Themes in Current Homiletical Theory

Preaching to Current Culture

Timothy Keller passed away in May 2023 after battling cancer. I was first notified of his death only days before my graduation from Westminster in Philadelphia—the very place where Keller studied and later taught as a professor. In an email to the student body, the seminary president recounted his life and ministry, which impacted not only his own Presbyterian circles, but the American church at large. As Christianity Today sums up on the back cover of his bestseller, “Keller will be remembered as a pioneer of the new urban Christians.”¹ And that he is. Whatever one makes of his theology and ministry, there is no denying that Keller, preaching from his pulpit in the heart of Manhattan, had this way of preaching to our current culture unlike anyone of our generation.

Keller often speaks about “contextualization.” In fact, he devotes four chapters to “gospel contextualization” in his magnum opus on urban ministry.² Some may hear “contextualization” and dismiss it as yet one more example of giving people “what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Ti 4:3). To this Keller forcefully objects. Instead, contextualization means “giving people the Bible’s answers, which they may not at all want to hear, to questions about life that people in their particular time and place are asking, in language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even if they reject them.”³ While Keller is widely known as an apologist and urban missiologist, he is also a homiletician in his own right. His book Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism is unique in homiletics in that it is a distillation of Keller’s analysis of secularism (heavily indebted to the philosopher Charles Taylor) applied to preaching. Keller is at his finest in chapters 4–5 on preaching to secular culture. There he shows how preachers can engage the identity narrative of the sovereign self, the society narrative of absolute negative freedom, the morality/justice narrative of self-authorizing morality, and the history and rationality narratives of science as the secular hope.⁴

Prophetic Preaching

The homiletical historian Hughes Oliphant Old lists “prophetic preaching” as one of five major genres of preaching.⁵ Prophetic preaching is not to be confused with the same name in genre-specific preaching. Here prophetic preaching speaks about how “God often has a particular word for a particular time and a particular place.”⁶ Like the Hebrew preacher Jeremiah in ancient Jerusalem, the medieval preacher Girolamo Savonarola in Renaissance Italy, or the modern preacher Earl Palmer in Berkeley, California,⁷ prophetic preachers have the audacity to wade into the most pressing cultural issues of their day and bring a specific Word to that specific time and place.

Contextualized preaching does not mean giving people what their itching ears want to hear.

Because prophetic preaching is shaped by a specific time and place, it would be helpful to share my own ministry setting. Ann Arbor is dominated by medicine and academia. When I was called to Redeemer, I was also called to campus ministry at the University of Michigan, which is informally called one of America’s top three “public Ivies” (along with UCLA and Cal—Berkeley) for its academic prestige. For the past six years, Ann Arbor has been ranked the most educated city in America, in part due to the highest percentage of college-educated adults.⁸ I still remember meeting a Taiwanese man with a PhD from Cambridge (who was a post-doctoral research fellow) at church, sitting down for coffee with a Harvard Medical School graduate, and meeting multiple university professors in casual conversation. Being in Ann Arbor involves constantly shifting between rigorous academics and lightning-rod social issues. For example, my preschool-aged children have already been exposed to downtown protesting for human rights in Iran and to LGBTQ+ at the local library. Around Ann Arbor one finds lawn signs supporting Planned Parenthood, Black Lives Matter, public power,⁹ and many other values enshrined in the phrase, “In this house we believe …” Ann Arbor is a city where no Republicans even attempt to run for local office and is located in the most progressive county in a reliably Democratic state for the last thirty years.¹⁰ I quickly realized I would need to grow as a preacher for my preaching to impact all this—marriage equality, transgenderism, feminism, environmentalism, scientific progress, RBG, BLM, DEI, tolerance, racial minorities, and immigration. It’s impossible to step foot onto a university campus on Wednesday evening and not step foot into the pulpit on Sunday morning without having current culture in mind.

Now certainly, it would be naïve—and pastorally irresponsible—to insinuate that my exact homiletical approach in Ann Arbor should be replicated across the nation. However, cities and universities have a disproportionate effect on culture because they are the centers from which people and message emanate. So my setting highlights these cultural aspects that are impacting America at large:

1. Increased knowledge: Your setting may not have the Hatcher Graduate Library,¹¹ but everyone does have the Internet. Because of Google, Wikipedia, or YouTube, everyone can be a self-proclaimed theological expert. No longer can a preacher assume someone will accept his preaching as gospel truth. Instead, a hearer might think, “That’s your view. I’ll search online and find ten people who disagree with you.”
2. Rise of secularism: Your setting may not be filled with Millennial and Gen Z “Nones,” but secularism has been a pervasive trend for the past thirty years.¹² Twentieth-century American preaching had the luxury of assuming most people would have a belief in God and a basic agreement on Christian values. No longer can a preacher assume that someone will agree with what we preach. Instead, a hearer might think, “That’s what institutional religion has always said, but we know that’s no longer the case.”
3. Rise of diversity: Your setting may not have international university students, but with changing demographics it will be increasingly difficult for American Christianity (historically, predominately white) to stay in a status-quo comfort zone of monocultural ministry. No longer can a preacher assume he can avoid things like discrimination or racial tension. Instead, a hearer might think, “Why isn’t this church more diverse?”
4. Distrust of institutional authority: Your setting may not have many atheists or agnostics, but trust of societal institutions is at historic lows. After the church’s sexual abuse scandals, many lump the church in with racist police departments, a politicized Supreme Court, or greedy big business. No longer can a preacher assume people will trust him. Instead, a hearer might think, “You are the problem.”

Because of this, we need to ask, “Is our preaching giving some people answers to questions they are not even asking?” The days when preachers could skim the text and quickly present long-held religious views for ready acceptance have long since passed. Going forward, I’m convinced we need to double-down on robust biblical exposition, so that we not only proclaim what we believe but, more importantly, why we believe it—and that paired with a humble, perceptive analysis of secular culture.

Basic Features of Preaching to Current Culture

To go back to the genre of prophetic preaching, preaching that dares to wade into the most pressing issues of its day inevitably touches on what is perceived to be politics. The traditional wisdom has been, “Politics has no place in the pulpit.” And there is good research to support that. Already fifteen years ago, David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons found that one major reason young people were disaffiliating from the church was that it was too political. After the rise of the Religious Right (and their willingness to post their conservative views online), “The conclusion is that millions of young people in their twenties and thirties, including many young Christians, are growing impatient with and feeling disconnected from the political activism of many in the church.”¹³

Yet my experience has led me to wonder if the opposite danger is more prevalent among us. Preachers are so concerned about being perceived as overly political they don’t want to touch social issues with a ten-foot pole. I have spoken to numerous college students who have longed to have a sophisticated, respectful conversation about gay marriage, transgenderism, racism, postmodernism, or atheism, but no one in their church ever addressed those topics (especially from the pulpit). If we don’t, we really are confirming secular privatization theories.¹⁴ What’s more, whether it’s fair or unfair, many (especially in Gen Z) then think, “You either are ignorant, or you don’t care.”

To state it differently, the pressing issues of our day—abortion, gay marriage, women’s rights, multiculturalism, racism, and so forth—are those political issues, moral issues, or religious issues? Yes! They are life issues, and life involves politics, morality, and religion. Religion is not merely a belief in a transcendent God or afterlife; it is a “narrative identity” that impacts how one lives life.¹⁵ Christian preaching is bold enough to say the gospel impacts all of life. Historically, Christian preaching has done an excellent job of showing how the gospel impacts consciences burdened by sin, souls troubled on a deathbed, or families living at home. Christian preaching also needs to show how the gospel impacts racial tension, police brutality, gender dysphoria, abortion, and environmentalism. We cannot reduce preaching into only the message about salvation. So to state it provocatively, politics does belong in the pulpit—provided you understand exactly what I am saying (and not saying). Political advocacy has no place in the pulpit. One-sided political oversimplifications have no place in the pulpit. Political commentary devoid of biblical exposition and gospel motivation has no place in the pulpit. But relevant preaching cannot avoid current cultural issues. Being apolitical can’t mean we don’t care about such things. We need to find a way to preach about politics without being political about it.

The gospel impacts all of life.

I need to warn you: preaching to current culture is like playing with fire. Prophetic preaching is a nuanced aspect of homiletical theory and a sensitive aspect of pastoral practice. If a preacher has the audacity to explicitly mention our culture’s most pressing issues from the pulpit, those sermons will either be the most impactful sermons people will remember for years to come, or they will cause people to leave the church. So that sermons hopefully are the former and not the latter, here are some practical tips:

• Don’t be dismissive toward secularists. Christianity and secularism may have different epistemologies, but deriding secularists as “lost” and “immoral” will get you nowhere. Instead, affirm the aspects of civic righteousness within secularism that benefit society.
• Directly mention social issues. Don’t fall into thinking you can discuss this only in Bible study or personal conversations. If you say nothing from the pulpit, you probably will be perceived as ignorant, uncaring, or unapproachable. I have explicitly mentioned George Floyd, DEI, and Roe v. Wade from the pulpit, and this has opened up conversations elsewhere.
• Be sensitive to the complexity of social issues. These issues have many sides, factors, and considerations. If there is any time for the pastor to practice, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood,”¹⁶ it is here. A preacher needs to be out in the community—ordering a latté from a hipster barista, walking into LGBTQ-friendly stores, or talking to racial minorities—before he steps into the pulpit. Then the hallmarks of ethical dialogue, empathy and confirmation, will shine through in his sermon.¹⁷ My goal is to so respectfully represent others that if a gay man or feminist woman would be listening, he or she would say, “That’s exactly what I believe, and that’s exactly why I believe it.”
• Pay very careful attention to your language. I proofread these sermons three or four times—and often have someone else read them over ahead of time too. You must be extremely cognizant of the connotations of your words. The ideal of a tactful, articulate preacher who has an apt word to say needs to shine through.
• Mention political figures respectfully. I have explicitly mentioned President Biden, President Trump, President Obama, and President Bush from the pulpit in various ways. I refer to them by title and last name, and never in a derogatory way.
• Always provide two examples. If all your examples tend to be conservative, it’s no surprise so many young people feel progressives have no place in the church—and then leave. Make sure your examples are representative of both sides.
• No one will ever be able to tell how I vote. It’s that simple.¹⁸

We need to find a way to preach about politics without being political about it.

To illustrate, here is how I opened my sermon on Romans 13:1-7 (Proper 24A) with the theme, “Where Did Pleasant Politics Go?”

There are certain days when we wade into such controversial waters that what we are about to talk about might just ruffle your feathers, might just boil your emotions, might just erupt into controversy. Today we’re talking about politics. The last few years have provided countless examples of vitriol and chaos, when the two polarized sides have become so demeaning toward each other that it feels like an all-out war. Supreme Court nominations, COVID mandates, election fraud narratives, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, diversity initiatives—and the list could go on. I know full well there are different feelings, beliefs, and experiences just among the people in this room right now. Some of you may have run across comments online that characterize Democrats as spawns of Satan who need to be opposed as much as the devil himself. Some of you may have run across comments online that characterize Republicans as misogynistic, homophobic, unenlightened ignoramuses from the Middle Ages. Some of you may have had conversations with friends that erupted into argumentative debates that you’re barely on speaking terms anymore. Some of you may have had conversations with coworkers that have revealed you were so far apart on the political spectrum you had no idea how to find any common ground at all. Some of you are so sick and tired of it that you just want to bury your head under a pillow, put the earmuffs on, and ignore everything that comes out of Washington D.C. To sum it up, in the last few years, politics has seemed to be anything but pleasant.

Preaching to current culture is like playing with fire.

A preacher certainly could utilize a topical series, but I have found numerous opportunities to preach to current culture within the lectionary.¹⁹

A Future Vision

When I first arrived in Ann Arbor, I made a point of meeting my neighbors. On one side of my church lives a university lecturer, and on the other live two gay men. I have a cordial relationship with both, I’ve been in both their homes, and I’ve invited both to church. Once I was inside the home of my friendly gay neighbors, and it came out his impression of our church came from an ELCA woman pastor, who said we were quite conservative. In that moment, I was surrounded by numerous controversial social issues. I said something like, “I can’t speak for every church. But at my church, we don’t focus on politics. We focus on Jesus.” To which he said, “We need more of that.” That is my vision for our synod’s future. I long for our gay neighbors to say, “We need more of that.” I long for us to fearlessly walk right into our culture’s most controversial issues, and like the prophetic preachers of old, clearly proclaim the gospel of Jesus that shines over all.

Written by Jacob Haag

Rev. Dr. Haag serves at Redeemer Lutheran Church, Ann Arbor, MI. His doctorate is from Westminster Theological Seminary with research in New Testament and preaching. His research project was entitled “Evangelical Exhortation: Paraenesis in the Epistles as Rhetorical Model for Preaching Sanctification.” He also serves on the Michigan District Commission on Worship.

¹ Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Riverhead, 2008).
² Timothy Keller, Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), 89-134.
³ Keller, Center Church, 89 (emphasis original).
⁴ Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Viking, 2015), 133-155.
⁵ Hughes Oliphant Old, The Biblical Period, vol. 1 of The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 8.
⁶ Old, The Biblical Period, 16.
⁷ See Old, The Biblical Period, 74-84; The Medieval Church, vol. 3, 567-604; Our Own Time, vol. 7, 96-112.
⁸ CBS News, “Ann Arbor named most educated city in US, according to WalletHub,” 18 July 2023, accessed from www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/ann-arbor-named-most-educated-city-in-us.
⁹ Public power refers to a local government disconnecting from utility companies to provide 100% renewable energy to all.
¹⁰ CNN, “Michigan Election Results and Maps,” 3 November 2020, accessed from cnn.com/election/2020/results/state/michigan.
¹¹ A claim to fame of the University of Michigan papyrology department is the important NT manuscript P46 that is housed (and sometimes displayed) at its graduate library.
¹² See Ryan P. Burge, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2021).
¹³ David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity … and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007), 155-156.
¹⁴ Secularization theories state that, as society becomes more advanced, there is less need for religion. In pluralistic, modern society, religion can no longer be the normative narrative in the public sphere but becomes relegated to individuals’ private beliefs.
¹⁵ Keller, Reason for God, 16.
¹⁶ I will be forever indebted to Prof. Mark Paustian for instilling in me this principle of communication (originally from Stephen Covey)—and its profound implications for ministry.
¹⁷ “Confirmation” here refers to graciously receiving a person as a valued and unique individual, without necessarily agreeing with their views. The most impactful sermon I’ve heard on current culture was Mike Novotny’s “Gay and God” series (accessible at timeofgrace.org). He openly mentioned he interviewed the president of the local Rainbow Coalition to help prepare his sermons. While that might not be practical for every preacher, it does illustrate the warm graciousness afforded to others about which I am speaking.
¹⁸ See Michael Berg’s presentation, “Signals Not to Send”: welsworshipconference.net/conference-materials. ED.
¹⁹ See more example sermons online at worship.welsrc.net/download-worship/preach-the-word-volume-28/.

The last newsletter…

This is the last issue of Preach the Word. Coming later this fall, WELS Congregational Services will offer a new e-mail newsletter called Devote Yourself, which will focus on providing ministers of the Word with helpful articles and practical approaches to teaching, preaching, and leading worship. Subscribe today at welscongregationalservices.net/subscribe-devote-yourself.

Themes in Current Homiletical Theory

Genre-Specific Preaching

When James Muilenburg addressed the Society for Biblical Literature in 1968, he raised issues with the dominant way of analyzing biblical texts in scholarly circles for years. So he pleaded with scholars to move away from form criticism to rhetorical criticism.¹ In layman’s terms, treat the Bible as a unified piece of literature. Slicing and dicing the text into numerous strands of redactional theology does not necessarily help us understand the text as we now have it. Muilenburg began a profound shift in reading the Bible that would impact biblical studies for the next fifty years. Any pastor who uses a recently published commentary can note how biblical studies is now keenly interested in treating the Bible in a literary and rhetorical way. This seismic shift in biblical studies has now cascaded into the other disciplines of theology, including homiletics. Preaching is now all about preaching the genres of the Bible in a literary and rhetorical way.

Genre-specific preaching originally began with the New Homiletic. Not only was Fred Craddock critical of authoritarian, deductive, theme-and-subparts preaching that had been the standard in Christian oratory for centuries, but he was also critical of preaching that did not appreciate the diverse genres of the Bible:

The Bible is rich in forms of expression: poetry, saga, historical narrative, proverb, hymn, diary, biography, parable, personal correspondence, drama, myth, dialogue, and gospel, whereas most sermons, which seek to communicate the messages of that treasury of materials, are all in essentially the same form. Why should the multitude of forms and moods within biblical literature and the multitude of needs in the congregation be brought together in one unvarying mold, and that copied from Greek rhetoricians of centuries ago?²

Instead Craddock contends the “forms of preaching should be as varied as the forms of rhetoric in the New Testament.”³

Genre-specific preaching is not only the concern of mainline preaching. It is also the concern of confessional preaching, and in fact, there is a solid argument that preachers who believe in inspiration should be very interested in preaching the genres of Scripture. In a very recent book on genre-specific preaching, Doug O’Donnell makes this exact point:

Did God inspire the forms of the Bible, or only the content? Both! God led some biblical authors to write stories, others to write poems, others to write satire and proverbs and epistles. The Holy Spirit superintended the process of composition undertaken by biblical authors and also the resulting products of that composition (see 2 Pet. 1:21). Thus, whenever a biblical author expressed the content of a passage in a literary form, we can safely conclude that he intended that the preacher interpret the passage using ordinary literary methods of analysis. Put differently, whenever a biblical author embodies his message in a literary genre and by means of literary techniques, he intends that pastors engage in literary analysis.⁴

Preachers who believe in inspiration should be very interested in preaching the genres of Scripture.

In context, O’Donnell is giving seven reasons to convince preachers to preach biblical genres in a literary way:

1. It appreciates the Bible as literature.
2. It helps avoid reductionistic preaching.
3. It recognizes biblical meaning is communicated through literary forms.
4. It helps the congregation relive the text and appreciate the human experience in the text.
5. It appreciates the artistry of God’s Word.
6. It opens up the entire Bible for preaching.
7. It adds freshness to preaching and prevents misunderstanding.⁵

O‘Donnell has been profoundly influenced by Leland Ryken, the renowned professor emeritus of English at Wheaton. In case Lutheran preachers are suspicious of this approach, both O’Donnell and Ryken quote Luther and his conviction that preachers of the Word need to be students of rhetoric and literature.⁶ In his Festschrift in honor of Kent Hughes, Ryken shares Hughes’ contention that “all biblical exposition is literary analysis.” Ryken goes on to argue for the great promise of literary analysis for expository preaching, “Although good expository preachers intuitively practice an incipient literary criticism, they could enhance their expository sermons significantly if they would add even a modicum of self-conscious literary analysis to their methodology.”⁷ His lament is incisive, “Many Bible expositors would assent to all that I have said about the literary nature of the Bible, only to ignore it when they stand in the pulpit.”⁸ That means the study of genre does not simply take place in a pastor’s office; it also needs to come through when he actually preaches on Sunday.

Basic Features of Genre-Specific Preaching

Traditional homiletics views the preacher’s task as distilling the content of the text and then faithfully transmitting that to the congregation. When he has preached what the text is saying, his job is done. Craddock, in particular, has argued that preaching is far more. Preachers need to capture both the “what” and the “how” of the text (and if they don’t, they are actually preaching an unbiblical sermon).⁹ I take it a step further. Holistic preaching needs to preach (1) what the text is saying (2) how the text is saying it and (3) why the text is saying it. Preachers need to be proficient exegetes, but they also need to be proficient in literary and rhetorical analysis. Genre-specific preaching addresses a deficient view that preaching is only concerned with transmitting biblical content or knowledge.

Genre-specific preaching means a preacher models the literary forms of the Bible in his sermon.

What exactly is genre-specific preaching? Peter Adam says it the simplest and best, “If this is the style of Scripture, perhaps it ought also to be the style of our preaching.”¹⁰ Genre-specific preaching means that preaching is specific to the genre of the text. It does not mean that a preacher simply appreciates the Bible as literature. It does not mean that a preacher merely comments on the literary forms of the Bible in his sermon. I cannot emphasize this enough: genre-specific preaching means a preacher models the literary forms of the Bible in his sermon. In other words, the preacher actually changes how he writes his sermon, so that his sermon is communicating, as much as possible, in the same way the text is communicating. Current homiletics speaks of narrative preaching, prophetic preaching, epistolary preaching, apocalyptic preaching, and so forth. Each genre of Scripture offers a unique way of preaching.

Narrative Preaching

I will begin with narrative preaching, not only because the majority of the Bible is narrative, but because narrative preaching is now all the rage in homiletics, especially as it applies to preaching in a postmodern world. Unfortunately, narrative preaching is itself a large label, and there are various ways to accomplish it.

Narrative preaching is now all the rage in homiletics.

To begin with, narrative preaching can be done by simply telling the biblical story in a compelling way. Walter Wangerin is a master of this.¹¹ Narrative preaching emphasizes the holistic nature of a story, and so it is usually not subdivided into parts.¹² As Mark Paustian says, “Let the story be the story.”¹³ The preacher needs to place himself (and his hearers) in the text, use the present tense, and belabor the details and emotion of the story. For example, here are selections from my Lent 1B sermon on Genesis 22:1-18, with the theme, “The Greatest Sacrifice of All:”

The emotion builds with each of the four descriptions—your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac. After all, this is the child he never thought he would have, the son he held in his arms, the miracle baby he received in his old age, the only hope for continuing his family line into the future. … Just imagine looking at these two heading off into the distance. This is just excruciatingly painful at this point! Every step of the journey Abraham has to think about making the greatest sacrifice of all, sacrificing his only son who’s walking right next to him. For three days in a row! … Once Abraham starts to hike up the mountain, Isaac asks where the lamb for the sacrifice is. I mean, this is just unbearable at this point! We have the wood and the fire, Dad, but where’s the sacrifice? Well, Isaac, you’re it! You’re the one being led like a lamb to the slaughter! This must have felt like five thousand darts fired right into the heart of Abraham. … Once they arrive at their final destination, everything goes into slow motion, as time seems to stretch out for eternity. First, build an altar. Then put wood on top of it. Then bind Isaac. Then put him on top of the altar. Then reach out your hand. Then grab the knife. I mean, you just got to cover your eyes and turn away. Abraham, are you really going to go through with this? Abraham, are you really going to kill your own son? Abraham, are you really going to offer up the greatest sacrifice of all? No! Don’t do it!

To take this a step further, narrative preaching can also be done in a first-person style. In first-person narrative preaching, the preacher speaks in first person throughout the sermon from the perspective of one of the characters in the story. For example, I preached on Transfiguration from the perspective of Peter (Mark 9:2-9), with the theme, “Lord, Teach Me Your True Glory”—beginning with Peter interacting with the crowds in Galilee, then confronting Jesus, then ascending the mountain to see his true glory, then addressing the people of my congregation with what he learned that day, and finally ending with what he told Mark as he began to write his Gospel. For a more complex example of this technique, consider the emotional impact from my Lent 2B sermon on Job 1:13-22, with the theme, “Praise God for Pain.” I preached in first-person narrative style, except that I manipulated the “I” to be six people’s different perspectives from which I was speaking throughout:

1. The introduction is from Alexander’s perspective in the children’s book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
2. The body is from Job’s perspective as he lives through his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day (losing his possessions and children).
3. The transition is from the congregation’s perspective, as they imagine what it would be like to live through their terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day (house burning down, laid off from work, car stolen, children killed in a car accident).
4. The gospel is from Christ’s perspective, as he goes through his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day (suffering and dying on the cross).
5. The application is from my own perspective, as I recount my own terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day (my mother dying in the hospital while I was deliberating a call right before Holy Week).
6. The conclusion is from Kristyn Getty’s perspective, as she recounts her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day (her cousin’s death and the Nashville school shooting, which inspired the hymn “God of Every Grace”—which our choir sang right before the sermon).

Prophetic, Apocalyptic, and Epistolary Preaching

After narrative preaching, we can briefly explore some more nuanced genres. First, prophetic preaching is not only about direct prophecies that can get easily traced to Christ. The Hebrew prophets like Jeremiah endured profound suffering, and so my sermon on Jeremiah 20:7-13 (Proper 7A), with the theme, “Lord, Why Is It So Hard?” modeled the jeremiads throughout the book. The introduction to my sermon was ten complaints, all of which began with, “Lord, why is it so hard …?” Notice that I am not only saying what the text is saying; I am doing what the text is doing. I am lamenting, just as Jeremiah is lamenting. Second, apocalyptic preaching is not just about the end of the world. It needs to capture the drama of an epic, crushing defeat of the forces of evil, and it also needs to provide profound encouragement for Christians to persevere in their faith until then. That is why I captured the intense drama of apocalyptic literature with my theme, “Christ Crushes the Competition,” for Revelation 20:1-6 (Proper 5B) and the exhortatory nature of apocalyptic literature with my theme, “Here’s What You Need to Keep Going,” for Revelation 7:9-17 (All Saints’ Day A). Finally, epistolary preaching is both personal and practical. Epistles were modeled after Greco-Roman features of letter writing, and so my sermon on Romans 1:1-7 (Advent 4A) was framed from the perspective of writing Christmas letters to family and friends.¹⁴ My theme was, “A Christmas Letter Filled with Good News,” but I am intrigued with the thought of writing an epistolary sermon as a letter itself.¹⁵ Epistles also include large sections of ethical exhortation, and so one way to structure these sermons is by merging exposition and application together.¹⁶ Much more could be said, but recent homiletical books will have entire chapters on how to preach each of these genres.¹⁷

A Closing Encouragement

As I talk to pastors around our synod, sometimes I hear comments like, “I don’t preach two-part sermons anymore. That was the way we had to do it at the seminary.” Or “I don’t develop parts at all.” Then I read Sermon Studies or listen to the Preacher Podcast or hear pastors who seem to always use two parts. All this has led me to conclude that many preach in the same way—whether that’s the way you’ve always done it since the seminary, or it’s a new way you’ve developed yourself. To which I usually think, “Well, what is the text doing? Does the text have two parts? Three parts? One part? Is it a narrative? Parable? Prophecy? Epistle? That should inform how you outline, structure, and write your sermon.”

If your sermons are all the same form, go back and look at the genre and literary features of the text again.

My simple test for preachers is this. Look at your sermon theme and parts over the past year. If your sermons are all the same form, go back and look at the genre and literary features of the text again. The Bible is not all the same form, and neither should your preaching be. I have preached deductive sermons with one part, two parts, three parts, four parts, and even five parts. I have preached inductive sermons with numerous narrative components. I have utilized the New Homiletic. I have preached apocalyptic sermons with drama, prophetic sermons with laments, and epistolary sermons with warmth and practicality. There’s no one way I preach, because there’s no one way the Bible communicates. Genre-specific preaching, well done, employs diversity and intrigue. It moves us beyond our comfort zones and helps us model diverse ways of preaching biblical genres. When we do so, no one will be able to complain that our sermons are boring.

No one will be able to complain that our sermons are boring.

It moves us beyond our comfort zones and helps us model diverse ways of preaching biblical genres.

Written by Jacob Haag

Rev. Dr. Haag serves at Redeemer Lutheran Church, Ann Arbor, MI. His doctorate is from Westminster Theological Seminary with research in New Testament and preaching. His research project was entitled “Evangelical Exhortation: Paraenesis in the Epistles as Rhetorical Model for Preaching Sanctification.” He also serves on the Michigan District Commission on Worship.

¹ James Muilenburg, “Form Criticism and Beyond,” Journal of Biblical Literature 88, no. 1 (March 1969): 1-18. It should be noted, however, that Muilenburg is not rejecting form criticism; he is saying it needs to be supplemented.
² Fred Craddock, As One Without Authority, 4th ed. (St. Louis: Chalice, 2001), 113.
³ Craddock, As One Without Authority, 45.
⁴ Douglas Sean O’Donnell and Leland Ryken, The Beauty and Power of Biblical Exposition: Preaching the Literary Artistry and Genres of the Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 19, ft. 10.
⁵ O’Donnell and Ryken, The Beauty and Power of Biblical Exposition, 15-22.
⁶ Luther wrote, “I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure … Certainly it is my desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies, as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily.” Quoted in O’Donnell and Ryken, The Beauty and Power of Biblical Exposition, 15-16; Leland Ryken, “The Bible as Literature and Expository Preaching,” in Preach the Word: Essays on Preaching: In Honor of R. Kent Hughes, ed. Leland Ryken and Todd Wilson (Wheaton, IL: Crossway: 2007), 38. On pages 45-46, Ryken goes on to provide further reasons to defend a literary approach to confessional pastors who question it as modernistic or theologically precarious.
⁷ Ryken, “The Bible as Literature and Expository Preaching,” 39.
⁸ Ryken, “The Bible as Literature and Expository Preaching,” 44.
⁹ Craddock, As One Without Authority, 5, 44; Fred Craddock, Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985), 28, 122-123, 178.
¹⁰ Peter Adam, Speaking God’s Words: A Practical Theology of Preaching (Vancouver, B.C.: Regent College Publishing, 2004), 94.
¹¹ Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996).
¹² If you do, one way is to divide the story based on the characters in the story.
¹³ Mark Paustian, “Joy and Confidence from the Basics—Part 3,” Preach the Word 24, no. 3 (January/February 2021), 3. Or as he says elsewhere about Hebrew narrative, “The story will not be rushed.” Mark Paustian, “The Beauty with the Veil: Validating the Strategies of Kierkegaardian Indirect Communication Through a Close Christological Reading of the Hebrew Old Testament” (PhD diss., Regent University, 2016), 3
¹⁴ The sermons mentioned above are available on the Commission on Worship website: worship.welsrc.net/download-worship/preach-the-word-volume-28
¹⁵ Those of my generation will fondly remember Pres. Mark Zarling’s “letters from home” chapel sermons that employed this approach.
¹⁶ For more on preaching sanctification in line with NT epistles, see my first article in this series.
¹⁷ I’d suggest starting with O’Donnell and Ryken’s book cited above. Then move on to The Modern Preacher and the Ancient Text by Sidney Greidanus or Preaching and the Literary Forms of the Bible by Thomas Long.

Themes in Current Homiletical Theory

Redemptive-Historical Preaching

Charles Spurgeon is one of the most famous preachers in homiletical history. In his massive seven-volume set on the history of preaching, Hughes Oliphant Old gives this nineteenth-century Reformed Baptist preacher from London high praise, “There was no voice in the Victorian pulpit as resonant, no preacher as beloved by the people, no orator as prodigious as Charles Haddon Spurgeon.”¹ In his sermon entitled, “Christ Precious to Believers,” Spurgeon tells a story that compares Christ to the grand metropolis of London:

A young man had been preaching in the presence of a venerable divine, and after he had done he went to the old minister, and said, “What do you think of my sermon?” “A very poor sermon indeed,” said he. “A poor sermon?” said the young man, “it took me a long time to study it.” “Ay, no doubt of it.” “Why, did you not think my explanation of the text a very good one?” “Oh yes,” said the old preacher, “very good indeed.” “Well, then, why do you say it is a poor sermon? Didn’t you think the metaphors were appropriate and the arguments conclusive?” “Yes, they were very good as far as that goes, but still it was a very poor sermon.” “Will you tell me why you think it a poor sermon?” “Because,” said he, “there was no Christ in it.” “Well,” said the young man, “Christ was not in the text; we are not to be preaching Christ always, we must preach what is in the text.” So the old man said, “Don’t you know young man that from every town, and every village, and every little hamlet in England, wherever it may be, there is a road to London?” “Yes,” said the young man. “Ah!” said the old divine “and so from every text in Scripture, there is a road to the metropolis of the Scriptures, that is Christ. And my dear brother, your business is when you get to a text, to say, ‘Now what is the road to Christ?’ and then preach a sermon, running along the road towards the great metropolis—Christ. And,” said he, “I have never yet found a text that had not got a road to Christ in it, and if I ever do find one that has not a road to Christ in it, I will make one; I will go over hedge and ditch but I would get at my Master, for the sermon cannot do any good unless there is a savour of Christ in it.”²

Christ is the center of all Scripture.

Spurgeon was convinced that the best preaching is focused on Christ. No matter the text, the sermon must lead people to Christ, because Christ is the center of all Scripture. As Jesus taught the Emmaus disciples “what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Lk 24:27, emphasis added), so redemptive-historical preachers who follow Spurgeon preach Christ from all Scripture. This is what the redemptive-historical, Christ-centered model of preaching is all about.³

Basic Features of Redemptive-Historical Preaching

Redemptive-historical preaching is based on redemptive-historical hermeneutics. Redemptive-historical hermeneutics (also called a biblical-theological approach)⁴ is a way of interpreting Scripture in its grand canonical context of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. This four-part drama⁵ of human history finds its grand climax in Christ. History is uniquely redemptive history, because God has been crafting the story all along to give hints of what the seed of the woman (Gen 3:15) would later do in his redemptive work. God is still crafting this story to lead to the day when all creation will be redeemed and restored in the new heavens and new earth (Rom 8:19-25). Particularly in its Vosian form,⁶ redemptive-historical hermeneutics emphasizes the covenantal structure of Scripture to argue for its organic unity and Christocentric nature in response to critical approaches of Scripture that divorce the OT from the NT and which relegate Christ to something other than the main character from cover to cover. Here are some basic features of redemptive-historical preaching:

• Redemptive-historical preaching is Christocentric. It does not matter if the text is from the OT or NT—or if the genre is narrative, prophecy, wisdom literature, Gospel, epistles, or apocalyptic—in one way or another, the text is about Christ. All roads lead to him.
• Redemptive-historical preaching is typological. It does not only emphasize prophecy about Christ, but it also emphasizes how historical persons and events foreshadow Christ.
• Redemptive-historical preaching is textual, exegetical, and academic. Redemptive-historical preaching is not for the faint of heart. Sermons are usually thirty minutes or more. Preaching is robust, especially because it often features lectio continua. Sometimes redemptive-historical preaching feels like reading a popular commentary on the Bible.
• Redemptive-historical preaching is artful. It does not simply exegete a word/theme in its immediate context. It then bridges to how that word/theme is used throughout Scripture. Finally, it demonstrates how that word/theme climaxes in Christ. When first exposed to this approach, hearers are often amazed at the artistry of redemptive-historical preaching.

The best preaching is focused on Christ.

To illustrate a redemptive-historical approach with a simple example, here are selections from my Advent 4B sermon from 2 Samuel 7:8-16, with the theme, “Build a Bigger, Better House!”

Think of it like a pit stop on a road trip. For example, my parents live in Wisconsin. You have to travel through Chicago to get to Wisconsin. Can I say, “I traveled to Chicago?” Sure. We traveled there and stopped to get gas, food, and take a break. But I don’t travel to Chicago for the exclusive purpose of filling up my car with gas and grabbing a bite to eat. Chicago’s not the ultimate destination. The ultimate destination is when I turn on Meadowbrook Lane to see family. In the same way, can we say, “Is this promise fulfilled in Solomon?” Sure. The promise has to get traced through him. But Solomon is like a pit stop for lunch and gas. As good as it is, it’s not the ultimate destination. The place this prophetic road finally ends is in Christ, when Gabriel announced to Mary that her son Jesus would sit on David’s throne. …

God promises to build us a bigger, better house—an eternal kingdom—through David’s messianic descendant. To the bigger, better Son of David God would ultimately say, with the deepest significance of the words, “I will be his father, and he will be my son.” On Christmas Day, God’s Son, begotten from all eternity, also became Mary’s son. To the bigger, better Son of David God would ultimately say, with the deepest significance of the words, “I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands.” On Good Friday, God’s Son was punished with Pilate’s flogging, not because he sinned, but because he took our sin on himself. To the bigger, better Son of David God would ultimately say, with the deepest significance of the words, “Your house and your kingdom will endure forever.” On Easter, God’s Son proved that he could destroy this temple and rebuild it in three days, because Solomon’s temple that manifested God’s presence on earth was manifest once and for all in Jesus’ body on earth (Jn 2:19). The living and reigning Christ would endure for all eternity. Jesus takes what Solomon did and makes it bigger and better.

Objections against Redemptive-Historical Preaching

To go back to Spurgeon’s analogy, redemptive-historical preaching begins with the text and finds a road to Christ. The first major objection to redemptive-historical preaching, therefore, revolves around the question, “When is building a road to Christ legitimate? Is that connection really there, or is it simply the preacher’s fanciful imagination?” That is not simply a homiletical question; that is a hermeneutical question.

On one side of this debate is the position that a connection to Christ is only legitimate if the NT explicitly makes the connection. For example, if the NT does not explicitly say this is fulfilled in Christ, it is illegitimate allegory. The problem with this view is that it is a reductionistic and oversimplified view of what is a very nuanced and complicated aspect of current biblical research, the NT usage of the OT. This view essentially denies the phenomenon of an allusion. Many biblical authors (and preachers) use words or themes in a sophisticated way to refer to something else, without necessarily saying, “This happened so that these words would be fulfilled.” They are implying that, but they don’t explicitly say that in such convenient terms. On the other side of this debate is the position that a preacher can use anything to make a legitimate connection to Christ. For example, any mention of the color red becomes a connection to Christ’s blood, any mention of water becomes a connection to Baptism, or any mention of bread becomes a connection to Communion. The problem with this view is that it ignores the immediate context, which in many cases has nothing to do with Christ’s blood, Baptism, or Communion. The limited scope of this article prevents us from dealing with specific examples, but simply put, in between those two sides of the debate is where we want to be. Preachers need to use every legitimate avenue possible to get to Christ. If Lutherans thought they have found them all, they will be challenged and enriched by reading redemptive-historical homileticians, even if they do not agree with every connection they make (as I do not). There are explicit prophetical connections to Christ where we are on sure ground (see my sermon above). There are allegorical connections to Christ where we are on shaky ground. In the middle are many cases where we use inter-canonical allusions to say (with various degrees of certainty) to what degree they connect to Christ. When we are in this messy middle, we can preach how general themes point to Christ, without saying we know for sure that specific details point to Christ. That requires a nuanced approach from preachers today.

To go back to the definition of redemptive-historical preaching, redemptive-historical preaching focuses on God’s action throughout redemptive history. The second major objection to redemptive-historical preaching, therefore, revolves around the question, “What about the people? Is preaching only this grand exposition of the biblical story? Isn’t it also supposed to encourage the congregation to actually do something on Monday morning?” That is not simply a homiletical question; that is a hermeneutical question.

When is building a road to Christ legitimate?

On one side of the debate is the position that the very purpose of Scriptural revelation is to record God’s action for us, not our action for God, and any focus on doing something for God by imitating biblical figures is contrary to the purpose of redemptive history. For example, sermons that urge people to be more like David as he fights Goliath are bound to lead to legalism.⁷ On the other side of the debate is the position that Scripture includes many exhortations to godly living, and an exclusive focus on redemptive history is contrary to the ultimate purpose of Scripture, which is that people would respond to the text by believing or doing something. For example, sermons that constantly use the four-part redemptive-historical context are bound to be this overly abstract, grand sweep of biblical history that has precious little to do with everyday life.⁸ So where do we want to be? We need to emphasize that the central character of all Scripture is God (specifically Christ), but Scripture’s many exhortations toward godly living show that the Holy Spirit was not only concerned about recording redemptive history. He was also concerned with how believers respond to redemptive history in their participation in the work of God’s kingdom. Preaching that focuses on doing something for God or imitating other saints can be moralistic, but it does not have to be moralistic.⁹ The motivation is crucial. We do so, not because we are trying to gain more favor before God or improve our standing with other people, but because we are responding in gratitude for what God has done for us and wanting to advance his kingdom for his glory, not our own. That requires a nuanced approach from preachers today.

What about the people?

To illustrate how to properly preach the imitation of Christ, while being sensitive to the complexities of the redemptive-historical/exemplaristic debates, here are selections from my Easter 4A sermon from 1 Peter 2:19–25, with the theme, “Be Like Your Slaughtered Shepherd.”

Christ knows exactly what it is like to suffer unjustly for something you did not deserve. To be clear, Christ is first and foremost your Savior, who did what you could not when he died in your place to take away all your sins. You can never be like him in taking away your sins, nor do you ever need to be, because he has already done that for you. But that does not negate that Christ is also your example. He does call you to follow him on a path of suffering, and he inspires you to do what he did. So be like your slaughtered Shepherd, because he calls you to it.

Still today, it’s easy to feel like slaughtered sheep. Yes, we all want a nice, easy life, where God paves this smooth four-lane highway with no traffic and no problems straight to heaven. But this is not the Christian life! This was not the path for Christ. Christ suffered all the unjust beatings during his passion to perfectly fulfill God’s law for all the times we have resented or avoided or complained about our suffering. Christ took up our guilt on the cross, where our sins died away and where our righteous lives spring to life. Here’s the key: sheep are not on a different path than their Shepherd. You are united to your Savior Jesus, which means you will suffer unjustly too. What do you do when you feel like slaughtered sheep? Remember that Christ calls you to it. For the children here, Christ calls you to simply walking away from the class bully who wants to rile you up and make fun of you and fight with you. For the university students here, Christ calls you to humbly admit your faults in a cut-throat academic environment that just wants to prove how much smarter you are than everyone else. For the young professionals here, Christ calls you to embrace biblical sexuality when all your friends are telling you to do whatever you want with your own body. For the families here, Christ calls you to carve out time in your evenings and on your weekends for church, catechism, and Sunday school. For the retirees here, Christ calls you to generously support his church financially at a time when people are concerned about how big a retirement account they can have or how big an inheritance they can pass to their children. Because Christ does that for you, wouldn’t you do this all the more? So be more and more like your slaughtered Shepherd.¹⁰

We benefit from being much more familiar with redemptive-historical preaching.

Redemptive-historical preaching is the dominant paradigm in confessional Reformed preaching. Unless Lutherans have read widely outside their circles, they may not be very familiar with the intricacies of this approach. By now it should be apparent that there is plenty within this model of interpreting and preaching Scripture that Lutherans can appreciate and use, especially when preaching from the OT. We benefit from being much more familiar with redemptive-historical preaching.

Written by Jacob Haag

Rev. Dr. Haag serves at Redeemer Lutheran Church, Ann Arbor, MI. His doctorate is from Westminster Theological Seminary with research in New Testament and preaching. His research project was entitled “Evangelical Exhortation: Paraenesis in the Epistles as Rhetorical Model for Preaching Sanctification.” He also serves on the Michigan District Commission on Worship.

¹ Hughes Oliphant Old, The Modern Age, vol. 6 of The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 422.
² C. H. Spurgeon, “Christ Precious to Believers,” vol. 5 of The New Park Street Pulpit Sermons (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1859), 140.
³ For redemptive-historical homiletics texts, start with Him We Proclaim by Dennis Johnson. Then consider also: Christ-Centered Preaching by Bryan Chapell, Preaching by Timothy Keller, The Modern Preacher and the Ancient Text or Preaching Christ from the Old Testament by Sidney Greidanus, Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture by Graeme Goldsworthy, and Preaching and Biblical Theology by Edmund Clowney.
⁴ Outside of our circles, biblical theology is not simply defined as exegesis or isagogics. It has the more nuanced definition I am describing here.
⁵ The concept of a “drama” is based on Calvin’s comparison of Christ’s cross to a “magnificent theater” where “the inestimable goodness of God is displayed before the whole world.” Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel according to John 2:73.
⁶ Geerhardus Vos taught at Princeton and was a leading confessional Reformed voice in early America. He is to the Reformed world what C.F.W. Walther is to the Lutheran world. See “The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, ed. Richard Gaffin, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2001), 234–267.
⁷ See Greidanus, The Modern Preacher and the Ancient Text (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 117–118, 163.
⁸ Watkins calls Krabbendam’s comparison of redemptive-historical preaching to an airplane that flies over the heads of people and the realities of life a “near infamous critique.” Watkins, The Drama of Preaching (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017), 7, fn. 22.
⁹ In his section on “be like,” “be good,” and “be disciplined” messages, Chapell writes, “There are many ‘be’ messages in Scripture, but they always reside in a redemptive context. . . . ‘Be’ messages are not wrong in themselves; they are wrong by themselves.” Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching, 294 (emphasis original).
¹⁰ Full versions of this sermon excerpt and the one above are available at worship.welsrc.net/download-worship/preach-the-word-volume-28/

For Further Reading

• For more on preaching Christ from all Scripture, see my forthcoming review of Him We Proclaim in the Shepherd’s Study: www.wisluthsem.org/grow-in-grace/shepherds-study
• For an extensive example of redemptive-historical exegesis, see my previous WLQ article (118:1), “The Indicative Behind the Imperative in James 2:1-13”
• For more on preaching the imitation of Christ, see my forthcoming WLQ article (121:1), “Preaching Christ as Example? Paraenesis in 1 Peter 2:21-25”

Free Text Series or Lectionary Preaching?

The lectionary: an enduring narrative

In the first two parts of this discussion of lectionary preaching vis-à-vis topical preaching, I argued that in many ways the topical paradigm has not grappled adequately with how contemporary culture has changed since the topical paradigm became popular in Evangelicalism. I also warned against several undesirable outcomes ranging from instrumentalizing Jesus to missing out on the creative strength of an established framework. I pointed to the ways in which the lectionary paradigm effectively keeps Christ as Savior at the center of the homiletical task while also providing the kind of framework that supports homiletical creativity and engagement by taking the burden of brainstorming off of the preacher.

Many of my colleagues who preach topically do, in fact, diligently seek to be thoughtful about what they plan and preach. The nature of my argument, though, is not about what preachers are able to do, but about the directions in which paradigms nudge preachers and their hearers. I see paradigms as a kind of intellectual and spiritual architecture whose designs invisibly—and often inexorably—move people toward certain ends. Such a phenomenon is not individual, but collective and cumulative.

Which leads to the third and final part of this series. Given the character of contemporary culture, it seems that lectionary preaching is perfectly poised to make a meaningful difference among God’s people because the lectionary is, at its heart, not so much a curriculum of topics as it is a comprehensive gospel narrative.

The corruption of narrative as a concept

The term narrative has, unfortunately, reversed polarity from positive to negative. Today narrative means something like dishonest spin. Political and social opponents accuse one another of perpetuating a narrative. “Your truth” competes with “my truth.” Or as The Dude put it in The Big Lebowski, “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

But narrative once meant a faithful account. Narrative was used in legal contexts to describe the facts of the case. A narrative is what St. Luke was talking about in the opening sentence of his gospel. To tell the story was to offer testimony to truths that had real-world implications.

The work of Lutheran preaching relies heavily on an understanding of narrative in the original sense.

The work of Lutheran preaching relies heavily on an understanding of narrative in the original sense, which is (thankfully) making an encouraging comeback these days. People are noticing what it’s like to live without narrative and are wondering if perhaps we might want to renew our narrative structures of sense-making.

Shared narrative vs. individual identity

Every preacher surely agrees that something in our social setting has gone horribly wrong. We appear to live in a time marked by a general dissolution of meaning and coherence. People no longer inhabit stories or contribute to institutions, they express identities and construct meaning by giving voice to a true self.

In a world where the primary catechetical truth is not that “I should be his own” but rather that “I should be my own,” the fundamental task in life becomes one of assembling the puzzle of personal identity from whatever material, values, and interests are available. This task is radically individualized. Indeed, that is the whole point. It is an expression of pure autonomy, of self-law.

Much has been said about this phenomenon, perhaps nowhere so thoroughly as in Carl Trueman’s recent work, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.” But that’s a long book. Taylor Swift captured the spirit of what Charles Taylor called expressive individualism in only two lines: “I know my love should be celebrated / But you tolerate it.”

This is not how it has always been and not how it must always be. People once sought to understand themselves not as isolated individuals but as part of a broader narrative. The shared story gave shape to the years and offered wisdom for different seasons of life. It helped them process sorrows and celebrate joys.

But such sense-making is far afield from our culture’s deepest convictions. Indeed, the late modern notion of freedom is to see oneself as a person who has no story. Today’s ideal protagonist is someone who yearns to discover who they really are, subsequently seeks to uncover an authentic self, and then throws off the expectations of family and society to chart their own path and construct their own meaning. The goal is to jettison existing narrative structures and to replace them with stories that are self-made.

Narrative as necessary counterculture

If this is an accurate description of the modern self and we agree that this not only makes society miserable but also contradicts broad tenets of biblical anthropology, then preachers must avoid acting as a chaplain to the culture of self-ownership. I have little doubt that many preachers have substantially addressed the phenomena described above, especially in recent years. But consider again the difference between what is said in the text of the sermon and what is communicated through the paradigm.

Topical sermons can, no doubt, make vigorous connections to the overall narrative of God’s work in the world. But it seems impossible to describe the paradigm itself as a narrative paradigm. The topical paradigm seems closer to a curriculum than to a story, which is in some ways the heart of my point about the paradigm’s interaction with contemporary culture: What is the story that seekers of true self are likely to discern from an idea-driven or concept-centric paradigm—especially ideas that are presented as useful for their practical benefits? One likely story will sound like this, “I am on a journey of self-discovery, self-actualization, and self-improvement, and God is my guide and ally in the process.”

To underestimate how much expressive individualism is imported into church is to be needlessly naïve. Those preachers who can discern the culture’s dominant influence on character formation even among Christians may wish to seek a preaching paradigm that aligns more closely with the countercultural nature of God’s Word.

What if the church had its own set of days tailor-made to accomplish its overarching goals over time?

The power of a calendar

A powerful way to address expressive individualism is to integrate people into a shared calendar. Indeed, the ability to set the calendar matters. What society celebrates as holidays says a great deal about what they value. The recent addition of Juneteenth to the calendar of federal holidays in the United States is an example of this phenomenon. Activists and marketers are also well-aware of the value of marking time by their own values. Our summers are now marked by huge commercial commemorations: Pride Month and Prime Day. The calendar is contested territory for a wide variety of competing values and commercial interests.

The big loser in all this has been, of course, the ecclesiastical calendar. This is unfortunate but also unsurprising considering the dominant cultural values of our time. In the past a liturgical calendar marked time in terms of the Christian story of God’s work in the world. But in an age when therapy and individuality are paramount cultural values, a church year calendar is seen as onerous. Why should a communal sense of what is important to all of us at all times impose on my sense of self-direction?

Now, I am not aware of anyone who has stopped observing Christmas and Easter, but for the most part the rest of the calendar appears to be fair game for revision. This is not to say that topical preachers do not sense the power of a calendar, it’s just that the calendar that sets the agenda is often the civic calendar.

I understand the rationale. “Preach on subjects that everyone’s attention is focused on that weekend anyway.” I suggest, though, that this tactic is not as effective as one might assume. Take Valentine’s Day, for example, and the perfectly understandable desire to preach about love on the adjacent weekend. That love sermon, good as it may be, is not likely to outpace the massive marketing complex devoted to selling billions of dollars’ worth of flowers, wine, and chocolate. To try to grab the microphone from the marketers and say that, actually, the holiday devoted to romance between lovers is a great time to consider the love of God may be an example of spitting in the wind. Chad Bird once noted that Christians already enjoy holidays far better suited for emphasizing the Christian idea of love. They are called Good Friday and Easter.¹ So here’s a radical idea: Let people enjoy Independence Day or Memorial Day or Valentine’s Day without necessarily trying to capitalize on the opportunity to preach a religious spin on it.

Here’s an even more radical idea: What if the church had its own set of days tailor-made to accomplish its overarching goals over time, one that closely reflects the nature of its message and the story into which God is integrating us all? And what if this calendar were used in common among all the churches with the same set of ultimate ends? If Jeff Bezos can see the value of having his own holidays and spreading its influence as far as possible, then surely we can imagine that the ecclesiastical calendar might have some power to it, especially as it employs its narrative strength to engage people on a deeper level than the curricular presentation of ideas can.

Tapping into the mythical core

A narrative structure that repeats and reinforces itself taps into what the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski called the mythical core of how human beings think and act.

The mythical core refers to matters of human experience that are not revealed by scientific examination or standard investigative inquiry. The mythical core connects to those aspects of human experience that are undoubtedly real but not strictly empirical. Kołakowski contrasted the mythical with the technological. The technological core is that which is subject to human manipulation and therefore involves reason, science, and most forms of thinking and philosophy.

Love is a good example of where mythical and technological diverge. Even the most strident evolutionary biologist knows that explaining love in terms of species survival (technological core) is lame. Something more satisfying—more real—is required. Presenting ideas doesn’t cut it. We need a story.

I doubt I will encounter much pushback when I say that contemporary culture is almost entirely dominated by the quest to deploy human power to manipulate and control. This impulse has moved into church life in the form of what has been called spiritual technology, that is, technique-oriented tactics of leveraging spiritual practices to achieve measurable results. Name-and-claim prosperity gospel, glossolalia, and even decisional regeneration are all examples of pagan-style efforts to bring God under human control.

These are, of course, out-of-bounds for confessional Lutherans, but this does not mean that other forms of spiritual technology never appear. Subtle discernment is required here. Emphases on, say, right thinking or applications about how to manage one’s finances or maintain one’s physical health certainly gesture toward topics that arguably fall within the realm of Christian virtues, but the line between sanctification preaching and the uncritical introduction of spiritual technologies imported from cognitive behavioral therapy or modern-day Stoicism (to name two popular movements today) is a narrow one.

Here it may be helpful to repeat a point from a previous article, that there are some things that Lutheran congregations will address in their ministry, but not primarily through the main, public preaching voice of the congregation. Other avenues are better for such things, especially when so many people are missing out on the narrative component of reality that strikes them in deep, abiding ways. When all the people of God are together let preaching be primarily about the story that enfolds all of history and therefore all people present.

Let preaching be primarily about the story that enfolds all of history and therefore all people present.

The language of history and narrative is in many ways more truthful than the language of concepts. Only when a person fully enters the rhythms and contours of a narrative that sets the agenda week after week, season after season, year after year is the transmission of information able to produce transformation of character. Indeed, this issue has long been one of the legitimate criticisms of sermonizing that is too heavy on deductive points of doctrine. But the cure for sermons too heavy on deductive points of doctrine is not sermons too heavy on practical points of application. If anyone wants parishioners to encounter preaching that is more transformational than informational, then he will not present a series of concepts but will instead inculcate a long-term narrative structure.

We do not turn to the Scripture merely to look up correct answers or to find helpful information (though such things are surely there), we turn to the Scripture because there we find the Way—and not according the technological core, as if Jesus is the way to some other good, but in the sense of the mythical core, that is, every aspect of who we are—from our body to our personality to our mind to our behavior—must participate fully in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is the main protagonist of history. All of us are written into his story just as a branch is grafted into a vine.

Narrative as network good

Lutherans are familiar with the concept of antinomianism, that is, a person who rejects moral rules revealed in Scripture. A similar somethingnomianism has lately arrived: autonomianism, that is, the view that we are a law unto ourselves.

Autonomianism in ministry introduces a curious version of the old cuius regio, eius religio in which the principle is often expressed as something like, “This is what we like.” To be sure, there is little justification for blanket uniformity among churches of a denominational brotherhood, especially across broad geographical distances, but there are surely ways to reflect unity apart from uniformity. A shared ecclesiastical calendar and preaching lectionary is one such way. The narrative of the lectionary is a network good.

Note the distinction between a good and a network good. A good is something that is advantageous to have, like money. Having one dollar allows you to do very little. Having one million dollars allows you to do very much. An iPhone, on the other hand, is a different kind of good, a network good. The advantage comes not from owning many iPhones but from many people owning iPhones. The good is a network good.

I would like more and more to think in terms of the “we” in our shared story.

I see the narrative character of the lectionary and corresponding calendar in much the same way. If everyone charts their own path, then not only is the local effect of a consistent, long-term narrative structure lost, but so is the broader network amplification of the good. I would like more and more to think in terms of the “we” in our shared story, a “we” that includes not just the members of this or that congregation who heard this or that particular set of topical sermons, but also the other churches of the denomination 15 miles across town or 1500 miles across the country. I would enjoy learning how some of the most gifted communicators in our church body walk their people through the texts and themes of Lent each year. I would be glad to know that a young professional newly introduced to the gospel narrative in one place could move to another and pick up where he left off. I see great appeal in raising children to find meaning in the narrative points of God’s work in the world, especially in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And best of all, inhabiting the same narrative structure does not require rigid uniformity. Not everyone in a baseball lineup has a uniform batting stance, but they are united in the task of hitting the ball and for that reason they do all share a certain set of practices in common. In the same way, creative variety and local contextualization in preaching will actually be stronger when connected to a common core.

Free to tell the story

The vision I have sought to articulate in this series is one in which the core paradigm of preaching is narrative, cyclical, seasonal, and communal. Such a paradigm is built on a sturdy foundation of texts selected for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel in a way that is distinctively Lutheran in emphasis. It is also a framework that is more likely to produce creative and engaging results in contemporary culture, to say nothing of the massive potential for network good and refreshingly countercultural testimony.

The massive potential for network good and refreshingly countercultural testimony.

For many years I have served in a setting where I could freely preach according to almost any paradigm I might want to try. But I have continually returned to the lectionary not because I am compelled to do so but because of the rationale I have explained in this series. I believe that a careful analysis of the way culture has changed since the rise of the seeker-sensitive or attractional model of Christian cultural engagement reveals a compelling case that, for the most part, the topical paradigm is a paradigm better suited for the past. I’m not enough of a historian to know if lectionary preaching was always so well-suited to a contemporary task at hand, but as I look around me and ahead of me, I am hard pressed to come up with a better overall way to preach to people living in late modern culture than through the shared heritage, common good, and creative strength that the lectionary paradigm offers.

Written by Caleb Bassett

Caleb serves as pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Fallbrook, CA. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the WELS Hymnal Project and chairman of the project’s Technology Subcommittee. He has been a frequent guest panelist on The White Horse Inn, a nationally syndicated radio program and podcast on theology and culture. He is a fellow of the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism, and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France and a member of the WELS Institute for Lutheran Apologetics.

¹ Chad Bird, Upside-Down Spirituality (Baker Books, 2019), p. 137.

Free Text Series or Lectionary Preaching?

The essential element that makes preaching worth anyone’s attention

A common sentiment among my fellow preachers suggests that the lectionary-based approach to preaching has become unsuitable for contemporary ministry. The thinking is that an occasional, topical approach—typically called series preaching¹—is better than following the liturgical church year with its one- or three-year cycle of pericopes used in common across an entire community of churches. This opinion appears to be particularly pronounced in missions to the unchurched and in parish settings self-consciously characterized as visionary or innovative.

This is the first part of a three-part essay in which I will enter this simmering debate. I will analyze and comment on three subtle but significant criticisms of lectionary preaching. I intend to offer meaningful resistance to what strikes me as a largely unexamined assumption: that series preaching is the way of the future because it somehow offers unique advantages for ministering to the kind of people shaped by contemporary American culture. I will work to carve out some much-needed common ground even as I make the case that lectionary preaching remains the best preaching paradigm for Lutherans in our time and place.

Perhaps I will be able to convince some of my fellow preachers to return to the shared heritage, common good, and creative strength of lectionary preaching. But if not, then the series preacher might at least rely less on unwarranted assumptions to justify the practice and become more sensitive to the realistic pitfalls in series preaching.

Effort isn’t the issue

Last year I participated in a conference discussion on how best to contextualize worship to today’s culture. The conversation inevitably turned to contextually relevant preaching. A clear sentiment emerged: lectionary preaching was said to be the easy way to preach because the lectionary has already been planned for you. The topical series, in contrast, was said to be the hard way to preach because a good series requires a significant amount of advance planning. The resulting benefit of all this hardness was said to be a corresponding increase in homiletical relevance. In other words, “The topical series is hard to do because relevance is hard to come by.” By the end of the discussion the matter was even cast in moral terms. One pastor called the lectionary not just the easy option, but the lazy option!

No doubt he was overstating the case. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the lectionary has acquired a reputation as little more than a time-saving table of texts instead of an atlas showing the way to the kind of seriously relevant preaching that ministers of the gospel are called to deliver. Many preachers are setting lectionary preaching aside on the grounds that it is simply too weak of a tool to till the fields where they have been called to gather a harvest.

I will wholeheartedly agree that series preaching takes more effort to do well than most lectionary preachers probably realize. I once had to plan and preach a brief, occasional series and I found the process to be quite unpleasant. Maybe the difficulty arose from working against the grain of so much training and so many years of practice. Regardless, my point is that, yes, it does take serious effort to do series preaching well. I hope any preacher who preaches serially always gives the job the full beans it requires.

Persistent misuse of a preaching paradigm does not prove the paradigm is faulty.

I will also agree that many preachers have used or continue to use the lectionary lazily. The point is well taken that the specific value of the lectionary is not that you can arbitrarily (and at the last minute) grab a text from a table of pericopes and preach as if every sermon is isolated from what has preceded it and what will follow it. But at the risk of offering what amounts to a playground retort—“I’m not lazy, you’re  lazy!”—what is the lectionary preacher to make of the many websites trafficking in ready-to-preach series kits? A clever programmer could probably code a bot to compare the social media feed of every WELS congregation to what’s trending on the most popular sources of series kits and find no small number of matches.

Both lectionary preaching and series preaching have well-known and well-worn ways of taking shortcuts, the habitual use of which should be unwelcome in a virtuous professional culture. Persistent misuse of a preaching paradigm does not prove the paradigm is faulty, rather it bears witness to an ethos short on rigor and lacking in integrity. Excellent preaching of any kind requires significant foresight, careful planning, and all-around effort. The lectionary is not the easy option because preaching is not the easy option. All preaching is hard when practiced seriously and sincerely.

I suggest that we settle on this common ground and focus on more fruitful ways to analyze and compare series preaching with lectionary preaching. We must still discern a credible path from the premise, “series preaching requires more planning than lectionary preaching,” to the conclusion, “therefore series preaching yields greater contextual relevance compared to lectionary preaching.” Is such a path possible or plausible?

Relevance is at stake

Differences over lectionary preaching vis-à-vis series preaching seem to arise most frequently in conversations about what makes preaching relevant to a particular cultural demographic or cultural moment. It seems that context and relevance, not ease or difficulty, are the real points of contention. This is significant for understanding and addressing the issue. The assumption appears to be that the lectionary cannot reliably engage the context of the congregation or the community in which the congregation operates. The question, then, is why anyone thinks this.

One commonly-held answer seems to be rooted in the static nature of the lectionary. The lectionary tells and retells the account of a God who promised (and subsequently accomplished) to become our human brother in order to decisively redeem mankind from its entanglement in the cords of death and to definitively raise us to new life in a God-owned identity and vocational purpose that stretches from this moment through eternity. And because these things happened in the past there can never be new things that happened “once for all,” as the writer to the Hebrews puts it. The core story in the lectionary is static in the same sense that history is static.

This means that the lectionary cannot know who was elected president or what progressives want to teach kids these days. The lectionary does not react to the latest ministry blogs, nor does it comprehend that superhero movies are a big deal. The lectionary hasn’t been imbibing the latest pop psychology and religious self-help. The lectionary doesn’t know any memes. The lectionary hasn’t reviewed the latest Barna studies. Therefore, the thinking goes, for preaching to be relevant to a contemporary setting (as opposed to flowing from a historical consciousness) there must be an intermediary individual or group, like a pastor, group of pastors, or a planning committee, who regularly surveys the surrounding culture anew to discern what topics need emphasizing for preaching to enjoy relevance in the coming months.

This is, to say the least, an extremely popular approach to preaching. Aside from the expository model in which a congregation will work through whole books of the Bible over lengthy periods of time, the entire Evangelical industrial complex appears to be geared toward the task of churning out series after series. Such an approach thrives in the theological framework governed by the presumption that if the church and her ministers will only just embrace the surrounding culture with gusto, then the surrounding culture and its denizens will be more open to the church’s message in return. In this dispensation it seems the concept of relevance is meant to mean the task of calibrating preaching to harness the most engaging subjects or styles of the times, even if it means making heroic leaps of logic to somehow connect intellectual fashions and cultural fads to biblical theology.

This is not the relevance that Lutheran preachers ought to seek.

I am unconvinced that this is best described as relevant. Predictable may be a better word for it—and not the good kind of predictable, like Christmas coming every year. The point at which the series approach as commonly practiced could be called innovative appears to be in the rear view mirror. Whether it’s the barely camouflaged fundraising effort (#generosity) or the soft-core commentary on sex (#intimacy), series preaching as a trend appears to have become a rote procedure by which a cultural product of some kind, like a fascinating book, hit movie, major event, or social trend becomes the catalyst for the question, “How can I preach a multi-week series on this subject?” Indeed, some such books come with twelve chapters, which—voila!—become twelve sermons.

This is not the relevance that Lutheran preachers ought to seek. Unless the goal is to communicate that the church’s message is a Christianized expression of the surrounding culture, it’s an awfully big assumption to think that what’s trending in culture or what’s on the pastor’s Kindle is also genuinely relevant to the actual predicament of particular people in the padded seats, to say nothing of relevance to the formation of thick, resilient, long-term Christian communities. In fact, a serious concern to consider is whether by focusing on cultural relevance the preacher is directing the eyes of his people away from where they need to be focused, that is, preachers can easily point people away from the Person in whom genuine relevance is found. To answer this concern with, “Jesus is in every one of my sermons,” is, frankly, inadequate. Jesus is in an awful lot of hip-hop tracks, too. The heart of the issue is what role Jesus plays in preaching.

Jesus is essential, not instrumental

The series paradigm too easily positions Jesus as instrumental instead of essential, that is, when a congregation’s preaching is presented as a species of cultural commentary, religious therapy, or intellectual inquiry, Jesus must inevitably come across as one of the many great minds that people could choose to follow for good advice. In this paradigm the preacher can really only recommend Jesus, and because he can only recommend Jesus he must go to great lengths to present Jesus as the best way to accomplish whatever the stated goal of the sermon series is. The preacher may say something quite biblical, like Jesus is the only way to salvation, but such a message, while technically true, is overwhelmed by what the medium says. Things soon start to sound less like preaching and more like motivational speaking or life coaching. After all, if this month isn’t “The Greatest Month of Generosity Ever,” then what was it all for?

Things soon start to sound less like preaching and more like motivational speaking or life coaching.

The underlying logic of an instrumental deployment of texts tends to create people who hear only way as better way—and even then, it’s only the better way for now, that is, until they discover an even better way. This underlying logic of instrumentality is subtly implied if not explicitly stated in the form of advice-centric series themes and topics. “Come to hear how Jesus makes blank better,” is the main message, even if a few sentences of gospel are sprinkled in to rescue the sermon from formal charges of legalism. The fact is that there are other great minds out there and many people who recommend them as the good, better, or even best way to get after your goals. Only Jesus asks his followers to bear a cross. At some point following Jesus does not make everything better, it makes many things quite a lot worse. If Jesus is offered to people as relevant insofar as he can be a means toward some other end—especially a self-directed end—then he is not relevant at all.

The psychological captivity of the church.

I file this entire tendency under a concept described as the psychological captivity of the church.² The notion that the most relevant pastor is the one who looks to the world around him to determine where to head with his preaching has probably ceded any remaining position of strength against profoundly strong cultural currents. The church and her preachers are mired in a trade deficit of sorts; we import more ideas than we export.

None of this is to say that good preaching won’t engage with the cultural context of the congregation in significant and meaningful ways. It is to say, however, that it is too simplistic to think that the series paradigm is itself the engine of relevance. Quite often the result is literal irrelevance, especially if what’s on offer is merely a Christianized version of what others offer. People will go elsewhere to get the same practical benefits but without the Christian cross. Can we blame them?

The gospel is relevance incarnate

A helpful way to understand the issue of relevance is to analyze what kind of communication the gospel actually is. Christian doctrine is clear that salvation comes “from hearing” and what’s heard is a “message about Christ.” Here it is not pedantic to point out the plain meaning of the word gospel, that is, “good news.” Because the gospel is a report of an event or state of affairs, we must understand our preaching as the delivery of news. If we are not preaching news, then we are merely hosting a speaking event. Whether this event takes the form of a droning lecture or a trendy TED talk is immaterial. Both manifestations are the same—devoid of the distinctive power at our disposal to call lost souls from death in sin to life in Christ.

What does this have to do with the question of relevance? Everything. A sermon that offers commentary, advice, or application about the world that someone could, in principle, come upon elsewhere and apart from the Christian gospel is, by definition, irrelevant as news. It may be good and useful information that everyone is glad to have heard, but it is not, in the final analysis, news—and certainly not gospel.

Nothing ever will be as relevant as the words and works of Jesus Christ.

What animates the lectionary paradigm is the insight that nothing is or ever will be as relevant to as many people in as many situations as the words and works of Jesus Christ. The relevance people need most comes in the form news, an announcement of events that no one could come upon by any amount of their own thinking or choosing, events that happened “once for all,” but must be proclaimed again and again, generation after generation.

This is why I suggest that Lutheran preachers be less concerned about the quest to make their preaching relevant in culturally conditioned terms and to work instead at saying what is genuinely relevant to people living under the effects of sin and death. You can be sure that everyone will one day find themselves facing a deadly spiritual thirst (indeed, they face it already). Your task is to ensure that they have been drenched with words that point to the one who can and does quench their thirst. Aim your preaching at the moments when people will need to have heard good news, not endless therapeutic applications of biblical proof passages. Aim your preaching at relevance worthy of the word.

The lectionary does make one thing easier

I want to be clear that my claim is not that the series preacher never preaches the gospel, but that the series paradigm as a medium, with its reliance on a culturally-conditioned definition of relevance, makes genuine gospel proclamation either more difficult to accomplish or makes the gospel into an instrumental footnote attached to what people otherwise sense is the obvious goal: religious therapy, cultural commentary, intellectual inquiry, or spiritual motivation.

For example, one Sunday after Easter I was enjoying dinner at a neighbor’s house. Our host, knowing that I am a pastor, asked, “What was your sermon about today?” I briefly summarized the thrust of my sermon on the appointed gospel in which the recently-resurrected Jesus shows his wounds to Thomas. Then, knowing that our host attends one of San Diego County’s largest multi-site Evangelical churches, I asked, “What was your pastor’s sermon about today?” The answer: “How to lead like Moses.” I have little doubt that Jesus was mentioned in that sermon just as I have little doubt that the Lord was mentioned mainly as the means to a practical end.

I am not saying that everyone who follows the series approach to preaching does that, but I am saying that the lectionary makes it a whole lot harder to traffic in legalistic life lessons. It would take a monumental effort to somehow feed God’s people leadership training seven days after Easter while preaching the lectionary. If the lectionary makes one thing easier it’s this: maintaining focus on the words and works of Jesus and delivering the good news in a way that is—as I will argue in the following parts of this series—uniquely poised to matter most in our cultural moment.

There are almost limitless opportunities to engage contemporary culture within the lectionary preaching paradigm. It’s still hard work, too; but where it matters most the lectionary may really be the easy option.

Written by Caleb Bassett

Caleb serves as pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Fallbrook, CA. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the WELS Hymnal Project and chairman of the project’s Technology Subcommittee. He has been a frequent guest panelist on The White Horse Inn, a nationally syndicated radio program and podcast on theology and culture. He is a fellow of the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism, and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France and a member of the WELS Institute for Lutheran Apologetics.

¹ This article is the first in a series of three that evaluates free text series preaching, not the kind of lectionary-based series featured in the new hymnal’s Commentary on the Propers and offered in The Foundation at welscongregationalservices.net/the-foundation.
² This concept was coined by academic theologian L. Gregory Jones, former dean of Duke Divinity School and provost of Baylor University.

Preaching with Outsiders in Mind

Insights from a Pastor Reaching Unexpected Prospects

Editor’s note: This issue continues our series on preaching with those outside our church membership in mind. It provides insights from Pastor Ben Kuerth, from Divine Savior in Doral, Fla., a northwest suburb of Miami. Prior to his ministry in Florida, Kuerth started a mission church, Victory of the Lamb in Franklin, Wis., where he served for twelve years.

Divine Savior operates an academy with 1,150 students and a special needs school with 40 students. A unique challenge is preaching to 65 WELS called workers who are mostly from the Midwest while also connecting with many who have never heard the pure gospel. Doral is home to immigrants from Venezuela, Colombia, most of South America, and many other countries since those who want to do business in South or Latin America have offices in Miami. This presents opportunities to share the gospel with souls who have little Bible background and for whom English is often not their native language.

Ideas from Pastor Ben Kuerth

Four examples or thoughts on how outsiders have impacted your preaching preparation:

The first three examples are of people in suburban Wisconsin—one from the early days of renting a Polish beer hall, one from our days in a movie theater, and one from our new ministry center. The last example is from Florida.

A tough father. He did MMA fighting at a local gym—not a big guy, yet wiry and tough. I sat next to him at the closing picnic for our soccer Bible camp which his daughter had attended. I invited him to church. He smirked and said, “Nah, church is for wimps.” I ended up daring him to come to church for the sake of his daughter and prove to her that he was a tougher and better man than Jesus. He said, “Okay, you’re on!” To my surprise, he actually came that Sunday . . . and faithfully almost every Sunday after that. Baptizing him and his daughter was a special moment. He thanked me for making church feel like a place where guys like him who were rough around the edges could come and not feel weirded out. He helped me realize that a lot of guys deep down are craving someone to call them out and call them to something more, Someone bigger.

A lot of guys deep down are craving someone to call them out and call them to Someone bigger.

A tearful mother. One night the phone rang. The woman was in tears because her son had committed suicide the day before. The reason she called me was because three years earlier I had knocked on her door while canvassing and invited her to church. She never came. What I didn’t know is that she had been watching our services online for years. Even though I barely knew her, she knew me and considered me her pastor. On the phone she told me the previous night she had watched one of our services on repeat over and over from 2:00 to 4:00 a.m. God’s Word was the only thing that soothed her broken heart. She reminds me of something now whenever I see the camera at the back of church: somewhere at the other end of that camera lens’s tunnel is someone else just like her—a soul hungry for what only God’s Word can give, someone who at some point will likely look to me as their pastor.

She had been watching our services online for years.

A trembling woman. One Sunday I noticed a car I didn’t recognize. It was parked some distance from the doors of our ministry center. For 15 minutes it just sat there. No one got out. Worship was about to start. But I felt I needed to go out there. I introduced myself and said, “Can I walk you in?” The woman in the car was trembling. She said she’d been battling depression. She had prayed to God for a sign—either to get out and actually go inside or to go away for good. She had recently considered ending her life. She then said something I’ll never forget: “I came here thinking maybe I’ll first give church one last shot.” I think of her often on Sunday mornings even now as I pray, “Lord, help me today to speak and act as if someone here is giving church one last shot.” This has had a lasting impact on me.

A grieving son. Recently in Doral I’m grateful for Bruno who has started bringing his two daughters to church. A few years ago, his dad died of cancer, and it was brutal for him to watch. How his dad faced death without hope did a number on him. During the pandemic he began seeking God, thinking that there must be more than this material world. Thoughtfully he wondered, “There has to be a God since I have this desire to be a good person and want to make the world a better place.” So out of the blue, he came to our church. From his home office he can look out his window and see our “Divine Savior” sign—a sign from God he now calls it! I can still see Bruno leaning in, intensely listening as I preached that first Sunday. Over a strong cup of Colombian coffee two days later, Bruno shared what had hooked him: “It’s like you were saying, ‘Let’s get back to the basics . . . but in a good way.’” My sermon that previous Sunday was nothing special—except for the simple, clear law and gospel with Jesus at the center. But, of course, (silly me) that’s exactly why it was so special for him! God brought Bruno into my life at just the right time when I needed to be reminded that I don’t need to carry the burden of always being super creative or needing to come up with “new-to-me” content. What people need, more than anything, is the clear, Christ-centered truths of the Bible communicated simply and sincerely. That is sorely lacking in so many South Florida churches. Is it also by you?

I don’t need to carry the burden of always being super creative or needing to come up with “new-to-me” content.

Three encouragements to preachers for keeping outsiders in mind in sermon preparation:

1. Clear beats clever. Sometimes I try and get too clever, and I end up confusing people. Clear and clever? That’s great when you can pull it off. Sometimes the occasion calls for it, perhaps. But if you’re trying to communicate with people whose first language is something other than English, or with people who are brand new to Christianity (or both!), being clear is the vital task. The more people I meet from other countries, the more I’m starting to realize this.
2. “There’s a soul at the end of that tunnel.” I tell myself this whenever I look into the livestream camera lens. There are potential pitfalls to preaching when you’re aware of people “eavesdropping” anonymously from anywhere in the world. Yet over and over, for years now, I’ve met or interacted with people who’ve reached out to me as their pastor even though I had no clue I was pastoring them. This is simply because someone invited them to watch online, linked them to a particular message, or they stumbled onto our website where at some point the Spirit prompted them to take a next step. So, keep them in mind. Consider greeting those who are worshiping online. Invite them to reach out to you if and when they’re ready. Simply acknowledge their “presence” with gratitude whether or not you know if anyone is actually out there watching. With archived services and messages online, it’s virtually guaranteed that someone will be eventually. It’s also a great way to establish a culture that communicates, “We are a church that is always expecting guests.”
3. Imagine someone present in person or online who is giving church one last shot. Between people disillusioned with some church experience and those doing the trendy thing of “deconstructing” their faith, this is a huge segment of people. When you prepare for a service imagining that such people will be present, it changes how you plan to greet people in the parking lot, host the service, conduct the liturgy, and communicate during the sermon. At least it has for me.

Consider greeting those who are worshiping online . . . to establish a culture that communicates, “We are a church that is always expecting guests.”

Two sermon excerpts of preaching with outsiders in mind:

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Kuerth’s sermon on 2 Thessalonians 1:3-10. You will hear his theme “Only Jesus Provides Eternal Home Security” echoing in the excerpt below.

The Thessalonians knew that ultimately only Jesus provides eternal home security. They knew that only in Jesus would they be kept safe from God’s judgment against sin. How about you?

There is a danger today, I think, that we would be so lulled into a false sense of earthly security that we forget about our real need for Jesus and his saving grace. There is a danger today facing everyone in Doral that if we just have enough money, or toys, or technology . . . and that if our earthly lives and houses feel safe . . . and we have the sense that we’re in control and if we keep our lives so busy that we don’t even really think about death or God’s judgment or wrath . . . then everything must be okay, and we just assume we’ll be safe forever and ever. There is a danger today specifically for Christians too that we would compromise the convictions of our faith and the teachings of the Bible in order not to experience conflict with the world. There is a danger that we would make our own personal comfort a higher priority than taking up our cross and following Jesus no matter the cost rather than be made fun of by our friends who don’t believe what we do.

But no matter what the cost, no matter how heavy the cross we have to carry in life or how much conflict we face, to those who cling to Jesus, he promises relief. Paul says, “He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well.” This is why the Christian church is the only place where you are perfectly safe. You’re safe here not because this earthly building is built impossibly strong. You’re safe here not because nothing bad could ever happen here. You’re safe here because only Jesus Christ provides eternal home security. Like Paul told the Thessalonians, “This includes you, because you believed our testimony to you.” . . .

Everything Jesus accomplished as the stand-in for sinful humanity, he did for you. When he died on the cross, those were your sins he was paying for. When he rose from the dead, that was your victory over the grave that he won. When he comes back in glory, he will come to bring you safely home and glorify you with him forever. It’s something we can look forward to. Only Jesus provides eternal home security until the day he says, “Welcome home.” Then we will be forever safe from all violence, selfishness, exploitation, and greed. Then we will be forever safe from all the consequences of sin and from endless ruin itself.

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Kuerth’s sermon on Matthew 1:18-25 with the theme, “Jesus Gives Us What We Need.”

So how could (Joseph) be sure (of what the angel told him and if he was equipped for the task of raising and protecting the Son of God)? Because he simply took God at his word. He went all in trusting God’s Word instead of his initial feelings. There’s a great lesson for us. That’s why months later Joseph followed through and named that little boy Jesus. Even after he had time to think things through, he was still sure. Even after the emotional high of a personal visit by an angel had long worn off, Joseph kept hanging on to God’s Word. He knew that God was with him.

And you can be sure of that too, no matter what you’re going through right now and no matter what surprises you will find in the future. For even though life often takes us by surprise, nothing takes God by surprise, and his presence in your life means you have nothing to fear. In our world there are lots of uncertain things. Pop up ads promise you too-good-to-be-true deals if you just click on them right now. Weather predictions are sometimes right and often not. The stock market is volatile and not even the experts seem to know whether it’ll go up or down. You might not be sure what the next year is going to hold for you and your family. You might not always be sure where you’re going to find the courage to deal with the different people and situations you face.

But you can be sure of Jesus. You can be sure he came to pay for your sins as the only one perfectly qualified to do so because he is both fully God and fully human. You can be sure that he lives to take you to be with him forever heaven. You can be sure that Jesus is your Savior God who is with you as you go forward into the future. Because he is Immanuel.

One preaching resource (besides the Bible and Confessions) in your library and why you have found it valuable:

I need to talk through the ideas in my head with others in order to sift out the wheat from the chaff, so for years now the most helpful resource in preaching preparation has been to meet regularly with other pastors to share key insights, applications, and ministry stories of the real people we’re thinking of as we prepare a sermon on the same text. I feel blessed to get to do that via Zoom with other Divine Savior campus pastors as part of our multi-site ministry.

A preaching book that I regularly consult is Stories with Intent by Klyne Snodgrass. Prof. Paul Wendland suggested this in a satellite summer quarter class on preaching parables. The book provides useful insights into story structure, historical context and interpretation, and relevant modern applications. I’ve realized that I could improve how I tell stories, so the book has been a help in thinking through the ways Jesus used stories.

Timeless Reminders

Editor’s note: This issue’s timeless reminder comes from Prof. Emeritus James Westendorf’s article, “Passionate Preaching for Impassioned Preachers.” You can read Prof. Westendorf’s article in its entirety in Preach the Word 4:1.

Know Your Text. Often when you go up to a person you didn’t know very well before and start asking him questions about himself, rather than simply listening to what other people have to say about him, you find out some very interesting things. You may get to know the person so well that you want to introduce him to your friends. The same thing can happen with texts. You begin a dialogue with a text, asking questions of it and listening for its unique answers, given in a way that perhaps no other text can give, and you start getting excited. The conviction begins to grow in mind and heart, “Wow, this text has some amazing things to say, and it says them so marvelously. I can’t wait to introduce it to my people next Sunday.”

Know Your Pulpit. The sermon is our chance to tell others what we have seen and heard from the mouth of God himself. I wonder with what feeling Philip spoke the words to Nathanael, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph”? I don’t think those words were said matter-of-factly because what they revealed was so mindboggling and amazing. You are in the same situation when you preach, only you don’t have to find the people first. They have come to you! Don’t hide the excitement. Let the enthusiasm that is in your heart show!

Know Your People. The impassioned preacher is not just a visiting pastor, he is also a listening one. He does the hard work of actually paying attention to what his people are saying. He makes mental notes of the fears, disappointments, doubts, and hopes which his parishioners describe. . . . When he is in the pulpit, all those conversations come flooding back into his memory. In his voice can be heard his unrestrained joy that says, “Boy, do I have something wonderful to tell you.”

Know Yourself. I’m sure you have been told more than once in your career, “Preach every sermon and apply every text to yourself before you take it to your people.” When that is done faithfully and regularly, the enthusiasm to share grows. . . . There are no magical formulas and no artificial contrivances that can keep the fires burning and the juices flowing, but that doesn’t mean there are no solutions to the absence of passion in our hearts and in our sermons. You are regularly working with the Spirit’s own instrument. Let it have free course in your heart. The passion will be there; passionate sermons will be the result. You and your people will reap the benefits.

Written by Joel Russow

Preaching with Outsiders in Mind

Insights from an Urban Setting

Editor’s note: This issue continues our series on preaching with those outside our church membership in mind. The previous issue provided insights from a pastor serving in rural Nebraska. This issue provides insights from a pastor serving in the greater Seattle area.

Pastor Daniel Lange shares insights from his ministry at Light of Life Lutheran in Covington, WA, where he has served for twelve years. Pastor Lange also serves as the first vice president of the Pacific Northwest District.

Ideas from Pastor Daniel Lange

Four examples or thoughts on how outsiders have impacted your preaching preparation:

Preschool parents – Every week I see the moms and dads dropping their kids off at our preschool. They are outsiders who could visit church any given Sunday and sometimes do. In my conversations with them, I’m often reminded that they are busy, stressed, worried for their children, filled with questions or guilt about parenting, and looking for deeper peace and purpose in life than living the “American dream” in the suburbs of Seattle. (I confess as a parent living in the same community that I struggle with much of the same). What would I want to say if a family from our preschool stepped in this week? “God use these words for them. May they find the Savior who invites them to find rest for their weary souls.”

The conversation died when I said I was a pastor.

My neighbors – Last year, two young professionals moved in next door. As we greeted one another, the conversation died when I said I was a pastor. Since then, as I’ve poked around different topics, I would describe their worldview as many living on West Coast—atheist, humanist, and secularist, with a splash of anti-religion. They care deeply about social issues. While they haven’t come to church yet, my prayer and goal for them is that someday they will. When I see opportunities to touch on current events in my sermon, I ask myself, “How would I say it if I knew they were coming? Or how might I say it if we were talking to one another in the backyard?” When looking at issues in the world, we may not agree on the cause, but we can agree that the symptoms are ugly. I, too, see the devastating effects sin has on our society. How can I connect those problems to the Problem and finally to the Solution of Jesus?

The drug-addicted welder – I met a man in my community two years ago. He was more open with me than anybody I’ve ever met. After finding out I was a pastor, in the first five minutes he confessed to me he was addicted to drugs, alcohol, pornography, and sometimes slept with prostitutes. He said he had recently been trying to quit it all. With tears starting to run down his cheeks, he wondered if I had time for a question. He wanted to know if his baptism still meant anything. I was able to talk him into a Bible Information Class but still have not convinced him to come to church, although he has promised many times to show up. He is a reason I sometimes ask myself, “Is God’s grace clear in this message? If this is the Sunday he arrives, will he see the Jesus who forgives him still, loves him still, and, yes, whose baptism still promises eternal life?”

Many of them are burned out by heavy preaching which presents Christ only as example.

The drifting de-churched – The collapse of Mars Hill in Seattle left 10,000 Christians without a church home. A few of these families have made their way to our congregation, joining some others with a non-denominational background. Many of them are burned out by heavy preaching which presents Christ only as example. They remind me to preach the law with all its deadly force and the gospel with all its life-giving power.

Three encouragements to preachers for keeping outsiders in mind in sermon preparation:

1. Regularly pray for first time visitors at your church. I live in an area where we don’t get walk-in visitors on a regular basis. When we do, one thought I don’t want to have is, “I wish I would have put more time into my sermon this week.” I’ve heard this from several others: the best outreach a pastor can do is to have a good sermon every week. Praying for regular visitors is an exciting pastoral practice. It’s exciting because God often says, “Yes,” to those prayers. It also helps me keep the outsider in mind when preparing the sermon.
2. Trust your sermon preparation process. Sometimes when Easter, Christmas, or VBS Sunday is coming, I find myself falling into the trap of focusing on the audience before I have spent enough time in the Word. At some point, we do turn from gazing into the Word to gazing at our audience, but don’t make that turn too quickly. Stay glued to the text, soaked in the Word, and keep digging, just like any other week. When the speaker is captivated by what he has discovered, the audience (both insiders and outsiders) will be listening.
3. We have THE STORY. In the age of information, where people are bombarded with disinformation, fake news, biased views, and thousands of stories every week, what comfort to know that we have THE STORY. Even though we may not know the personal story of every outsider who comes into our doors, we know that God’s STORY includes them. What a privilege to share, even if it’s just one time.

Two sermon excerpts of preaching with outsiders in mind:

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Lange’s sermon on Genesis 1, preached during the summer of 2020 when protests and riots gripped Seattle, Portland, and much of the nation. Lange comments that the sermon attempted to connect social issues people are passionate about to the greater problem of sin.

“Why is our world broken?” Be careful as you answer that question. Some might say, “Because of racism.” I wouldn’t disagree. Some might say “Because of lawlessness.” I wouldn’t disagree. “Because of selfishness, because of hatred, because of greed.” I wouldn’t disagree. But the reason I urged you to be careful in answering the question, “What is wrong with our world?” is this: everything we see happening right now is connected to a problem that runs much deeper than anything you see in the headlines. Like a river of pollution and filth THE PROBLEM runs its ugly course through every part of our existence. It’s source, the headwaters, begin flowing into our world just 2 chapters later.

I find myself falling into the trap of focusing on the audience before I have spent enough time in the Word.

Genesis 3. The tragic account of how God’s beautiful creation fell apart. Tempted by the devil at a tree, the first human beings reached for something they could never attain, they believed the serpent’s lie that they could become like God himself. And rebellion, evil, and sin went viral. Spreading like a cancer into all of God’s creation. Racism is an evil that flows from this event. Lawlessness is an evil that flows from this event. Injustice, violence, hatred, fear, greed, selfishness, apathy—all of it flows from what took place at that tree.

It’s very likely that because of your background and upbringing, one of these issues angers you more than another. And because of that, you are likely drawn to one side more than another. And if you are drawn to a side, you then have the target: the other side. To point out how they are so wrong and how your side is so right. And like blinders on a racehorse, our anger focuses our attention on the issue and against the other side and we forget something. We often can’t see it, but since the fall into sin there is not a single person living on earth who is completely right. Not even close to it. “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). I’m not saying there isn’t a time to speak up and speak out and stand for justice and righteousness, but I fear we often do so without acknowledging and confessing something first—that wicked and evil river of pollution flowing from the tree in the Garden of Eden has flowed right into my own heart as well. As children of Adam and Eve, we were born with hearts of darkness. You were born with a heart of emptiness. We all enter this world with hearts filled with chaos, emptiness, and disorder. We are all guilty and deserve God’s righteous and true anger to come down upon us.

The scene is set again for one of the greatest demonstrations of God’s power and love. He looks at this mess of a world and he sends his Word again to bring peace, order, justice, and life. This time he didn’t just speak the Word, he sent the Word. The Word of God took on human flesh. Born of a woman and placed in a manger. The Word grew up and walked the earth. He, and only he, lived righteously and walked perfectly. He, and only he, was always in the right. He, and only he, was truly in a position to look down on everyone else in righteous anger, but he didn’t. Instead, he looked up to his Father and said, “Let it be me! Let your anger come down upon me! Not them. Let all this mess fall squarely upon my shoulders.” And so, we go to another tree. The tree where the innocent Son of God, took up all our pain and misery and suffered injustice for us once and for all.

Many guests would be used to preaching heavy on sanctification and light on justification.

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Lange’s Palm Sunday sermon on Philippians 2. This sermon was preached on a Sunday when many preschool guests would be in attendance. Lange comments that this sermon attempted to speak to the de-churched with a non-denominational background. Many guests would be used to preaching heavy on sanctification and light on justification.

Remember what was said at the beginning (of the text), “In your relationships with each other have the same mindset Jesus displayed.” God commands us to be humble just like Jesus. And if I said, “Amen,” right now and you left, you might be thinking this was the sermon summary: “1) Jesus was humble, 2) God commands us to be humble just like Jesus,” and you might be fine…for a while. You might go to IHOP and get your pancakes, go to Home Depot and buy your hanging flowerpots for the deck, but sooner or later this question would catch up with you today or this week, “Have I been humble like Jesus? Am I in my life being humble like Jesus? Can I ever be humble like Jesus?”

Why is it that my heart enjoys having the advantage over others? When people treated Jesus like nothing, he carried on in love without complaining? But why is it that when people dismiss me or treat me like nothing, I want to say, “Excuse me, don’t you know who I am? How significant I am? You can’t treat me like that!” And being a servant? Why is it that after a long day of work, the dishes get done, the house gets picked up, and finally a quiet hour for me, and right when we sit down, we hear from upstairs, “Mom, Dad, I need you.” Why is this heart of ours is so slow to serve? This is not a “Look at Jesus and be humble like him!” kind of sermon, this a “Look and first be humbled!” kind of sermon. Be humbled by the truth we haven’t loved this way. Be humbled that God commands us to love this way, but we can’t. We have broken his commands. Someone had to pay for our pride and our selfishness, someone had to pay for the times we haven’t loved others. Someone had to pay for all of our sins. That is what Jesus came to do. It was the reason he came to the city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. To rescue us from sin. He didn’t bring an army. He would win victory over sin by surrendering himself. His humility is our hope!

There is no greater act of humble love. The exalted one, who by nature is God, allowed sinful humans to pin him to a crossbeam with nails. The most powerful being to ever walk the earth rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and offered himself to die. The one equal to God didn’t consider using that advantage for himself, even when the other crucified criminals mocked him telling him he should save himself. He stayed. He didn’t even think of saving himself, because all that was on his mind was saving you. The payment we owed God the Humble Servant has given.

One preaching resource (besides the Bible and Confessions) in your library and why you have found it valuable:

One resource is my blank sermon writing template page. Every week I open this document when it is time to begin a new sermon. It has prayers, reminders, tidbits from homiletics class, quotes from other preachers, sermon diagnostic questions, etc. Here is a sampling of what is on it right now:

1. Begin with prayer. Remember: It is a privilege to stand in pulpit. Enjoy the process!
2. Catch ME in the Gospel net this week!
3. Holy Spirit, use this message despite me!
   • Text: Theme of Day: Prayer of Day: Lessons: Initial Ideas:
   • Law: “How can I preach the Law to the secure sinner?” (CFW Walther, Proper Distinction)
   • Gospel: “How can I preach the Gospel to the crushed sinner?” (Walther)
   • Other thoughts and questions:
     • Where is Christ in this text?
     • What lie is the devil telling? How does this portion of God’s Word expose that lie?
     • OT questions: What does the text reveal about God and his will, God’s acts, covenants, law, grace, etc?
     • What is the narrow and broad context of this text?
     • Don’t forget the “So What?” factor.
     • With this sermon I pray that the Holy Spirit will ____ my listeners to…

Timeless Reminders

Editor’s note: This issue’s timeless reminder comes from sainted Prof. Daniel Deuschlander’s article, “Preaching Old Testament Texts.” You can read Prof. Deutschlander’s article its entirety in Preach the Word 7:2.

Perhaps it will help if we start with the simple and so useful assumption: Every text is unique. It makes no difference whether the text is from the Old Testament or the New, keeping that assumption in mind may help to guard against preaching the same sermon every Sunday or from using the same application, no matter what the text: This is the Word of the Lord. Now let’s go out and share it with our neighbors and relatives. Just as the miracles of Jesus are all the same only different, so too are the Bible stories of the Old Testament. Jesus’ miracles all prove that he is the omnipotent Son of God who cares about our human condition. But each recorded miracle is at the same time unique, containing in its telling a lesson found nowhere else in quite the same way. So also the Bible history of the Old Testament. Each story makes the point that God is serious about his Word, both the law and the gospel.

The preacher is always looking for what makes these inspired words, this particular story, unique.

Each story illustrates the truth that grace is always undeserved, that we live by faith, and that we walk as pilgrims under the cross. And at the same time each story is unique and sharpens our understanding of those eternal truths just a little bit more. It is part of the art of the preacher of the Word that he is always looking for what makes these inspired words, this particular story, unique. He is always asking the text: What are you doing here? Of all the things that God could have said, could have told us about, why this?

Written by Joel Russow

The Foundation – Year A

The worship planning spreadsheet (and PDF version) for the entire year has been available since mid-August. Advent through Epiphany had been posted in early June. Some materials such as the Preacher Podcast and graphics are still being provided as they become available.

To receive earliest notice of such materials, be sure to sign up for email notification of new resources at welscongregationalservices.net/subscriptions/. Pastors might want to encourage musicians to sign up for the Hymnal Highlight series, which offers practical and helpful ways to introduce new hymns.

Are you just now considering The Foundation for the first time? Be sure to review the introductory video at welscongregationalservices.net/foundation-yr-a/ and also Worship the Lord #111. A link is just under the video. Note that you can use The Foundation even if you don’t have the new hymnal. You can easily adapt the worship plan for CW21 in the Year A Planner to CW93. The new lectionary is available in the free test drive version of CW Service Builder (builder.christianworship.com) and for purchase from Logos. Since the Gospel readings in the new lectionary are almost always identical to the old, you can still use Planning Christian Worship (worship.welsrc.net) for hymn suggestions if you’re still using CW93. Just watch for any hymns that focus on a First or Second Reading that might have changed in CW21.

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