The preaching swim, therefore, illustrates several important aspects of the act of preaching: God's energy and movement, personal commitment, fitness and preparedness, inadequacy and danger, cultural context, progression of phases, and fellowship. I invite you in these next few chapters to visualize preaching as swimming in a river.
Though a preacher's lifelong journey could be described as a marathon swim, the preaching swim applies to the short-term weekly process of preparing a sermon. There are five stages within the preaching swim that contain thirteen phases [The thirteen phases are discussed in an appendix of Quicke’s book, 360-Degree Preaching.] Its first two stages belong close together because they both involve immersion and listening.
Stage 1: Immerse in Scripture
Immersion sums up the challenge of engaging Scripture holistically. Immersion involves a learning experience in which understanding means participation. It requires preachers to be open to Scripture — to feel its pulse, sense its mood, and prayerfully enter a Bible passage in its context by listening with heads and hearts, right brain as well as left. Preachers cannot do this secondhand or at a safe distance. Rather than standing on a riverbank to fish for ideas, they need to plunge in to Scripture's flow to experience its story and its power. This immersion is listening in the past tense. God's words and images in Scripture breathe with creative potency as God shares himself, and preachers need skill and sensitivity to hear his message in its original context.
Traditionally, this stage is called "exegesis," and it lays the vital groundwork for biblical preaching. Listening in the past tense involves asking questions such as What happened in this text? What did this mean to the first hearers? What did it say? and What did it do?
Stage 2: Interpret for Today
Stage 2 closely parallels exegesis and can be described as listening in the present tense. As preachers immerse themselves in Scripture, they need to keep in mind an understanding of their own times. They need to listen to several voices within the contemporary world. Scripture's voice is primary, but the voices of congregation, culture, preacher, and worship are also present. To interpret a text for today, preachers need to ask, What does it say now? What does it do now? What is its mood and movement? A preacher summarizes the outcome of this interpretation process by completing the following sentence: "By the grace of God, what this sermon will say is . . . and what this sermon will do is . . ." This is called the "main impact" of the preaching event. Some call this stage "hermeneutics" (though this term properly includes the entire process of exegesis as well as interpretation).