A summary guide to any discipline is the “Cliffs Notes” version of the subject. It can be helpful in giving a broad and surface understanding of an extremely complicated and varied field but is unable to give detailed attention to its subtleties and complexities. It’s better with the ‘whole’ than its ‘parts.’ Still there is, by times, the need for a general taxonomy of the schools or approaches within a discipline. It may be helpful for those attempting to enter the field so they might understand the ‘lay of the land.’ Preachers may be helped by looking at their current approach to preaching in relation to others. Scholars in the field will probably be entertained by the reductionism evident in the taxonomy and may be motivated to suggest ways in which it might be improved. So for these reasons, what follows is an attempt to classify the major approaches to preaching within the scope of contemporary North American Evangelicalism.
A word about the approach — there are several differing ways to classify schools of preaching. One way would be to analyze the actual practice of preaching by studying a representative collection of sermons. This process has some merit but would require such a large database of sermons as to be somewhat prohibitive. Another approach might be classification by sermon form — deductive, inductive, narrative, etc. Since it is more generally accepted now that sermon form should follow the form of the biblical text, this approach has lost some of its appeal. A division into expository, textual and topical preaching seems outdated since its critique by Sidney Greidanus in his The Modern Preacher and the Ancient Text.1 A classification based on different theological/ epistemological/hermeneutical understandings would be helpful to map the entire North American homiletical landscape. This, of course, has already been done in several recent studies.2Since this article relates solely to Evangelical preaching, a basic Evangelical theological stance and hermeneutic is assumed, even if there are some variations in theory and practice. So what remains is a ‘classification by emphasis.’ Here is where we employ “The Preaching Sphere’ diagram to form the basis of our analysis.
Most teachers and students of preaching have seen or used a similar diagram before. The Preaching Sphere views preaching as a three-sided conversation among the biblical passage, preacher and the people (i.e. the gathered congregation) under the sovereign direction of the triune God. Good preaching, then, maintains the appropriate order and balance among these conversation partners. “Conversation” as used here, is not understood in the same sense as it is employed among ‘radical postmodern’ homileticians who tend to blur the authority of biblical text with the collected opinions of the gathered congregation. The term does connote, however, a reciprocal relationship between each of these three conversation partners surrounded by the guiding and enabling presence of the triune God that highlights the living nature of the preaching task (event). The biblical passage is at the top of the triangle to represent its authority in respect to the other two, but these two are also indispensable to the entire preaching task. Preaching requires a preacher and an audience (or better, a congregation) to be complete. God himself broods over the entire process to bring about his glory -- illuminating the text for the preacher, creating unity between preacher and people and conviction in the lives of the entire congregation. At risk of over-simplifying the complexity of all that happens in this ‘conversation,’ the plane between the passage and the preacher can be summarized as ‘exposition,’ the plane between preacher and people (the congregation) as ‘communication,’ and that between the passage and people as ‘application.’