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.