Stetzer: Robert Webber, who died recently, offered some helpful categories. You used one of them: traditional evangelicals. In my denomination, that's probably the leadership right now and in many seminaries. For them, as far as preaching goes, that's going to be much more of a working through the text, verse-by-verse, bring in a lot of linguistic tools. That sort of thing.
Following that, Webber talks about the pragmatic evangelicals. Think in terms of the WillowBack world, my own little made-up word. The idea is that it's much more practical; some might use the word felt-need preaching; but what we've seen is that even many of the churches that became known for that don't do that anymore or do that to a lesser degree.
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Webber talks about this emerging generation that he calls the younger evangelicals. Well, I don't know if we can use that term forever because they're not always going to be that young; but there's a desire to do preaching that is more text-engaging. I preached in November for a pastor friend of mine, Mark Driscoll; and I'm thinking, "I've got to bring an hour of in-depth biblical text." I don't preach an hour. When I preach, I'm a 40-minute preacher; but this church, one of the fastest growing churches in America, is led by a pastor who preaches every week for an hour, working through the text.
So I think it's a misnomer to say that emerging generations are not seriously wanting to engage in the Scripture. I find the opposite. My friends—these young pastors with whom I work with—they're very much engaged in it, and to the point where I'm looking at it and saying, "Man, I've got to step up for an hour to bring that."
Preaching: You wrote an article for the last issue of Preaching called "Sermons that Stick." Of course, that title relates to a book I think both of us really like, called Made to Stick.
Stetzer: Great book.
Preaching: What do you see as things that will help sermons stick?
Stetzer: Well, we did a research project, of course in partnership with Preaching magazine, and what we did was actually two projects. First, we surveyed a thousand Protestant pastors to ask about their preaching practices. How do you open a sermon? How long do you preach? What do you do with the text? Do you start with the context or the text? So, we wanted to find a way to report that.
In the second part, we actually downloaded 450 sermons from the two leading, audio sermon resources on a two-week period; so we'd get a random sampling from that set. We listened to them. We actually had a team listen to the sermons to report on what they did. Then we asked pastors what they thought they did.
What we wanted to do was report fairly the data but do so through an article that brought some advocacy for engaging preaching. So, I wrote about the four things preachers need to do. They need to enter their [congregation's] world, open the book, pull back the curtain and call [listeners] to respond. Then for three of those four, we brought data about how pastors did that in their preaching. For example, we asked: "Do you start with the text or the context?" About 37 percent said they prefer to start their sermons with their listener's context by addressing issues such as the current question or a decision their listeners are facing. We found preachers in their 40s and 50s more likely to do that. Younger preachers actually were less likely to do that.
