I started preaching thirty years ago. Back then, I attacked Biblical passages with hammer and chisel, working to break them open into identifiable segments, which could then be arranged in a rational and psychologically appropriate order. I dressed up the outline with illustrations along with additional supporting materials. I even analyzed psalms and stories, dividing them into three or four "points." The expository outline was the big thing! I was a teaching preacher! My models were Paul Rees, Stephen Olford, and James Stewart.

My naturally linear, rational bent was intensified by five years as pastor of a college church in the east, where cerebrally oriented academics wanted meat, not fluff. Amazingly, even a music professor urged me to quit telling all those stories and just give them the Word! People took good notes from those days! I churned out neat outlines with points and subpoints. I was often tediously exegetical, uniformly propositional/deductive, and only superficially Biblical, at times. Instead of letting the text speak for itself, I imposed my analysis upon it, often failing to deal with the wider context of the passage, the book, and the Scripture as a whole.

Even then, I discovered that what most gripped people and fostered post-sermon, pastoral interaction was concrete, earthing of Biblical truth in everyday life. Christian people were beginning to value the right brain, along with the left, the intuitive along with the analytic. The importance of narrative in the fabric of Scripture was beginning to filter into evangelical Christian circles. Fred Craddock's As One Without Authority (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971) had started to make inductive preaching the "in thing." I also observed that even in the academic community, where I served, life wasn't all lived in the mind. There was a whole person to be engaged with the gospel.

As I began to hear and read about narrative preaching and inductive preaching, I started to recognize the breadth of literary genre in the Scriptures, demanding varied approaches to shaping the sermon. I also came to recognize that, whether I liked it or not, "reasons why" didn't seem to matter as much as an "experience of" and "feeling good about."

These days, the homiletical pendulum has swung a long way from the linear/rational/deductive model. Many preaching theorists discount, even deride the analytical, propositional approach I used to work with most. Many propose an approach to structure that is inductive, organic, and which more closely follows the shape of the Biblical passage. The realization that Scripture is largely narrative in form and should be handled accordingly has led preachers to major in story, and not just "illustrations," dropped into sermon development to "shed light" on abstractions.

I agree -- at least to a point!

What I disagree with, however, is that in much of the mainline homiletics I read and see practiced, there seems to be a sharp wedge being driven between didache and kerygma.