What do soldiers talk about before battle? A moviemaker answers with the portrayal of a private who on the eve of D-day reminisces about his time at home: "Sometimes when my mother would come in to wake me up in the morning and tell me that she loved me, I would pretend that I was asleep and didn't hear her." Then after a long pause, he adds, "I don't know why I did that." What comes from the lips of soldiers after battle? Shelby Foote's account of the Civil War records, "As they lay wounded and dying on the field of battle, they cry out for water and their mothers." The message is simple: We may not appreciate what is most dear to us until we are desperate. This is true of mothers and it is also true of expository preaching.
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The ethic of expository preaching is plain, because we believe that the power of spiritual transformation resides in the Word of God, the goal of the preacher is to say what God says. Expository preaching that solemnly commits the preacher to make the meaning of the passage the message of the sermon is the preaching method that most dependably achieves this aim. Yet, we must confess that we can tire of the apron strings of such a method and long for approaches more imaginative, communicative and seemingly relevant. We long to fly to more exotic destinations, but may in the heat of a culture war discover there's no place like home.
What I intend to contend is that expository preaching like the homes of our youth may occasionally need some remodeling, but there is still no place like home for the restoration and nurture of the spirit. Mom and apple pie don't seem so bad when you're at war, and neither does expository preaching in the present cultural battle for the soul. To discern why we still need some home cookin' we need first to discern what some of the trends are in the world of pulpit feeding, understand what gives us a taste for it, and determine what can spice up what is dear to us without dishing out something no different than what the rest of the world offers.
At the same moment that our culture is deepening its appreciation of story forms of communication, the homiletics world — particularly the Evangelical homiletics world — is showing increasing caution toward the dominant use of story in preaching. The narrative revolution that produced the "New Homiletic" and enveloped mainline preaching over the last three decades is being examined with greater perceptiveness by the rising generation of Bible-believing preachers and scholars. This increasing caution is not because any of us doubt the power of story to hold attention and touch the heart (aspects of communication that expository preaching — at least in stereotype — is notoriously weak in producing). Rather our increasing wariness is a result of the growing awareness of the philosophical soil from which narrative models have sprung.