Preaching With Your Whole Person
When I attended Calvin Theological Seminary, every first year student wanted to be Neal Plantinga. Then-President Plantinga’s sermons abounded with adverbs and adjectives that simultaneously sliced through theological ambiguity and cut to the bone and marrow of our hearts. And he did it in the gentle bass tones of what can only be described as a vocal embrace of your entire soul.
Our first year preaching class was awash in poor imitations of Dr. Plantinga’s dynamic style—myself included. It’s like we were collectively saying, “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30).
To be fair to Neal, he never asked for this. To be fair to us students, we could have picked many a worse exemplar to parrot. And, of course, imitation is how any young preacher begins to find their own voice.
However, it just didn’t work. People rightfully want authenticity in their preachers. Go figure. Seeing the tops of too many heads during my sermons taught me a painful lesson: I need to find my voice.
The problem? No one was trying to teach me how.
We learned proper exegesis. We learned transitions. We learned how to find the good news of Jesus in any passage of scripture. I am grateful for every one of these lessons, and I truly think I received a terrific education.
But no one in those first couple years of seminary seemed interested in helping us be us in the pulpit. It’s a trend I’ve continued to see in my years of ministry: preachers writing sermons that their elders could read to the congregation and it would still work just fine.
Where does this self-less preaching come from?
I suspect this personality-less preaching phenomenon finds it roots in three intermingled soils.
1. A simplistic theology of scriptural inspiration
If God poured his Word unerringly through the pristine, empty vessels of Paul, Isaiah, Moses and others, perhaps we too should strive to empty ourselves of ourselves so the Word can come through pure and unadorned.
The reality is that many of us who ascribe to a much more embodied view of inspiration—one in which God’s Spirit inspired the various authors of scripture through their histories, intellects, and personalities—still imagine God holding their hand as they held their pens.
If we believe that the temperament and sense of humor of scripture’s authors didn’t matter, then why should mine? However, if we believe wholeheartedly in organic inspiration of the Bible we preach, why wouldn’t we expect God to work through our personalities as preachers?
2. A misunderstanding of humility.
Many Reformed preachers hold fast to the tenet that we shouldn’t draw attention to ourselves when we preach because then we are then drawing attention away from Jesus. And, we’re not Jesus! We’re merely like John the Baptist. “He must become greater. I must become less.”
But John the Baptist wasn’t saying he must become less John. He was watching his disciples leaving him to follow Jesus. He was saying, “If it’s a zero-sum game for disciples, I hope Jesus wins.” Like locust-eating John, we can preach with all of who we are toward that aim.
3. A fear of the people listening
If I show up as myself, they won’t like me. They won’t listen to me.
Especially in a multiracial church like ours, there is a temptation to hold yourself back or become someone you’re not. It’s easy to think that you can’t connect with people who aren’t like you unless you become like them—or at least less like you.
In any church, it’s vulnerable to be yourself in the pulpit or on the stage. The more of your personality, humor, and stories you put in, the more it feels like the response to the sermon is a referendum on whether folks like you.
Death to Self vs. Death of Self
The key that unlocks this three-pinned padlock shutting in our personalities in preaching is a proper view of dying to self. Dallas Willard wrote:
[Christian teachers] have not carefully drawn the distinction between death to self and death of self. As a result, people view death to self as if it means getting rid of yourself. That is not at all what it involves. You were not put here on earth to get rid of yourself. You were put here to be a self, and to live fully as a self. The worth of the self—your self—is inestimable, and God’s intent for you is that you become a fully realized self.
Doing away with “death of self” theology corrects our view of inspiration and humility. God made our self. Our voice. Our way of thinking and speaking. If God made me this way and called me to preach, presumably he wants to speak through me.
On the other hand, embracing “death to self” kills our pride without killing our personality. Dying to self means we are more concerned with Jesus being loved than our self being liked. Dying to self means we won’t insert our self into our preaching in order to be the center of attention, and we won’t excise our self from our sermons for fear of vulnerability.
A preaching professor in my third year of seminary noticed that we needed help finding our voice. He gave us freedom to try on the best attributes of preachers from every tradition and style to see what came closest to each of us.
But it was this quote he shared with us from Phillip Brooks that liberated me. (Apologies for the non-inclusive language.)
Truth through Personality is our description of real preaching. The truth must come really through the person, not merely over his lips, not merely into his understanding and out through his pen. It must come through his character, his affections, his whole intellectual and moral being. It must come genuinely through him
8 Responses
I appreciate these insights. Thank you for sharing.
The most helpful process to finding my “preaching voice” was a sabbatical I undertook in 2008 which included studying, reading and writing poetry. My most important teachers were a group of poets I met with for several years, none of them clergy. It’s amazing to see how, where and through whom God works in revealing ourselves to us.
I appreciate this essay.
I especially love the line: It’s easy to think that you can’t connect with people who aren’t like you unless you become like them—or at least less like you.
I’d love a follow up essay on what this looks like in your particular context, just because I want to learn about how you navigate this- both in preaching and living.
A preacher I know well shared a story of a church he served where after one of his sermons he asked the sound booth to turn off the broadcasting to the outside world. He then vulnerably shared with his congregation the heartbreak his family was going through at the moment; asking for prayers. While shaking hands at the end of the service an older parishioner offered compassion to him. He fumbled his words sharing you were surprised how accepting this congregation was. But she responded: Isn’t this what you have been teaching us that Jesus wants for us to be for one another?
He often said that church congregation allowed him to be human…as you would say, himself.
Permission granted to share this story.
I appreciate hearing your thoughts on this. It’s a topic worthy of serious reflection.
Some brief thoughts.
That the Gospel gets mediated through me and my personality when I’m preaching strikes me as a truism–how could it be otherwise? But that’s not the same as saying my job in the pulpit is to tell stories about myself. What’s more, how reliable an evaluator am I of the worth of these stories?
Most of us find ourselves pretty fascinating. Certainly, in my experience, preachers are far from immune to over-estimating the interest and value inherent in their experiences, passions, dislikes and so forth, as well as their pet theories on the economy, politics, international conflict, epidemics, public health, entertainment, and so forth.
In fact, I would say the larger problem we have in the churches these days is preachers giving themselves far too much license to spend their time narrating their own lives, sharing their obsessions, or posing as experts in areas they’ve never seriously studied, and too little preaching the Word of God as found in the Bible.
It’s not as if Christians in North America in the 21st c. are so Biblically and theologically literate that they need to take a break from all that. So put me in the “Back to the Bible!” camp.
A former spiritual director, Ginger Anderson-Larson, advised me, “Trust your gifts.” Not to neglect conscientious preparation, but to let my self interpret and express the message. It has helped me to remember this over the years, and released me from the anxiety of over-preparation and subsequent lack of spontaneity. Writing poetry helps too, even if it is not used in messages, because one finds one’s own style there too. Thanks for a thoughtful essay!
I really liked what you had to say about preaching and I really liked what John Haas says about it in his response. I think the two perspectives can go together and need not travel in opposite directions.
I agree, David. There’s room for a lot of diversity in how we do things, and the main thing is whether–whatever our style or method–we’re doing it well. To do that typically means being ourselves. On the other hand, we also need to stretch ourselves sometimes. There’s room in the world’s pulpits taken as a whole for a lot of experimenting, innovation, and idiosyncracies. If we’re delivering the good news in a compelling way, that’s what matters. I’ve heard chatty, story-filled sermons that were excellent, and I’ve heard austere and formal sermons that might have come straight from a 13th c. theologian that were excellent. I think the main thing is to reflect on what we’re doing and why, to stop relying on formulas and fads, to be aware and intentional about what we’re doing, and, as the article says, to find our unique voice. And to preach every sermon as if it’s the last we’ll deliver and the last they’ll hear.