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Dr. Marguerite Shuster has taught preaching and theology at Fuller Theological Seminary since 1992, after having served nearly a dozen years in pastoral ministry. Combining her pulpit experience and theological expertise during two decades of full-time teaching, she has taught hundreds of homiletics students to refine their craft. Today, we focus on one of Dr. Shuster's key topics—avoiding formulaic preaching in service of creative, faithful, emotionally engaged preaching.

Matt Woodley, PreachingToday.com: Why is "formulaic preaching" such a problem?

Dr. Marguerite Shuster: I think it's a three-pronged problem. There's the problem biblically speaking, the problem for the hearer, and the problem for the preacher.

The problem biblically speaking has to do with the wide variety of genres in biblical literature. If you preach a Pauline argument the same way you preach a lament, something is going to be lost. If I am trying to persuade you of something by way of an argument, for example, I might want the structure of the sermon to be what we call "bony," so that you can see the moves in the argument, so that someone can tell how you got to the conclusion. But if you're preaching a lament, it isn't an argument; it's a cry. I don't want a bony structure in a sermon like that. I want something that doesn't interrupt the emotional participation in the text by both the hearer and the preacher. That doesn't mean that you have a messy structure, but the joints aren't quite as clear as they might be when preaching an argument. Preaching according to the typical sermon formula allows understanding at the intellectual level, but can miss the bite of the passage. I'm looking for structure that fits the structure of the biblical text.

There are caveats here, though. You will notice that, upon occasion, Jesus answered a question that looked like the proper response would be an argument. "Who is my neighbor?" He upset expectations. The lawyer who asked this can't get an argument in the form that he is asking for and still be confronted as a human being in the way that he needs. So sometimes a switch in genre, with respect to a particular passage or a question that is being addressed, may be useful. You just need to know what you're doing.

There's a problem for the hearer, too. If the hearer thinks that you're always going to do three points and an application, they mentally check out. They know how it goes. They're not captivated in the same kind of way as if they don't know for certain exactly how you're going to preach. Attentive churchgoers, if they experience preaching that has variety to it, will sometimes comment that it keeps them listening. They know they have to pay attention.

There are a few of these rather classic forms; the "then/now" form, for example, where the preacher gives historical and exegetical background, and then some kind of contemporary application. But as one homiletician said a long time ago, people don't come to church with a pressing desire to hear what happened to the Jebusites. The "then" is remote in its very nature. If you use that format, people know that they can check out for the whole first half of the sermon. People will listen to complex exegetical and historical arguments if they see why they matter, but if you haven't shown them that, they're gone … and you're going to have to wrestle them back to attention.

Then there's the problem for the preacher. If you preach this way, writing a sermon can become like building a doghouse. You sort of put the various pieces together. You forget that without the dog the doghouse really doesn't matter. You risk losing the living relationship of the preacher to the text. Preachers need to be addressed by the text—to stand under it—if they are to address the congregation without being remote, or condescending, or any of those kinds of things that are especially obnoxious in preaching. There needs to be that living relationship of the preacher to the text if the appropriation is to be a dynamic and genuine one.

Why do we preachers settle for formulaic preaching?

First of all, I don't have anything against the classic three-point design, for example. It's how you use designs that matters. Most of my sermons are probably three-point sermons. They just don't look like it on the surface. It's the excessively tidy and predictable that I don't like.

Why do preachers settle? They are anxious and pressed. Formulas ease the burden of writing a sermon. They actually make the task less demanding. That's one reason. Some people, of course, simply don't think structurally, and their habit is to add stuff until they get to twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes, or however long it is that they preach. Sometimes they will argue that this kind of thing is "authentic." The trouble with that, of course, is that loose association isn't giving their hearers much help in getting to the actual point.

Being careful about structure is just plain hard. It takes real discipline to think about what kind of approach you are taking to a text. People have not been taught very well these days—even in terms of basic English composition. People don't know how to do this stuff. Many people can't write a paragraph, much less a sermon, with any kind of structure to it.

So what would you recommend? Personally, I flow very naturally in a linear way. I like developing three points. But let's say you come to a psalm of lament, or Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan. How would you outline those? Obviously you could say, "From this passage we learn three principles of lament," or, "Three principles for how to be a good neighbor in today's fragmented culture," or something like that.

That formula, just the way you have stated it, makes absolutely clear why these formulaic approaches stay in the head and never get to the heart, which is my whole complaint.

This is one of the issues with a verse-by-verse approach to preaching the text. You can get from the preacher's notes straight to the congregation's notes, without ever really having to pass through the head, much less through the heart. Listening seems to become a matter of taking down information.

Data is not enough to make a sermon. If the preacher hasn't been addressed by the text, if the preacher doesn't feel a little catch, perhaps, in the working out of the sermon, one wonders why the preacher thinks that the congregation would also be touched.

That's a very powerful statement.

I think it was Spurgeon who said a long time ago that the surest way to get the congregation to feel is for the preacher to feel. This isn't a matter of whipping up emotion. That's false and cheap, and that's one reason that I hate tear-jerking stories. They yank people around. They can drag out emotion, but it's manipulative. For myself, if I have been manipulated, you may get the emotion, but I'll be mad at you later. You violated me. God doesn't do that.

If I were preaching on a psalm of lament, the sermon might have three moves to it, but they wouldn't be something that you would call reasons, points, or an analysis of the elements. Not propositions. My goal would be to move you imaginatively into the opening situation of the person who is lamenting, the situation in that person's life that has brought him or her to a particular situation. Then you might move through the complaints against God that this situation draws out, and you would be using all the kinds of language that rise up in your own heart and that you hear from your parishioners, the anger of the unfairness, all of this kind of thing, in ways that resonate clearly with the actual wording of the text but that have a contemporary ring. Then your final move, as is usual, not universal, in laments, would have some way of bringing it back to a trust in the God who somehow is there and in some unforeseen way will deliver. Now you have a three-point movement but it doesn't sound like three propositions.

So three propositions would be something like: "laments contain anger, laments contain sadness, laments lead us to trust in the Lord."

Yeah, and that's just death on a platter. They're true enough, and not true enough.

Unpack that.

Well, what is being said is not false, but it fails to connect with the reality of the experience of trust in the midst of desolation, the kind of trust that doesn't undo the desolation but that, in a sense, transforms its nature. That outline doesn't do what the text is doing. You can't imagine the psalmist writing that outline. You can't imagine the writer of a lament, saying, Okay, I'm going to write a lament. Let me see. No, it's an out-flowing of the heart. And the sermon, in my view, somehow needs to capture that out-flowing of the heart in a way that the hearer says, "Yes, that's what my life is like. This writer knows what my life is like." That generates trust in the text and trust in the God of the text. By contrast, the wooden outline tends to leave the hearer thinking Yeah, but he doesn't know my experience.

Let's look at the parable of the Good Samaritan. How would you approach that text?

Well, the parable of the Good Samaritan has been rewritten a million times with a contemporary setting. You know what I mean—preachers just sort of change the people. We put it in a twenty-first century setting, with twenty-first century components. The first few times that was done, it probably worked.

But it's become hackneyed. You know how it plays out. We've lost half the dynamic of the thing. So I'd have to give this passage a good deal of thought to make it fresh. I don't necessarily have instant answers to these things. But I might spend a little time thinking about the lawyer Jesus told the story to—thinking about his capacity to get love right if he only had the right information. I think a lot of preachers treat their congregations as if they would behave well if only they had the right information and processed it correctly. But maybe the real story here is talking about the lawyer's expectations—either he's trying to trap Jesus, or else he's doing a control trick here. He's a control junkie. That would be interesting to talk about—being control junkies.

Now, we're talking about a parable that has been used so much that we don't hear it any longer. Maybe I'd look at how Jesus uses that parable as a way of undermining all of us control junkies. I would be looking for a take on it that would undermine the defenses that have been built up for so long around a very, very familiar piece.

Preachers are busy. They're under pressure, and it's easy to default to a familiar formula. What practical advice would you give for the week in, week out work of sermon prep?

Well, preachers won't like this one very well, but I have been a preacher in a local congregation, and preaching just takes time. If you're not willing to give it that time, you will default to whatever the Saturday night special requires.

You have to set aside enough time actually to think about and wrestle with the text itself, the research that you have done on the text and the demands the text makes on you and on the hearer. You shouldn't think of structure first. You think of what you're doing with the sermon, and what the text is doing, and then you go from there to a particular design that expresses in a fresh, creative, interesting way how this text has captured you. If you get excited about that, then finding a form that captures the excitement can be a lot of fun. It has a lot more energy in it than just sort of pasting things together. Sitting with the text, and caring about the text is the first step.

And if you don't care about your text, why not? That negative question will sometimes lead you into very fertile ground. Maybe you don't believe it, you see. Maybe you don't care about it because deep in your heart you don't believe it. Well, why don't you believe it? Well, there might be a sermon in that.

That could be a very disturbing question.

Yes. And many preachers don't like to ask the hard questions—that's one reason that we get shallow, formulaic preaching, and congregations that let it roll off their backs. Because it never quite bites them where they live. The preaching is safe, but the texts aren't safe.

Can you say more about that to wrap up?

Well, of course this is way overused, riding on C. S. Lewis' shirttails. But we often preach a pretty domesticated God—the sweet, gentle Jesus, meek and mild, and all of that kind of thing. "You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" is not our favorite picture. When people skip over the parts of texts, for example, that make them most anxious, they're skipping over the parts of the text that make everybody most anxious. If only they would go after the stuff that is most troubling to them, they'd actually have something fresh because that's what nobody does. It's the stuff that's passed over that chews on congregations and that basically undermines their confidence, I think, in the preacher and in the text because the hard things are simply avoided.

I met somebody I had never seen before, while walking the dog the other day. She made a remark that made me think that she might be a Christian. She said, "Thank you, Jesus," which sounded sort of Christian to me. So I asked, "Are you a Christian?" She started to say yes, and then she said, "Well, I guess I'm an agnostic." I just opened the door a little bit, and out came a flood of the absolutely most basic theological questions. People are hungry for serious answers to the serious questions that the church has dealt with for centuries, but many preachers are often afraid to take up those basic theological questions.

Dr. Marguerite Shuster is Senior Professor of Preaching and Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and the Harold John Ockenga Professor Emerita of Preaching and Theology.