Scott Hoezee - Actuality: Real Life Stories for Sermons That Matter (The Artistry of Preaching Series)

Title Page

Copyright Page

Actuality:

Real life stories for sermons that matter

Copyright 2014 by Abingdon Press

All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Permissions, Abingdon Press, P.O. Box 801, 201 Eighth Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37202-0801 or permissions@umpublishing.org.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hoezee, Scott, 1964-

Actuality : real life stories for sermons that matter / by Scott Hoezee.

1 online resource. (The artistry of preaching ; 2)

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by

publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-4267-9625-8 (epub)ISBN 978-1-4267-6593-3 (print) 1.

Preaching. 2. Experience. 3. Sermons. I. Title.

BV4211.3

251dc23

2014032255

Scripture quotations unless otherwise noted are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version , NIV . Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. TM Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc. TM

Dedication Page

For Rosemary, whose love of literature inspires me and whose yearning for
honesty in sermons has taught me so much about preaching. I love you!

Contents

Contents

T

Series Preface

Series Preface

T he Artistry of Preaching series gives practical guidance on matters that receive insufficient attention in preaching literature yet that are key for preachers seeking greater creativity in their preaching. Fresh, faithful proclamation requires imagination and creative engagement of the Bible and our world. There is no shortage of commentaries on the Bible and books on biblical interpretation for preaching, but practical resources to help strengthen the creativity of preachers to help them better to proclaim the gospel are much in need.

The first volume of this series, Preaching as Poetry: Beauty, Goodness, and Truth in Every Sermon , redefines preaching for our current postmodern age. Imagination is needed to compose strong theological sermons. Modernist notions of authority, goodness, and truth are challenged by our current culture. The church needs to adapt to a new world, where faith is understood as poetry rooted in the beauty, goodness, and truth of a saving relationship with God.

The second and current volume of the series, Actuality: Real Life Stories for Sermons That Matter , is a resource for preachers who want guidance to be better storytellers or to use story more effectively to communicate with a new generation. Here readers will also find a collection of stories that both preach and that can stimulate their own imaginations to identify stories from their own contexts. Preachers can easily run out of good stories to use that embody the gospel. The problem is not a shortage of storiesthey are all around in everyday events; the task is learning how to harvest them, as will be shown here.

Preachers long for good stories, and todays listeners are not content with the canned Internet illustrations that sound artificial and have a predictable moral. Rather, they want stories rooted in the actual world in which they live, that depict life as they know it, and that can function as Jesuss stories did, as parables and metaphors that bear Gods grace to their hearers.

Scott Hoezee is a wonderful storyteller and preacher, whose insights into what makes for a good story will inspire and encourage preachers. His volume demonstrates various ways in which stories may be mined from news, literature, drama, movies, art, and daily life. He develops several key practical principles that guide his approach to biblical preaching.

The aim of the series is to be practical, to provide concrete guidelines and exercises for preachers to follow, to assist them in engaging practice. Preaching is much more than art, yet by ensuring that we as preachers employ artistry in our preaching, we assist the Holy Spirit in communicating the gospel to a new generation of people seeking God.

Paul Scott Wilson, Series Editor

Author Preface

Author Preface

Y ears ago when I was serving as pastor of a congregation, one of our high school students met with the elders of the church to make his profession of faith. When asked what inspired him to take that important step in his faith journey, the student indicated that the main thing that got him thinking about spirituality and his own faith was a religion class assignment to write a sermon. The student then looked directly at me and said, Turns out, its hard to write a sermon! For a long time I thought all you did on Sunday mornings was just get up and talk!

If only it were that easy!

Preaching is hard work. And as my colleague John Rottman has often noted when we are in the midst of grading student sermons, sermons can go wrong in a startling number of ways. Sometimes how a sermon goes wrong is very interesting, very instructive. At other times it can be hard to say why a given sermon doesnt work, even though everyone who heard it knew that something just didnt go right.

Preaching is hard work. It has always been hard work, but the pressures of the modern world have only exacerbated the degree of difficulty. Whether its postmodernisms sometimes squishy ideas about goodness and truth, religious pluralism that blunts ultimate claims, or the pervasive reach of the entertainment industry and its elevating of listener expectations, our present age has made the preaching craft even more fraught, more fragile than it has ever been. The average preacher also faces the unhappy truth that any number of the people who come to hear him or her on a Sunday morning might very well have spent some time in the previous week downloading YouTube videos of well-known preachers, to whom comparisons with their own pastor will inevitably be drawn.

Having preached something approaching a thousand sermons myself, I know about the pressures preachers face every week. I know, too, that without fresh infusions of good resources, images, stories, and ideas no one can preach very well for very long. A couple of years ago, a senior seminarian who was about to graduate proudly told me that the sermon he had just written for preaching class was already the eighteenth sermon he had ever written. I smiled at him as I told him that if he soon became the pastor of a congregation with both a morning and an evening service (and he soon did just that), then hed double that sermon total in about four months time! Buckle up! Sundays are relentless.

This is a book for all my fellow preachers. It is written in the sincere hope that it will help preachers face the challenges of our present age by writing sermons that will do exactly what most listeners in the church today desperately desire: to hear sermons that are as firmly rooted in the realities of daily life as they are deeply rooted in Gods word. The series in which this book is included is called The Artistry of Preaching, and that title gets it just right: writing sermons is as much an art as a skill, as much a knack as it is a set of hard-and-fast principles.

Finding just the right story or image to fit a given Bible text in a sermon is likewise an art, a sensibility. But knowing deep down that every sermon needs just such reality-based stories is very much a principle of good preaching. Investigating how and why that is so is a big part of this volumes rationale. In the pages ahead I hope not only to make the case for a sense of actuality in preaching through vivid vignettes and stories, but to show what this looks like in action in ways I hope will be inspiring on a very practical, week-in and week-out level for all those preachers who know that as soon as any given sermon gets delivered, the clock is already ticking to get going on the next one!