Wiersbe: At Back to the Bible, it was studio preaching; there was no visible audience. I wanted them to change. One of my early suggestions was' "Let's change and do what Chuck Swindoll is doing and others are doing, let's tape it from a live situation." This has a number of advantages: first, it's much easier to preach to a live congregation than it is in a studio. Secondly, you can use humor -- you can't do that in the studio, they don't know you're being funny, they take you seriously. But if they hear the laughter coming from the congregation they say, "Hey, it was funny!" But the board preferred not to change; they said, "Ours is a studio ministry." So the difficulty of the studio ministry is you must be very careful what you say and how you say it. The listeners cannot see your face. They don't know what your expression is. You've got to imagine one person listening, not a big congregation.

Actually when you preach to a congregation, you don't preach to a congregation but to an assembly of individuals. When I preach publicly, I preach to one person because the Word is for individuals. The radio preacher who talks about "people out in radioland" invites everybody to turn the radio off, because there are no "people" -- only individuals -- it's a woman ironing clothes, or a truck driver on the road; and you're talking to an individual. You should do that, I think, in pulpit ministry rather than talk to a crowd. How do you preach to a crowd? Crowds don't do anything; individuals do. I like Phillips Brooks' definition of preaching: "the communication of divine truth through human personality." We preach as individuals to individuals.

Preaching: Through your books and your radio ministry, you have been a favorite of many preachers. Many have drawn encouragement and ideas from you. Who were the folks you drew encouragement from or who you enjoyed listening to or reading?

Wiersbe: I have two sets of homiletical heroes: the dead and the living. Among the dead, Campbell Morgan is a hero -- his sermons and books have been a great encouragement to me and, of course Spurgeon, but for a different reason. I read Spurgeon, not as a preacher or a homiletician, but as a sinner just needing God's grace. Many times I will come home from church on Sunday morning and while my wife is getting dinner ready, I'll just sit down and read one of Spurgeon's sermons. It does my soul good. A relatively neglected preacher, George Morrison, had a great influence on me. He pastored the University Presbyterian Church in Glasgow. An hour before the service, the line of people in front of the church would reach around the block. He published many books of sermons -- they're out of print, as many good books are -- but he had a poetic gift in his preaching.

You must know this about me: my early preaching ministry was very analytical, very content centered; and in these recent years, I have moved away from the emphasis on content to intent. I did not agree with his theology but Harry Emerson Fosdick was right when he said, "The purpose of preaching is not to explain a subject, but to achieve an object." So I've moved more into that, plus I use more imagination. For several years I've been working on a book on imagination in preaching -- not how to think up illustrations and how to have clever titles, but the theology and psychology of imagination. You read the Bible and it's a picture-book. It's not a book of doctrine, or even a theology book -- it's a picture-book, but we don't preach that way. There's a lot of material available on imagination. The secular philosophers and semanticists have been doing a great deal of study on metaphor. You read Isaiah and see what a master he was of the imaginative. I was reading Hosea the other day in the NIV, and there must be thirty or forty similes and metaphors in that one book. So when I prepare a sermon, the first question I ask is, "What does the text say?" Then I ask, "How does it say it?" I used to skip that. Is my text a poem, a proverb, a narrative, a story, a parable? What kind of literature is it -- and why did the writer use this approach? Bible preachers preached in that mode; why don't we? We analyze everything to death.