Exegesis, narrative both necessary in preaching, Gregory says

MCALLEN –As a part of a BGCT annual meeting workshop designed to help churches proclaim the words of Jesus Christ found in Acts 1:8, Joel Gregory, professor of preaching at Truett Seminary in Waco, demonstrated two ways in which this verse can be preached – the deductive method and the narrative method.

Gregory began with the deductive method. At the heart of any good sermon, he explained, is its ability to point to the large idea of the passage.

Joel Gregory

“How many times have you listened to the sermon and asked, ‘What is this about?’” he asked. “What you are looking for is a sense of unity.”

According to Gregory, the deductive method is the simplest way to make sure that unity is maintained. It is also the easiest way to ensure that the intended meaning of the author comes through in the sermon.

“We need to be about leading meaning out of the text instead of leading meaning into the text,” Gregory stated.

Therefore, good exegesis of the text is always necessary regardless of the method one chooses to deliver the sermon.

“If I bring any meaning and impose it on the text, then it is just that, an imposition,” he said.

While the deductive method of preaching is the easiest way to preserve the meaning and unity of the text, it has its weaknesses. First, the text of Scripture does not always come in neat packages that fit well within a three-point outline. Second, extreme deductive preaching tends to “bleed the story dry of its narrative.” Instead of capturing the excitement of a story, it whittles it down to succinct and sometimes boring points.

Third, deductive preaching is not people’s normal method of communicating with each other. According to Gregory, “We live in stories. You have your story. I have my story. We do not talk to each other in propositions; we talk in stories.”

The narrative method, therefore, best captures typical conversation and is sometimes a preferred means of hearing by congregations. Gregory listed out the various ways in which this narrative form can take shape. Some prefer to simple run the story of the text and “just tell it like it happened.”

Another method is the initial narrative, beginning with the biblical narrative and then going into the contemporary story. The postponed narrative flips this and begins with the story from today and then goes on to the story in Scripture.

A fourth approach, the intermittent narrative, interchanges two narratives, biblical and contemporary throughout the sermon. While each approach lends its benefits, Gregory demonstrated that through an intermittent narrative approach to Scripture, often the preacher can blend the best of the deductive and the best of the narrative.

Perhaps the biggest weakness of the narrative approach, Gregory suggested, is its reliance on the congregation to discover the main points themselves without having it told to them. In the narrative method, “I don’t really want you to know whether I said it or you thought it,” Gregory stated.

In this case, the sermon becomes provocative, but the unity of the sermon may be lost. “Some people have understood the narrative as a story—a text and that’s that,” Gregory admitted.

For himself, Gregory claimed to rely more on a deductive approach than narrative, but he suggested that each should study their congregations and determine what works best for them. For some it will be a sermon through a series of propositions, for others a story.