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PREACHING SKILLS
Three Legs of Preaching
A balanced message is theological, biblical, and practical. An interview with Randy Frazee.
Randy Frazee

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Preaching Today: In every sermon you preach, you strive to have what you call the three legs of preaching. What are they?

Randy Frazee: The three legs are simple — theological, biblical, and practical. I'm trying to present a message that's balanced — not just balanced in terms of preparing or crafting a sermon, but balanced for the listeners, the people you hope to be transformed into Christlikeness.

What we've done, first of all, is define what we believe are the core components of a Christian life. We call it the Christian Life Profile. It is made of ten core beliefs that we see are the predominant themes of the Scripture, and that should make up the way in which a believer thinks about the Bible and about life. These are ten core practices, as we read Genesis through Revelation, and particularly the New Testament, that the believer is to engage in.

Spiritual disciplines.

Spiritual disciplines, exactly right. We have a set of beliefs that renew our minds, and a set of practices that we put into play, and then finally a set of ten virtues, what God wants us to become. So it is a know, do, be structure.

We have also resurrected the idea of a church calendar. Instead of a church calendar built around doctrinal beliefs, to separate correct biblical ideas from heresy, we've created what we call " the spiritual formation calendar " where we place all 30 theological ideas in a calendar. We deal with the first core belief in January, and we deal with the final core virtue in December. We've been doing that for three years. We see a language of spiritual formation beginning to emerge in our congregation. People are not only talking about how a particular sermon hit them on a particular Sunday, but they're beginning to see how it fits in the overall scheme of things in terms of living.

Talk in depth about the first leg.

The first is the theological leg. It means to present an operating system for life. That requires the pastor to ask himself some questions. If the pastor gave a sermon on Galatians 4:19, that suggests Christ is to be formed in us. As a pastor and church we're going to work hard to see Christ formed in us. If a visitor said, " I'm excited about that. What might I expect? " I think the pastor would often step back and say, " Well, I don't know what to tell you. "

Here's where the preacher needs to become crystal clear in scope and sequence of what to work on. The preacher says, " While the Bible is made up of more than these topics or subtopics, we're going to lay out the core beliefs, the core practices, and the core virtues. And we're going to work hard to get those things working in your life. " That's the theological perspective.

We created a calendar to insure we have balance in our theological perspective.

For example, in the first decade of my ministry, I would pick out popular texts that I thought would work for the congregation either from a practical or preaching perspective. What I've come to discover is I have an obligation to the congregation to speak on subjects that may not be culturally attractive, but critical to making the Christian life work — subjects like biblical community and the nature of the church and God's desire for the church. In the individualistic world we live in most people aren't that interested in the idea of the corporate church, but I've got to teach on it. Going through the spiritual formation calendar every year requires that I present balance in speaking to subjects that our people need to hear.

What are the ten core beliefs?

The ten core beliefs are

1. The Trinity
   
2. Salvation by grace
   
3. Authority of the Bible
   
4. Personal God
   
5. Identity in Christ
   
6. Belief in the church
   
7. God's view of humanity
   
8. Compassion
   
9. Eternity
   
10. Stewardship
    

The ten practices are

1. Worship
   
2. Prayer
   
3. Bible study
   
4. Single mindedness
   
5. Biblical community
   
6. Giving away my time
   
7. Giving away my faith
   
8. Giving away my life
   
9. Giving away my money
   
10. Spiritual gifts
    

The virtues are things we're pursuing to become. Essentially they are the fruit of the Spirit. They are

1. Joy and peace
   
2. Self-control
   
3. Faith, and faithfulness
   
4. Humility
   
5. Love
   
6. Patience
   
7. Gentleness
   
8. Kindness
   
9. Goodness
   
10. Hope
    

We have gone back in church history and found how earlier Christians dealt with the burden of transferring Christian living to the people in a congregation. The church created creeds. So for each of these 30 ideas we created a creed we recite on Sunday. We've created banners. We put them everywhere. So while we're a contemporary church, we have found a new need for creeds.

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