Sermon styles

While looking for a pastor, one of the things you start thinking about is sermons. Though sermons weren't a definitive factor in choosing a candidate for our church, I do believe that a pastor's sermons can tell you a lot about the person. And I realized that sermons can vary on more than just a good or bad spectrum.  There are different styles of preaching that not only reflect upon the personality of the preacher but that can be received in very different ways by the congregation as well. 

Pastors who value feelings are more likely to include stories that appeal to the listener's emotions. Pastors who value knowledge are more likely to refer to metaphors that conceptualize a point. Neither means of communication is necessarily better or worse than the other.  They're simply different. That said, I believe some people resonate more deeply with styles of preaching that fit their own personalities more closely.  The intellectual may walk away from a very good sermon that was full of stories thinking, "That was OK, but he mostly just told stories."  While the person who values feelings more highly might walk away from the same sermon thinking, "Wow!  I finally understand God in a way that I never have before.  That was a fantastic sermon!"   Likewise, the intellectual may hear a very organized, detailed, point-by-point sermon and think, "I could really connect with that.  That was well laid out and argued."  Whereas the feeling person slept through the sermon because they found it to be dry and lifeless.  Both sermons might have had great things to say, including valuable truths that would help a person in life, but if they weren't relayed in a way that the people could connect with, they might go in one ear and out the other. 

This, I believe, is one reason why certain types of people are drawn to certain types of churches.  Philip Douglass studied this in detail in his book, What is Your Church's Personality?: Discovering and Developing the Ministry Style of Your Church (which I haven't read yet, but it's on my "to read" list). After studying churches specifically in the PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) he determined that 80% of the churches in the PCA were either ISTJ/ESTJ (which he calls "Organizer" churches) or ISFJ/ESFJ (which he calls "Fellowship" churches) in personality (and the people both leading and members in these churches were often also predominantly these personality types.  This holds true in our church where our two elders are ESTJ and ESFJ and our incoming pastor is an ESFJ.  I'm an anomaly as an INTJ as is Rob as an ESTP.)   ... Wow, I'm rather digressing here.  I'll have to tackle this topic again in another post.  Back to sermons....

There were essentially three styles of sermon that I came across in the many sermons that I listened to from our candidates: 1) Loud, 2) Lectured, and 3) Personal. The Loud style reminded me very much of our youth group pastor when I was at a church in Colorado Springs. He had very simple messages to get across, but he spoke very loudly and with great enthusiasm that gave his simple messages more grandeur than they otherwise would have carried.  As an intellectual teenage brat, I didn't think much of them.  I discovered during our pastoral search that I still don't think very much of them.   The Lectured style is what I predominantly hear from the pulpit.  It tends to proceed according to a series of points that, if you were to take notes, would fit neatly into an outline format. It addresses the Bible very much as a professor would address a textbook. The Personal style seems to center around the preacher's interaction with the Biblical text. The speaker often begins from a point of "When I first looked at this, this is what struck me."  Preachers using this style often delve deeply into context (historical, social, theological and personal).

I think this Personal style is the tack Dan Kimball is calling for in his descriptions of preaching in his book on the Emerging Church.  And I find that I agree with him that it's an engaging and relational style of preaching that I find really refreshing.  Ironically, when I described it to my mom, especially Kimball's suggestion that pastor's need to lose the "fill in the blanks" sermon notes, my mom looked shocked and cried out, "But I love filling in the blanks!"  Like I said earlier, different preaching styles appeal to different personality types differently.  It's not good or bad, it's just different.