Remember Preaching 101? On the first day of class your professor said, "In this course you will write, think and sleep preaching." Then over the next few sessions he demonstrated the three types of sermons with a booming voice that rattled the windowpanes. Everyone in the class was awed (and filled with just a bit of vocal-chord envy).

By the end of the course every student could identify and deliver a topical, textual or expository oration on command.

A recent ministry transition gave me the rare opportunity to listen to other pastors preach. I heard a new variety of sermon -- a style that, surprisingly, my preaching professor failed to cover in class. (I say "surprisingly" because so many preachers employ it, the uninformed observer might think that seminarians devote several semesters to it.) It is absent from the list of preaching classes in every college catalogue I perused. And my inspection of the literature on preaching turned up no book, not even an essay describing it or extolling its virtues.

Since (apparently) I have discovered a new, as yet undefined type of sermon, I decided to name it. At first I tried to incorporate my surname somehow, perhaps "Longitory" or "Longual." Neither sounded right. Besides, those titles simply reminded me of the garden variety "long sermon," and nobody wants to hear those. In the end I settled on a name borrowed from contemporary literature -- the Stream of Consciousness sermon.

Now the reason for this choice will become obvious in a moment. First, for you non-literary types, Stream of Consciousness writing is a way to display the thoughts of a character in a novel. Since human thinking often flows without any particular organization, plot or direction, authors represent it on the printed page by an utter lack of punctuation, run-on sentences and phrases. The prose is disjointed, one thought jumping to another, seemingly without end. James Joyce popularized this technique in Ulysses (which some people say is the greatest literary work of all time):

...all he could do to keep himself from falling asleep after the last time we took the port and potted meat it had a fine salty taste yes because I felt lovely and tired myself and fell asleep as sound as a top the moment I popped straight into bed till that thunder woke me up as if the world was coming to an end God be merciful to us I thought the heavens were coming down about us to punish when I blessed myself and said a Hail Mary like those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar that they come and tell you there's no God what could you do if it...1

And this consciousness-stream continues for forty pages. Fun stuff, huh?

In Stream of Consciousness writing, then, we read whatever comes to the mind of the thinker at the moment he thinks it. In Stream of Consciousness preaching we hear whatever comes to the mind of the speaker also at the moment he thinks it. Of course, a Stream of Consciousness sermon has complete sentences and for the most part follows traditional syntactic rules. In that it differs from the writing technique. Otherwise the parallels are striking. A Stream of Consciousness sermon typically begins with a text (or maybe a thought or experience) and then takes the listeners on a wild ride from topic to topic to topic, without organization or outline, as each idea presents itself to the preacher's consciousness.