When Jesus preached His greatest sermon on the love and grace of God, He didn't say "Let me share three principles about God's love." Instead He said "There was a man who had two sons ..."

Story preaching, sometimes called narrative or parable preaching, has been an important method of Christian proclamation since Jesus told parables. However, during the past decade, story preaching has grown increasingly popular in American Christianity. Large numbers of preachers have moved away from propositional preaching toward a more narrative, story-telling method. Richard Eslinger calls this shift from precept to parable preaching "The Copernican revolution in homiletics."1

Simpy put, story preaching is a preaching style that is fundamentally storytelling in its methodology. A story sermon may take the form of an extended biblical story, taking the listener from "once upon a time" to "happily ever after." However, story sermons are often a combination of several stories, both biblical and non-biblical. An example of the multiple story is found in Luke 15, where Jesus told three stories about a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son. Other variations of story preaching exist but, for the purposes of this article, it is enough to say that story preaching is preaching that communicates primarily through the telling of stories. Although the heart of a story sermon is a biblical narrative, story preaching also uses stories from history, literature, theatre, motion pictures, current events, and personal experiences.

Story preaching has captured the imagination of many contemporary preachers. Calvin Miller describes his conversion to story preaching this way: "I will never forget the first time I heard a narrative preacher. The rattlebang homiletics of all the one-two-threesy preachers of my youth dissolved sweetly like the reels of old horror films in the charm of his narrative. From that time on, I was hooked on the idea."2

Like Miller, I'm hooked on story preaching. Although it's certainly not the only valid form of preaching, it is an extremely effective method. With the help of numerous writers in the field of homiletics, let's consider ten strengths of story preaching.

1. Story preaching's style is congruent with the biblical record.

Indeed, it can be forcefully argued that story preaching is the most biblical method possible for preaching a sermon. Years ago, H. Grady Davis reminded preachers that while only one-tenth of the gospel is exposition, nine-tenths of it is narrative. This fact made Davis question why propositional sermons roared on, entirely out of sync with the Bible's narrative mode.3

Charles Rice gets to the heart of this issue in his book, The Embodied Word. "It is easy to forget," says Rice, "that the Bible is, whatever else we may say about it, a storybook. We may divide it into chapter and verse, parse its poetry, turn its tragicomedy into texts, and make so much of its jots and tittles that we cannot hear the stories as stories, but the Bible remains, nonetheless, a storybook."4