Not all preachers write out their sermons, nor do preachers who write out sermons write out every sermon, but the discipline of preparing a manuscript improves preaching. Writing scrapes the fungus off our thought, arranges our ideas in order, and underlines the important ideas.

An expository preacher professing a high view of inspiration should respect the power of words. To affirm that the individual words of Scripture must be God-breathed, but then to ignore our own choice of language smacks of gross inconsistency. Our theology, if not our common sense, should tell us that ideas and words cannot be separated.

Our choice of words is called style. Everyone possesses style—be it bland, dull, invigorating, precise—but however we handle or mishandle words becomes our style. Style reflects how we think and how we look at life. Style varies with different speakers, and an individual speaker will alter his or her style for different audiences and different occasions. The polished wording used in a baccalaureate sermon would sound completely out of place in a small group Bible study.

While rules governing good writing also apply to the sermon manuscript, a sermon is not an essay on its hind legs because what you write serves only as a broad preparation for what you will actually say. Your manuscript is not your final product. Your sermon should not be read to a congregation. Reading usually kills a lively sense of communication. Neither should you try to memorize your manuscript. Your manuscript, therefore, contributes to the thought and wording of your sermon, but it does not determine it.

Writing a sermon differs from writing an essay or a book. Write as though you were talking with someone, and as in conversation, strive for immediate understanding. Authors know that their readers need not grasp an idea instantly. Readers can examine a page at leisure, reflect on what they have read, argue with the ideas, and move along at any rate they find comfortable.

STRONG TRANSITIONS#

There are several techniques that can help you think with fierceness and communicate with clarity. Try indenting and labeling your manuscript according to your outline. The supporting material for that point would be indented. By doing this, you will imprint on your mind the coordination and subordination of the ideas in your sermon. Listeners, of course, do not hear an outline. They hear a sermon. The outline and the manuscript are for your benefit.

In addition, because transitions carry a heavy burden in spoken communication, they take up more space in a sermon manuscript. Listeners hear your sermon only as a series of sentences. Transitions serve as road signs to point out where the sermon has been and where it is going. Transitions, therefore, are longer and more detailed than in writing.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of clear transitions for clear communication. Major transitions will appear between the introduction and the first major point, and then between the major points within the sermon, and between the body of the sermon and the conclusion. Strong transitions will usually review the major points already covered and show the listener how the points relate to the major idea and to each other, and then they introduce the next point. As a result, major transitions can take up to a paragraph or more in the sermon manuscript.

Minor transitions that link sub-points together may be shorter: sometimes a single word (therefore, besides, yet, consequently), at other places a phrase (in addition to that, what is more, as a result of this), and even more often a sentence or two. Although a writer may imply transitions, a speaker must develop them. It is important to state your point, restate it “in other words,” even restate it again, and then repeat it. Clear, full, definite transitions look clumsy on paper, but they run easily in a sermon, and they enable your congregation to think your thoughts with you. A major reason that sermons fail to be clear is that the transitions have not been well crafted.

A CLEAR STYLE#

What characteristics of style should you try to cultivate? First of all, you must be clear. A sermon is not deep because it is muddy. Whatever has been thought through can be stated simply and clearly. Similarly, we do not understand a passage from the Bible or a point of theology unless we can express it clearly to the men and women sitting before us.

Make no mistake about it. For preachers, clarity is a moral matter. It is not merely a question of rhetoric, but a matter of life and death. When we proclaim God’s truth, we must be clear. If we believe that what we preach either draws people to God or keeps them away from Him, then for God’s sake and the people’s sake, we must be clear.

Imagine a mass meeting in China with a Communist launching a tirade against Christianity. Someone jumps to his feet and shouts, “Jesus is the Messiah!” The audience would be startled, and the Christian would be ejected for disturbing the meeting. But suppose he cried out, “Jesus Christ is God! He is the only Lord, and all who make the system into a god will go to hell, along with their Communist leaders.” The objector would risk being torn to pieces by the authorities. Clarity reveals the offense of the gospel. It also provides life and hope.

A Clear Outline#

How then can you bring clarity to your sermon? Clear manuscripts develop out of clear outlines. Communication originates in the mind—not in the fingers, not in the mouth, but in the head. Some preachers have jerky minds. While they have stimulating insights, their thought follows no natural sequence, and their zigzag thinking runs listeners to death. After a bewildering half hour trying to keep up with a jerky speaker, hearers will feel that listening to a dull friend comes as a soothing relief, like taking a cat in your lap after trying to hold on to a squirrel. Zigzag thinking can be straightened out only by outlining your overall thought before working on the details. Laboring over an individual paragraph or sentence is pointless unless you know the broad sweep of thought in your sermon. Clear manuscripts and clear sermons develop from clear outlines.

Short Sentences#

Furthermore, to be clear, keep your sentences short. Rudolph Flesch, in The Art of Plain Talk, maintains that clarity increases as sentence-length decreases. According to his formula, a clear writer will average about seventeen or eighteen words to a sentence, and will not allow any sentence to wander on over thirty words.70 In your sermon manuscript, short sentences keep your thought from tangling and therefore are easier for you to remember. When you deliver your sermon, you will not concern yourself at all with sentence length, just as you do not think about commas, periods, or exclamation points. As you preach, your words tumble out in long, short, or even broken sentences, punctuated by pauses, vocal slides, and variations in pitch, rate, and force. Short sentences in your manuscript serve your mind; they have little to do with your delivery.

Simple Sentence Structure#

Keep sentence structures simple. A clearer, more energetic style emerges when you follow the thinking sequence: main subject, main verb, and (where needed) main object. In the jargon of grammarians, concentrate on the independent clause before adding dependent clauses (an independent clause can stand alone as a complete sentence; a dependent clause cannot). If you start into a sentence without pinning down what you want to emphasize, you may end up stressing insignificant details. If you add too many dependent clauses, you complicate your sentences, and that makes them harder to understand and remember. Generally, style will be clearer if you package one thought in one sentence. For two thoughts, use two sentences. Arthur Schopenhauer scolded the Germans, “If it is an impertinent thing to interrupt another person when he is speaking, it is no less impertinent to interrupt yourself.” Complicated sentences have an additional disadvantage: they slow the pace of the sermon. As Henry Ward Beecher put it, “A switch with leaves on it doesn’t tingle.”

Simple Words#

Simple words also contribute to a clear style. Theologians and ministers seem to keep themselves in office by resorting to language that bewilders ordinary mortals. Beware of jargon! Specialized vocabulary helps professionals within a discipline to communicate. But it becomes jargon when it is used unnecessarily or with people who do not understand it. While it takes three years or more to get through seminary, it can take you ten years to get over it. If you pepper your sermons with words like eschatology, angst, pneumatology, exegesis, existential, Johannine, the Christ-event, you throw up barriers to communication.

Use a short word unless you find it absolutely necessary to use a longer word. Long words have paralysis in their tails. Seventy-three percent of the words in Psalm 23, seventy-six percent of the words in the Lord’s Prayer, and eighty percent of the words in 1 Corinthians 13 are one-syllable words. All the big things in life have little names, such as life, death, peace, war, dawn, day, night, hope, love, home. Learn to use small words in a big way.

No matter how accurately a phrase or word expresses a speaker’s meaning, it is worthless if the listeners do not know what it means. This does not mean that you should talk down to a congregation. Instead, your rule of thumb should be: Don’t overestimate your audience’s religious vocabulary, or underestimate their intelligence.

A DIRECT AND PERSONAL STYLE#

In addition to being clear, a second major characteristic of spoken style is that it must be direct and personal. Preachers speak to their hearers face to face and call them by name. Therefore a sermon should not sound like a thesis read to a congregation. It sounds like lively conversation where the speaker is thinking in the act of speaking. The feeling of good preaching is that you are talking to and with your hearers. You are thinking about ideas the instant that you utter them. Both speaker and listener sense they are in touch with each other.

Speakers will use questions where writers may not. A question invites the listener to think about what the preacher will say next, and often is used in a transition to introduce a major point or a new idea. Questions are sometimes employed in the conclusion of a sermon. Questions show clearly that the audience and speaker are face-to-face. Good questions provoke thought and help listeners anticipate what will come next.

Any speech appropriate in lively conversation fits preaching. This doesn’t mean, of course, that anything goes. Poor grammar, gutter language, or faulty pronunciations may unsettle listeners, and like a giggle in a prayer meeting, all of these raise doubts about a preacher’s competence.

What about the use of slang? It gets mixed reviews. When it is used deliberately, slang can capture attention and inject a sense of casualness and informality into the sermon. When it is used thoughtlessly, slang sounds trite and even cheap, and it betrays a lazy mind. Personal, direct speech does not call for careless use of language or inappropriate or undignified English. The language of effective preaching should be the language of stimulating conversation between thoughtful people.

A VIVID STYLE#

Vividness is a third characteristic of effective style. We learn about the world around us through hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch. To get your listeners to experience your message, therefore, you must appeal to their senses. You do this directly through both sight and sound. Your congregation sees your gestures and facial expressions and hears what you say. You also stimulate the senses indirectly through your use of words. Language helps listeners recall impressions of past experiences and, to some degree, they respond to the words as they did to the events. Your words cause people to connect with new experiences out of feelings about past experiences.

Your vividness increases when you use specific, concrete details and plenty of them. We label a phrase specific when it is explicit and exact, and concrete if it paints a picture on the mind. Specific details add interest if they are concrete. They communicate because they relate to the experiences of the audience. Therefore, instead of produce, say cabbages, cucumbers, carrots, and oranges. Rather than weapon, talk about a heavy lead pipe. Instead of major cities, be specific: New York, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco.

Your speech will become more vivid if you let nouns and verbs carry your meaning. Adjectives and adverbs clutter speech, and they keep company with weak nouns and verbs. Verbs, like nouns, wake up the imagination when they are precise. She went gets her there, but not as clearly as crawled, stumbled , shuffled, lurched. He shouts, shrieks, rants, whispers tell us what says does not say.

Your vividness also increases when you employ fresh figures of speech. Metaphors and similes produce sensations in listeners and cause them to recall images of past experiences.

Metaphors and similes, like lobsters, must be served fresh. Both the literal and figurative meanings should strike the mind of the listener at the same instant. When the literal image fades because the comparison has been overworked, the figure loses its force. Hearers become tone-deaf to them.

When a comparison has turned stale, toss it out and come up with a fresh one that clarifies your point and keeps your audience alert. Relevance shows up in style as well as content. While we speak the eternal message, it must be in today’s words.