Book #7- Preaching On Your Feet: Connecting God and the Audience in the Preaching Moment

Lybrand, Fred R. Preaching On Your Feet: Connecting God and the Audience in the Preaching Moment. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2008, 171 pages.

This is a re-read for me. I first read this book when I did an independent study in Evangelistic Preaching in the summer of 2008 at NTS. This quickly became my favorite book on preaching. When I interned at Columbus Shepherd Church of the Nazarene with Dr. Eddie Estep, now the district superintendent in South Carolina, I was always amazed at the way Eddie would always preach without notes, and was becoming quite convinced that this was the best way to go about the task of preaching. Eddie differs from Lybrand, however. Eddie would write a manuscript and then was able to pretty much memorize it and repeat it nearly verbatim; Lybrand challenges the preacher to be completely extemporaneous in their preaching.

By this Lybrand does not mean so much of the extemporaneous preaching that holiness people have had to suffer through in the past: the preacher opens up his Bible and sticks his finger down on it, and whatever verse he happens to be pointing to is where the Spirit wants him to preach from in this particular sermon. Oh, the harm we do to both God and the Church when we blame such a poor attempt at preaching on the Spirit!

In preaching on your feet, Lybrand is speaking of what he calls "the art of practiced thinking." Lybrand says that one of the best ways to learn to preach on your feet is to talk to yourself, getting used to verbal processing. Work things out aloud to yourself. The key, ultimately, is saturation. The preacher must saturate themselves into the text and begin to let it wash over them until they can have a single focus for the sermon, a la Haddon Robinson's big idea. Then, "if you know what you intend to say, then the words will come if you start." (84)

Early in the book, Lybrand gives a definition of preaching that I really like: "Preaching is the moment of the sermon that includes the audience, one's walk with God, one's preparation, and things that come to the forefront in the moment to weave together into a unique tapestry of a sermon for people in a time." (22) In Lybrand's view, the personality of the preacher is of great importance. He describes preaching someone else's sermon or mimicking the style of another preacher as being an echo which loses all the force of the original. He goes so far with this line of thinking to say that even preaching on Sunday a sermon prepared earlier in the week is an echo, because since you finished your manuscript and set it aside, you have changed. You aren't the same now as you were then. You have grown and changed, and preaching on your feet allows the sermon to do the same much more than reading a manuscript.

Lybrand admits that preaching on your feet is not easy, so he argues that if one is going to do it at all, one must do it exclusively. His argument is that if you begin to use notes, you will become accustomed to using notes, and so then you will have to use notes. If you go without notes, you will become accustomed to that and will not need them.

As I was reading this book, I began to preach on my feet. When I came to Drexel, I preached from a manuscript for the first several months, but there was just something about reading a manuscript to the congregation every Sunday that just didn't feel right. I felt as though I wasn't connecting, so I began preaching on my feet, and though I haven't done a survey of the congregation or anything to prove this, I feel as though my preaching is connecting a lot better than it was before. However, my congregation might complain about the fact that my sermons have gotten significantly longer since I began preaching on my feet.

My method is a little different than Lybrand's, however. At one point in the book, he suggests writing your own book on how you prepare sermons. Though it may never get published, it will help you think through how you preach, so let me sketch what I do briefly. Of course, the first thing I do is read the text, and I normally get some ideas of what I want to say or what I think this text might mean. I plan my preaching out in advance, so I don't have to go searching for a text. I'm either preaching in a series that I already have planned out or from the lectionary.

After I've read the text and begun to formulate some things in my mind, I begin to read some commentaries. Anything that sticks out to me in those commentaries as being particularly well-said or important for the passage, I write it down on a sheet of paper with all the bibliographic information. Normally, I'll read two or three commentaries on a passage. This week I'm preaching on the Beatitudes, and I actually read 8 commentaries.

Once this whole process is completed, I take the sheets of paper to my computer and type them out. Yes, it would probably be easier to do this all at once, but my commentaries or at the church and my computer is at the parsonage. After this is typed up, I send it to my Kindle. I normally have all of this done by Wednesday or Thursday, and the rest of the week, I just let it marinade. I normally figure out how I want to begin before hand, or if there are any particular themes I want to pick up on.

Then Sunday morning during Sunday School, I read through my notes several times on my Kindle. When I actually stand up to preach, most things are pretty extemporaneous. Most of the illustrations I use are personal stories, lately mostly focusing on my marriage; I'm not sure yet if this is a good thing or a bad thing. And yes, sometimes, I kind of pause as I think of what I want to say next or how exactly I want to word something. I don't think this is a bad thing though. I think it allows people the opportunity to process what I've just said.

I'd encourage you to try preaching on your feet. I've noticed in recent years that it seems that the best preachers in the Church of the Nazarene preach without notes. I'll end with two practical tips on what to do with particular phrases you know you want to include in your sermon or maybe a particularly good quote you want to get exactly right. First, you could always just write it out on a 3x5 card and tuck that away in your Bible. Second, you could print those quotes as notes in your bulletin. Scott Daniels does that Pasadena First Church of the Nazarene, and it seems to work very well for him.

May God Himself, the God of Peace, bless your preparation this week as you prepare to proclaim His Word.