"In your lifetime and mine, a tidal wave has hit. We are now in transition and in transit out of terra firma. A sea change of paradigm shifts and transformations is birthing a whole new world and a whole new set of ways of making our way in the world. The Dick-and-Jane world of my 50s childhood is over, washed away by a tsunami of change." So, not untypically with a gaggle of metaphors, does Leonard Sweet begin one of his recent books, Soul Tsunami: Sink or Swim in New Millennium Culture.

Sweet is professor of postmodern Christianity and dean of the theological school and vice president of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. He is the author of a number of books, most recently Soul Tsunami and Aqua Church. He is also about to open a new website, PreachingPlus.com, a new kind of preaching resource that will incorporate images and video streams (for PowerPoint demonstrations, for example), as well as the usual array of homiletical helps.

Sweet loves the metaphor, and he's not shy about using them. Some would say his roaming and wild use of metaphors is a key to his success as a communicator. PreachingToday.com wanted to know more about how and why he uses so many metaphors, so we commissioned Mark Galli (editor of Christian History and former editor of Preaching Today) to interview Sweet by phone. This is the first installment of a two-part interview.

PreachingToday.com: Why should preachers care about whether and how they use metaphors in preaching?

Sweet: Because we now live in a postmodern culture, which is much closer to apostolic methods of communication, which is very much grounded in preaching by image and metaphor. The modern era began with Luther's posting of The 95 Theses—a 95-point sermon, heavily rational, logical, linear, point-by-point, step-by-step. We've led people to the altar point by point, reason by reason, law by law. That's not how Jesus communicated. So, I think it's an exciting time in which communication has to be much more image based, metaphorical.

Do you mean inductive preaching?

No, not at all. This is where preaching has been stuck for so long. We've got whole seminarys and schools of homiletics that say, "It's the deductive method." Others say, "No, it is the inductive method!" The problem with both is that you're moving from or towards a proposition—a linear, sequential, proposition.

Instead I advocate something pioneered by philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (died 1914), a man who has been called the American Aristotle. He argued that there's another method of communication that is more natural to how the mind functions. It's not inductive; it's not deductive. It's abductive.

To really simplify him: it is image based, not word based. It is more relationship based, not proposition based. The abductive method hypothesizes a thought through metaphor. So you throw out a metaphor, and then you see if that metaphor will come to life. You bring it to life by spinning little two- to three-minute narratives. And you spin one here for two to three minutes, and then a different one another two to three minutes.

Sometimes the metaphor you've hypothesized will fall flat. But other times that metaphor will come to life and become almost holographic, three-dimensional, in its power as it draws people in and creates a whole new reality out of which people live.

Metaphors are more basic to the mind than propositional language. In fact, the mind is made of metaphors. When you dream, do you dream in words? You dream in images, metaphors. So, we're talking here about an image-based method of communication, not a proposition-based method of communication.

Peirce argued that the person who invented this method of communication and developed it most fully was Jesus of Nazareth. This is parabolic preaching. The kingdom of heaven is like a vineyard. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. That's hypothesizing. And then you stack on it these two- to three-minute little narratives. That's what these parables are. You tell little stories. Notice: all Jesus' parables are very, very short.

How do we begin preaching like this?

You start off simply: you and I as pastors were trained to exegete words. In the abductive method, you begin exegeting images. I first saw this done by Paul Minear in his 1960 book Images of the Church in the New Testament. He just looked at the images of the church in the New Testament—he found 96 of them—and he exegeted them. It's powerful. At the time, I had no idea there were 96 images of the church. And we're not talking about other New Testament images, like ones of discipleship or evangelism or of Jesus (as lion, as Lamb, and so on).

So the pastor's first image-based preaching resource is the Bible.

When you say "exegete images," do you mean something more than a rational explanation of what the image means?

It means letting the metaphor work on both head (explanation) and heart (emotions). But even more than that, I look at heart as both motion and emotion. So I want that image to begin to stir the emotion. But if that emotion doesn't lead to some kind of motion—that is, some kind of practical action—then my communication has not communicated the power of that gospel.

So how might a preacher make use of an image like Jesus Christ, the foundation?

One of the greatest images for the church is the medieval cathedral. If you've ever toured one, one of the most powerful moments comes when the guide takes you down to the basement, and you walk down these creepy, musty, dank steps, going down, down, down. And then you start to see the stones that are down there. They're huge. I mean, these are uncarved, uncut, but they are some of the most humongous stones you've ever seen. And you realize to create a cathedral, to sustain a cathedral's weight, beauty, splendor, and majesty, you've got to build it on this incredibly stable and firm foundation.

So what I'd do as a preacher is give the listeners an experience of that image of that huge stone, as I've just tried to do briefly. And then I'd talk about the stone the builders rejected that became the chief cornerstone.

And I wouldn't just tell them in the say way I just told you; I would try to let listeners participate in the metaphor. I would step out in the congregation with the mike, and I'd say, "How many of you have ever been to a cathedral? How many of you have ever visited one? Does the guide ever take you down to the basement? Has anybody hear ever gone down to the basement? What happened when you went down to the basement? Tell me what you saw?"

I have an acronym for this type of preaching: It's called EPIC. E stands for experiential. P stands for participatory. I stands for image base. And C stands for connectivity.

How is this different than traditional preaching?

Each one of these requires a transition from how you and I learned to preach. We learned rational; now we have to learn experiential. We learned how to do performance (giving a message from a platform); now we're talking about participatory preaching. We learned how to do word-based stuff; now we're talking about image-based preaching. We learned to focus heavily on the individual; now we're talking about the communal and helping the people connect with other people and especially with God.

Let me overstate the case, and then I'll come back and repent of the excess. If you're over 30, you're an immigrant; if you're under 30, you're a native. I'm an immigrant. I'm having Ellis Island experiences every day. I'm having to learn a new language. I have to learn new customs. These natives, their brains are wired differently than mine. I know that mine is being rewired by this new culture, this new electronic technology, this new means of accessing and processing.

The invention of print rewired our brains, just as the invention of the codex rewired our brains even earlier. Luther and Calvin were immigrants in their day, but they tried to minister to the native, print-oriented culture then emerging.

PreachingToday.com: In some ways, image-based preaching sounds like classic evangelical preaching. George Whitefield and John Wesley, for example, created the evangelical movement with their preaching of the "new birth."

Sweet: We're really going back to some of the ways in which our evangelical forbearers started preaching on the frontier. It's also a type of preaching we find in the Black church. In many ways, African-American preaching styles are much more postmodern.

In fact, it may be time to bring back traditional evangelical metaphors that some have shied away from, like "the blood" imagery, especially in a culture bombarded with unholy violence. There was a medieval piety about dedication to the wounds of Jesus, and it may be time to do that sort of thing again. I did a whole book in which I just looked at the five wounds of Jesus and poked at each one of those wounds as metaphors for our own woundedness.

In letting images go forth without rational interpretation, the preacher is losing a lot of control of the preaching moment.

Well, you're trusting the work to God's Spirit. Everybody who does linear preaching has had the experience after the service of somebody saying, "Pastor, that sermon spoke so much to me this morning. After you said _____, I know now exactly what I have to do."

Then I go home and ask my wife, "Did I say that?"

Part of the heresy of the modern church is the notion that we are bringing Christ to people. No, Christ is already there in people's lives. God is already at work in the world and in the church and in every person sitting out there. Our job is to help people see how the Word is already at work in their lives, and trusting that the Spirit will point to and fasten on and resonate with that Word. The Word, the Logos, has a life of its own.

So we aren't bringing it to people. We're calling to their consciousness the Spirit who is already working in their lives.

What are the cautions and dangers of using metaphors? Should we try, for example, to avoid mixing metaphors?

That's a linear attempt to deal with metaphors. Jesus had no problem mixing metaphors. How many times does Jesus pile one parable upon another, like in Luke 15, with a parable about lost sheep, another about searching for coins, another about a prodigal son. Paul could use powerful metaphors and mix them: "The weight of glory." That's part of the spinning. You can spin it and even mix the metaphors you're trying to spin.

The real danger of metaphors is closely related to their worth. Images are friendly. They disarm you. Unlike linear points that are sharp and that'll cut you, metaphors are fuzzy. And fuzzy is good. Fuzzy logic is a logic being used in the most sophisticated form of computers. But precisely because they are fuzzy and can create wonderful connections in people, images can also lead to some misunderstandings.

Somebody can hear and experience through the power of those images something that is not gospel, something that is their own projection, something that comes from skewed and deformed metaphors in their own life. Some people, for example, who hear the word Father for God can think of nothing else but the abusive father who raised them.

So even if you're spinning biblical metaphors, people's own life experiences can warp those into all sorts of crazy stuff. That's why I think there needs to be a new step in preaching, which is time in small groups after the sermon to let people ask, "Okay, what did we all hear? What did we all experience?"

Are the days of propositional preaching over, then?

Jesus on the cross was flanked by two thieves. To one of those thieves Jesus said, "I'll see you today in Paradise." The other one of those thieves refused, couldn't get it. The church likewise has double focus. We have to take into consideration both of those thieves.

The Bible says Jesus did not speak to those outside the church except in parables. When he got to his disciples, he got linearhe explained things rationally. To me those two thieves are symbols of this double method of communication. Especially when we're communicating to the culture, we must use image-based preaching. But even those inside the church live in a culture saturated with images. We as a culture live and die by images, by metaphors, and we have to begin there. So most preaching should be image based. Still there is a place for the linear, especially in the classroom setting.

Where in our culture do you see examples of powerful metaphor-based communication?

Where our culture steals our stuff. Everybody knows the line from the movie Field of Dreams," Build it and they will come."I thought that had a certain resonance. So I did a little word study in a concordance. That phrase is similar to Haggai 1:8, where God says to build his house so he can come dwell there. I thought, They're stealing our lines! It's not building some fantasy diamond to which some fantasy figures are going to come. No, build God's house and the Ruler of the universe, the God of creation will come in all God's glory. That's what the church ought to be saying to this world.

Other examples are not deliberate metaphors, but they're there for the taking. We tell our people to be servants, or servant leaders, or to serve one another. But what does servant mean in our culture? Not much in the traditional sense, but the hottest thing in this high-tech culture, the best thing you could have is a dedicated servera computer that frees people to communicate on the Internet, that runs programs in the background, and so on. The metaphor is rich.

You sound like theologian Karl Barth, who said the pastor ought to preach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

Here's how I put it: I say preaching is holding in one hand the world of the visible and holding in the other hand the world of the invisible, and then clapping hands until the thunder rolls, the lightning strikes, and the heavens clap. So, really I'm talking about bringing together the culture and the world of God's Spirit.

Leonard Sweet is the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey, and Visiting Distinguished Professor at George Fox  University in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of SoulSalsa.