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Is expository preaching the emphasis at Living Stones? Marco via my blog

Haddon Robinson in his book Biblical Preaching defines "expository preaching" this way:

I think that’s a pretty good definition. If you take this definition I would say that expository preaching at Living Stones is the norm and the rule. I was trained at Calvin Seminary which has a very strong bias towards expository preaching and a strong bias against topical preaching. The message must always originate from the Bible. That is where we begin.

Having said that, I am also aware that there are many different preaching traditions and sometimes form, function and content get confused. I would say I am strongly an expository preacher, but I am not a traditional preacher. Let me see if I can explain the difference and some of the background possibly by what some others might imagine "expository" to mean.

Some churches define "expository" in terms of text selection. For some "expository" means that your text selection follows books of the Bible. For example, This week we preach from Mark 1, next week Mark 2.... We sometimes do sermon series like these. I’ve done a variety of them from a variety of Old and New Testament books. I am currently doing this in our adult Sunday School class which I find to be a better forum for this mode of study. We don’t restrict ourselves to this method, however.

Another tradition in preaching is to read the Biblical text prior to the sermon. This is a find tradition that has Biblical warrant (see Luke 4 and Jesus’ sermon at Nazareth). There are other sermons in the Bible that do not function this way. Most of the time I do not preach this way and this sometimes confuses people who have been steeped in churches where this is the tradition.

Why not preach this way?

1. The job of the preacher is to communicate with the audience. In order to do this you have to get into the head of the audience. If your audience is already motivated to learn what Luke 7 says then that method makes a lot of sense. Many of us, however, tend towards the self-absorbed and self-obsessed. We may not be highly motivated to find out what a particular passage says for its own sake. We need someone to draw us in, to paint an enticing picture, to give us a reason to listen. Everyone who has ever taken a speech class knows what is suppose to accomplish this: the introduction. Good sermons need good introductions to help break through the fog and focus on what God wants to say to us. In many cases, reading the Biblical text prior to the passage doesn’t help many listeners prepare to really hear what the text says, which is why we have sermons and don’t just read passages in church.

2. Most of us have an easier time listening to a story rather than listening to a string of abstract thoughts. We should ask ourselves why most of the Bible is narrative and poetry? Because God wired us, knows how we are wired and uses how we are wired to communicate effectively with us. Sermons in our culture have often suffered from the notion that we should take the narrative and poetic language of the Bible and distill from it some abstract thought to be presented and adopted. There isn’t anything wrong with this, necessarily. The Apostle Paul does a lot of this in his Epistles, and it is a reason much historical protestant preaching has often focused disproportionately on the Epistles. Jesus, however, tended not to preach this way. He used parables. Parables is powerful because they have elements of story and they are also concrete so they can communicate a wide range of things to a broad range of people. Many of Jesus’ parables have surprising twists and ironies. Often reading the whole parable before you preach the sermon lets the cat out of the bag. I often find it better, especially in preaching from Old Testament narrative or from the Gospels to unfold the text in the process of the sermon rather than unfolding it first and explaining it. Often explaining narrative, poetry or parables is like explaining a joke. The power is in the telling of it so why diffuse the payload before you’re ready. I want the passage I am preaching from to have the impact that the story or prophesy was designed to have for its original audience. It should be surprising, audacious, horrendous, world shattering. My job as preacher is to have my sermon serve that function, not defuse it. Some people of course already know the punchline and that is fine. Hopefully they too can have a narrative experience where the story is engaging, audacious and life changing.

3. A third reason I seldom read the text prior to the sermon is because I believe context is crucial, not only in terms of the exegetical steps of sermon preparation, but also in terms of hearing the passage and applying it to our lives. Many have heard the old adage "a text without a context becomes a pretext for whatever we want it to mean." This is not only true in exegesis, it is also true in homiletics. In the last 20 years the idea of "just in time learning" has become a bit of a fad. It does make sense, however. I might never be very motivated to learn boat building, until I’m stranded on a deserted island. As human beings living in history context determines a great deal of our motivation. People will often in just tune out hearing a Biblical text read to them because it has no context for their lives. However, if the context is appropriate listeners can be highly motivated to hear what the Bible has to say and even apply it to their lives. For this reason I will often spend a large amount of my sermon setting people up for hearing the text. Framing the text appropriately is absolutely crucial for assimilating the text as authoritative for their lives. They have to see where it fits into the big picture often before they can see the value of it. Even Christians with a high view of Scripture struggle with this. Our most important relationship with Scripture sometimes has less to do with the doctrinal and technical words we use to describe it than the way we actually apply it to our lives and trust it over and against whatever wisdom of the age we are struggling with.

4. Having said all of this I often break my own rules. This Sunday I’m preaching on Isaiah 5, the whole chapter. It is a thundering chapter and I may start the sermon with a dramatic reading of the text. Every sermon must be uniquely shaped at the intersection that Haddon Robinson’s definition describes. That’s why God gives us living preachers, and not just scripts to read or videos to play.

Hope this helps. Pvk