by Barney Wells, DMin
Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence
As we continue looking the step-by-step process of crafting a sermon, having spent time letting the text soak into our souls, having done the exegetical work to determine what the text meant to the original readers, and having done the theological work of determining the timeless message of the text—now what?
There is a step here that isn’t directly part of this process but must come from the parallel process of loving and living with your congregation, knowing them as a shepherd knows the sheep in his or her flock. In future installments of the Sermon Crafting Blog, we will look at that process, but for now I will assume you know your audience and their needs.
Take the timeless message of the text and the needs of the audience, and ask how the text speaks to one of those needs? Ask what you expect your audience to think and feel and believe and do as a result of hearing this message from this text. (You may at this point want to review the earlier post titled “Do Your Sermons Have a Mental Model).
Now, at long last, you are ready to write the first words of your sermon, the very most important words. You are ready to write the theme or thesis statement or “big idea” of sermon, the one sentence that will lay out the course of the sermon and help determine whether each supporting point and illustration, the introduction and conclusion, etc. will move the sermon along that course or distract from it. The importance of this sentence cannot be overemphasized. To quote an outstanding preacher from over a century ago, John Henry Jowett,
“I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as crystal. I find getting that sentence is the hardest, the most exacting, and the most fruitful labor in my study. To compel oneself to fashion that sentence, to dismiss every word that is vague, ragged, ambiguous, to think oneself through to a form of words which defines the theme with scrupulous exactness—this is one of the most essential factors in the making of a sermon.”
More recently, Haddon Robinson expressed the same idea in more earthy terms, “A sermon should be a bullet, not a buckshot.”
Here are some tips for crafting that all-important sentence:
- Keep it short. A good thesis or big idea statement should usually be no more than five-to-eight words.
- Use a present-tense verb. The sermon should be about what God is doing, or what we are doing in response, right now—this Sunday morning, this coming week.
- Use an active verb. Again, we are talking about what God is doing or what we are doing in response, or both.
- The subject of the sentence should be Christ or us, and the object should be whichever of those isn’t the subject. Of course, there may be some exceptions to that on occasions, but let that be the general rule.
- Use adjectives and adverbs sparingly. Unless the text makes it imperative to include more than one or two, piling up too many will hide the main clause of the sentence behind descriptors.
It is hard, time-consuming work to get this sentence right, but it will pay off in helping you filter supporting and illustrative material and structuring the movement of the sermon. This sentence may be spoken early in the sermon, or not until the very end, but it must be written first as all the rest of the sermon grows from it.
And next week, we will start that growing process.