, would develop a preaching method that began with humanity’s problems rather than with God’s problem with humanity. Following a mental breakdown, Fosdick described the major impetus to his preaching as a desire to “get at folks—ordinary, everyday folks—and try to help them” (Twenty Centuries of Great Preaching, Vol. 9:7). The irony is that life-situational preaching, which began as a preaching method in the theologically liberal tradition, is now practiced most often in evangelical pulpits.

In their desire to reach an increasingly secularized world, evangelicals have focused their attention on the needs and hurts of humanity. The needs and hurts evangelical preachers address are typically of a personal rather than societal nature. Life-situational preaching is employed in one form or another by popular evangelical preachers as diverse as Robert Schuller and Bill Hybels. Echoes can also be heard in the preaching of Charles Swindoll. The strength of life-situational preaching, especially in regard to evangelism, is its ability to meet people at the place where life pinches and to bring to bear the resources of the gospel. Life-situational preaching takes seriously, in a way that many other methods of preaching do not, the hurts and needs of the people.

Critique

Focused on the problems of individuals, life-situational preaching is prone to excessive individualism, which ignores both the communal dimension of its listeners as the gathered church and the sometimes systemic nature of the problems individuals are facing. Furthermore, as Thomas Long has suggested, this method in preaching “overworks relevance” and thus disregards the gospel’s prophetic message that some problems (sin, death, social inequities—to name just a few) will not be resolved this side of the kingdom of God (The Witness of Preaching [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989], 34). Yet the most serious critique of life-situational preaching has been that this method ignores the Bible in favor of psychology and reduces “theology to anthropology” (The Witness of Preaching, 35). Harry Emerson Fosdick, toward whom all these critiques were leveled, at one time or another defended the life-situational method in preaching as follows: “The [life-situational] sermon is a mediation of the revelation of God in Christ … an opportunity so to mediate a knowledge of God and the saving power of Christ that lives can be transformed.” A reading of Fosdick’s sermons will quickly reveal that he succeeded in his defense of this preaching method. However, there has been only one Harry Emerson Fosdick.

The applicability of life-situational preaching for today is as a corrective to preaching which, in a desire to be faithful to the biblical revelation, forgets that it is to the needs of humanity that the biblical revelation is addressed. The life-situational method in preaching calls upon the preacher to take seriously the jagged edges of the listener’s marriage failed career, or children run amok. Life-situational preaching forces the preacher to consider as homiletic grist the day-to-day stuff of life that pinches at the preacher and his or her listeners as well. Life-situational preaching seeks to touch people where they are and, when done aright, where the Spirit of God wishes to be incarnate through the preached Word.

Confessional Preaching

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Confessional preaching arises out of the situation of the preacher. It builds on a personal experience, a matter of struggle, a triumph. It thereby connects with the lives of the hearers and draws them into the Word of God for their own situations.

Background

Confessional preaching is defined by its most famous contemporary practitioner, John R. Claypool, as a willingness “to share out of my own light and my own darkness—to share the truths that are saving me and the places where I find the struggle still to be most acute” (The Preaching Event [New York: Harper and Row, 1990], 89). Confessional preaching seeks to give the listener entree into the preacher’s innermost struggles, conflicts, and joys as a means of finding the full range of salvation offered in Christ.

Claypool’s first efforts in confessional preaching came out of one of his life’s darkest moments—the loss of his eight-year-old daughter, Laura Lue, to acute leukemia. Through a series of confessional sermons, compiled in a book entitled The Tracks of A Fellow Struggler, Claypool sought to make sense of God’s dealings with humanity for his listeners. Out of the crucible of that experience, Claypool further refined his confessional preaching method in the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching delivered at Yale and published under the title, The Preaching Event (mentioned above).

An early example of confessional preaching may be seen in Paul’s defense before King Agrippa in the twenty-sixth chapter of Acts. In his speech before Agrippa, Paul rests the validation of both his faith and ministry on his Damascus road experience. He seeks to win Agrippa to faith by giving testimony to his personal experience. Through the history of the church, others, like Paul, have used their personal experience as the starting point in their preaching—e.g., Augustine in his Confessions and John Wesley by way of his Aldersgate experience. Yet it has been only in the last quarter of the twentieth century that confessional preaching (understood as more than an evangelistic testimony of how the preacher was converted) has increased in popularity.

In many ways, confessional preaching’s growing acceptance in the mid-seventies may be seen to arise out of the human potential movement in psychology and the lay renewal movement in the church. Robert Raines, one of the early popularizers of confessional preaching or “preaching from the inside out,” as he describes preaching that starts with the preacher’s own personal struggles, points to Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, Erik Erikson, and others associated with the human potential movement of the mid-seventies as having influenced his preaching. Claypool acknowledges the influence of the lay renewal movement and such proponents as Paul Tournier and Keith Miller, whose book The Taste of New Wine called the laity to a new openness in sharing. Today Claypool sees echoes of the confessional style in the writings of Frederick Buechner, especially his three-volume spiritual autobiography (The Sacred Journey, Now and Then, and Telling Secrets). His most confessional work, Telling Secrets, is shaped by the recovery movement (Twelve Steps, Co-Dependency, etc.), which gives some indication that confessional preaching has shifted its locus from the human potential movement to its natural successor, the recovery movement.

Critique

Confessional preaching’s greatest strength may be in allowing listeners to enter into the experience of the preacher to find resources for help in their own situations. When confessional preaching is overused or used exclusively, the following dangers are inherent: exalting the preacher above Christ; psychological exhibitionism; and ignoring the social implications of the gospel. As D.T. Niles said, however, the power of one beggar showing another where he has found bread is irrefutable. One has only to read the second chapter (“The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing”) in A. W. Tozer’s classic devotional work The Pursuit of God (Harrisburg, Pa.: Christian Publications, 1948) to understand, by its absence, the power of confession. As spiritually moving as is Tozer’s description of Abraham’s offering up of Isaac to God, it is more gripping to know Tozer wrote the chapter out of his own spiritual struggle to turn his own daughter over to God—a fact Tozer does not reveal.

Cautioning the preacher to “hide behind the cross” is warranted. Yet, the cross behind which the preacher hides would do well to be a cross that bears witness both to the preacher’s truthful story of his or her own frailty and to the Christ who redeems that frailty. This is the cross that confessional preaching lifts up.

Narrative Preaching

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In recent years, the paradigm shift from a rationalistic worldview to a world in motion has shifted attention in biblical studies and preaching away from propositional statements to story. Narrative preaching draws on the Scripture as a story and seeks to communicate through the form of a story.

The Importance of Story

Narrative preaching is story-formed preaching—preaching that takes seriously, in method and form, Clark Pinnock’s suggestion that “the essence of the gospel … is the biblically narrated epic story of salvation through Jesus Christ” (Tracking the Maze [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990], 154). Flowing out of the recent trend in biblical studies, theology, and ethics to make narrative their guiding construct, many contemporary preachers have also made narrative their touchstone. As Edmund Steimle, Morris Niedenthal, and Charles Rice stated in their collaborative work on narrative preaching:

We are trying to find that formative image that could both articulate what preaching is and free people to do it. Is there an image adequate to shape the form, content, and style of preaching? If we had to say, in a word or two or in a picture, what preaching is and how it is done well, what would that phrase or picture be? … Let us consider the storyteller.… If we were pressed to say what Christian faith and life are, we could hardly do better than hearing, telling, and living a story. And if asked for a short definition of preaching, could we do better than a shared story? (Preaching the Story [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979], 12-13, 15)

Narrative preaching is an emerging methodology, and the last word on how narrative preaching should be defined is yet to be written.

A better perspective from which to view narrative preaching is to look at the methodologies of some of its leading practitioners. What one learns, as Thomas Long notes, is that narrative preaching gives foremost attention to the “how” of preaching versus other preaching methods, which may evince greater concern with sermonic content or the preacher’s own ethos (The Witness of Preaching [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989], 36). As Richard L. Eslinger points out in his book A New Hearing: Living Options in Homiletic Method (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988), a review of five narrative preachers (Charles Rice, Henry Mitchell, Eugene Lowery, Fred Craddock, and David Buttrick), preachers of this method intend to shape their sermons after the fashion of the gospel, which for them, with the exception of David Buttrick, is nothing less than narrative. For these preachers, the form of the sermon is narrative, not discursive, evocative not rationalistic, dynamic not static, inductive not deductive, and true to the shape of Scripture, not Aristotelian rhetoric or logic. For them, narrative preaching is narrative both in form and in method, utilizing all aspects of narrative technique (plot, character development, and so on) to bring to the listener’s consciousness the interplay between his or her own story and the biblical story.

Critique

Narrative preaching is not without its critics, as the growing literature makes known this method’s implications. Perhaps the most common critique leveled against narrative preaching is its failure to acknowledge the fact that, while the biblical witness is to the redemptive story of God’s dealings with humanity through Christ, Scripture also contains poetry, proverbs, and extended didactic passages. Only David Buttrick, who advocates both the narrative technique in preaching and faithfulness to the biblical form of the passage being preached, deals with this issue. Thomas Long’s critique of narrative preaching deals with the overemphasis on evaluating a sermon’s effectiveness by whether the sermon evoked a religious experience rather than whether it communicated a propositional truth of Scripture. As Long notes, preachers favoring a more rationalistic preaching methodology have a point when they remind us that God’s revelation may not always move us when we want to be moved, but nonetheless, it is God’s revelation (The Witness of Preaching, 40–41).

Narrative preaching, however, has some very practical benefits. First, no other preaching methodology is as intent on forming sermons to the shape of Scripture. Second, narrative preaching integrates concern for the biblical story, the listener’s story (concerns, needs, experiences), and the preacher’s story in a way few other preaching methodologies can or do. Third, narrative preaching is able to evoke the experiential dimension of faith in the listener in a way that rationalistic and cognitive methodologies, such as expositional preaching, cannot. It is not without reason, then, that Jesus “never taught them without a story.”

The Historical Context for Narrative Preaching’s Emergence

The application of narrative preaching moves along two axes: theology and praxis. From a theological perspective, many preachers, such as Thomas Oden, Clark Pinnock, and others, point to the end of the twentieth century as a transition phase between modernity and postmodernity. Whereas the paradigms of modernity were, according to Oden, rationalism, secularism, and radical individualism, the paradigms of the postmodern era are or will be a metaphor, tradition (i.e., shared story), and community (Agenda for Theology [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979], 48-49). The problem this poses for preaching is that the assumptions of the old homiletic worked out against modernity’s background no longer hold true. Richard Eslinger, commenting on the preaching of David Buttrick, notes:

The old rational homiletics is obsolete. “For nearly three hundred years, preaching has been trapped in a rationalist bind,” observes David Buttrick. But the conditions that made for its viability no longer stand. Every dimension of homiletics—biblical interpretation, hermeneutics, language, theology, the liturgical context, and even human consciousness—has changed radically. (A New Hearing, 133)

Whereas modern preaching has depended on reason, logic, and propositional truth, narrative preaching depends on the metaphor, image, and story—qualities more in tune with a postmodern world. The preacher who is sensitive to the shift in consciousness from a modern to a postmodern world will readily welcome the applied benefits of narrative preaching.