Reading to Grow as a Storyteller

    This is a second stab at a blog post for this week. I had a first draft completed but in retrospect decided to hold it in abeyance as an idea which may possibly be developed into a larger project. I am preparing to preach from the Johannine Literature in 2022. I will preach from John’s Gospel, John’s Epistle, and John’s Apocalypse. I am pumped about next year’s preaching calendar, but more importantly, I am deeply involved in my preliminary research for the same. I have also made the decision to do the preliminary work with a view to future publishing, so I am trying to be extra careful in storing and preserving the fruits of my research. 

    I ran across this little gem whilst finishing up the Introduction to D.A. Carson’s commentary on John. I will quote him and address an important issue which he mentions.

But these comments may also be necessary because many young preachers (and some not so young!) find it relatively easy to preach from an epistle, but find little to say when they turn to the Gospels. 

                                Carson, D. A. The Gospel According to John. PNTC. Accordance electronic edition, version 2.5. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.

I’m not Don Carson but I have also sensed that many preachers find Gospels harder material to preach than the Epistles. I want to address this difficulty and make some suggestions for how you can become not only more comfortable preaching Gospel materials but get better at preaching, what is the largest group of material in the New Testament.

    First let’s consider why Epistles, in the big picture, are “easier” to deal with than Gospels. Three primary reasons:

1. Length

2. Structure

3. Form/Genre

    The longest epistles are half as long as Matthew, Luke, or John and roughly the same size as Mark. The Gospels, while as highly structured as the Epistles, manifest that structure in a different genre incorporating several different forms each contributing to the overall structure of the book. That means more work for the preacher. Preaching Gospel materials requires working with longer pericope’s which can make it hard to mirror the “outline” of the text into a preachable sermon outline. 

    The Gospels narrate events from the life of Christ and draw practical and theological conclusions from them. It is easy to become untethered from the text and fall into the trap of facile moralizing. In short, preaching the Gospels requires us to hack a clear path from the structure of the text to the story we are telling in the sermon. The brush we are hacking back can be external to the preacher and internal. The external brush is all the material we must study to make sense of the text. The internal? Some preachers are not comfortable with the openness of storytelling.

    Just a quick example. Many are uncomfortable looking over Jesus’ shoulder while He speaks with the woman at the well. Some of us would have been harder on her sins and more explicit in encouraging her to repent. Other preachers look at the text and focus on details of adultery, true worship, and the nature of revelation. The fact of the matter is that Jesus leaves many issues unresolved, even up in the air. (Did she ever go get her live-in to meet Jesus?) What we preachers find problematic is that this is a great story but makes for hard preaching. 

    Let me make a couple of suggestions for how we can combine the organizational and structural components of good preaching with the narrative and creative components of good storytelling. It begins with (to return to a previous blog topic) promiscuous reading. And some of that reading needs to be fiction. New and old novels. The classic and the forgettable. Pure fiction and historical fiction. Read the new narrative journalism which sprang up in the late 20th century with a focus on the storyline of factual material. Biographies and histories. You are surrounded by good storytellers. Take the time to read and listen to how they tell their stories. If you don’t have a favorite author outside of the Biblical and Theological disciplines, you are probably not reading enough. Now, I know when you are a preacher, everything is a potential illustration. However much of what you read should prepare the preacher as opposed to preparing sermons. Voracious, promiscuous reading enriches your intellect, firms up the muscles of your mind, freshens your perspective so that when you look over Jesus’ shoulder during His awkward conversation with that lady by the well you understand the dynamics of His conversation with her and how brilliantly John has captured the pathos of the situation. 

    This is where your writing process can be improved as well. As you are putting your sermon together, moving from exegesis to final sermon outline think through the material asking yourself the question “what is the point of this text?” This is analogous to the question “what is the point of this story?” If all that you have is information to give but no story to tell your congregation, they may be informed but not transformed. 

    Much of the material in the Bible is oblique; it comes at you sideways or sneaks up on you. Our propensity to classify and analyze without conceptualizing our finished product as a transformative story told by a creative author robs the Bible of much of its emotive power. We replace the inspired and creative voice of the author with additional illustrative material or interject emotion into our presentation through voice or gesture. We believe the Bible to be inspired but we often force it into molds of our own making and wind up wondering why people are not impacted by it. Creativity is just as hard as analysis, and it takes a lighter touch.  

     It is nice if people like the Bible. That is not really the job of preaching. The job of preaching is faith leading to a rightly formed fully transformed life. In the pulpit you make the redeeming story of scripture come alive. Much of what we read in the Gospels will not be easily reduced to three points and a poem. Don’t punt just because it’s hard. Improve. Get better. Read more. Don’t just study harder study with the purpose of becoming better at telling the Old, Old Story of Jesus and His love.