What would you say if you saw the above drawing on your sermon notes Sunday morning? Would you try not to say anything from the pulpit, and wait till you could get hold of that five-year-old preacher's kid who's been drawing on things again?

What I said when I came to that picture in my outline was that the Israelites made a golden calf while Moses was on the mountain. They had sacrificed some of their most precious jewelry to acquire this calf. If turtle wax for calves had been invented back then, they would have brought out the shine and pulled it out of the garage only when the weather was nice.

The calf was bound to disappoint them, though, just as it does every time God's people break the first commandment and construct other gods. There is always the first scratch, or worse, the first time it gets hauled off by the tow truck and we receive a large repair bill before we can get our calf back.

My sermon outlines are full of pictures. For me they have grown from being a helpful to being a central element in my style of proclamation.

Why draw pictures?

It is certainly not because I am a good artist. I have worked long and hard drawing the pictures for this article. Normally those in the pulpit are recognizable only to me.

I draw pictures because they take a more direct route to the listener's attention. Many preachers like myself have been trying to preach visually over the past couple of decades. The literature is plentiful about the need for this approach. If a preacher is attempting to provide a visual experience for the hearers, why let words get in the way? Why not proceed to a picture?

Drawings insure that at least one person in the church, the preacher, will be able to see what is happening in the sermon. If the preacher can see it, there is at least a chance that others may see and experience it as well.

What would cause an exegetically trained preacher to turn from designing traditional outlines for use in the pulpit to drawing pictures?

I did not always draw pictures. In seminary we were taught to use an outline, not a manuscript, in the pulpit. We were taught a very useful procedure called "functional memorization." It meant that you would know your outline so well that you could probably do without it. You would memorize the headings and subheadings, probably about twelve sentences. You would spend additional time getting your introduction and conclusion down nearly word for word. This served very well for years. Then the preaching literature began to tell of a change in the way people think and listen. Suddenly, the words seemed to get in the way.

I have been drawing more and more pictures on my outlines as the years proceed. I hesitate to call them "outlines" because they possess fewer and fewer of the elements of an outline.

On my early sermons I would sometimes draw a simple cross on the outline to remind me that this was the place where I should not forget to tell the Gospel. After a few years I dropped the numbers and letters for the headings and subheadings. Then I stopped putting subheadings in order and rearranged them according to their relation to each other. So if I wanted to speak of increasing discouragement, the factors or stages may be written resembling stairs heading downward. When the pictures started appearing on my outlines they were small and usually one per sermon. Now I may eliminate the words altogether for major sections of the "outline."