If you should do a Google search on “preaching styles,” you will see a number of articles and debates on the subject. This may seem unusual to any of you who have only attended one congregation or denomination all of your life. But due to my job moves and differing situations, I have over the years been a member or regular attender of eight different congregations representing five different denominations or church traditions and can see what different approaches preachers take in their sermons. I must admit that I am not very well acquainted with the current practice within either liturgical churches or those of the Pentecostal/charismatic type, but for the evangelical churches which fall somewhat in between these to polar opposites, sermons, preaching seems to boil down to two different types – topical sermons and expository sermons.
For years, I attended only churches that practiced the former type. Thus, the congregation never really knew what the upcoming subject of the weekly message would be unless the pastor happened to be in the middle of a short (three-week or so) study on a particular topic. Then I attended for years a congregation firmly in the Bible church tradition which made a great fetish of claiming that expository preaching was the only way to go. I read later some comments by a famous evangelical pastor who was a strong critic of that approach and stated in no uncertain terms: “That's no way to grow a church!” And by that, I believe he meant both numerically and spiritually.
Since I have experienced both types of preaching over the years, I would like to share my personal thoughts regarding the pros and cons of each approach.
Topical Sermons
For those not acquainted with this type of preaching: The message generally begins by reading a short Bible passage or key Scripture verse and then takes off from there into the chosen subject of the day. That subject is presented by referring to additional Bible passages that may be pertinent, sharing personal experiences of the pastor, and citing current examples taken from the news or popular culture. The conclusion is often expressed in roughly three bullet points that capsulize the major take-home points of the message.
The advantages of this approach are many. But the greatest strength of this method of preaching is that the pastor is usually in the best position to continually gauge the spiritual tenor of the congregation and know what practical issues they are facing and/or any theological items with which they may be wrestling. Thus, he is able to tailor each sermon to address areas his flock needs at the time.
I witnessed this in my own church last week when the sermon dealt exclusively with the theological subject of the deity of Christ. I happened to be aware that this was a sticking point with someone in our Sunday school class, and it had become an issue just the week before. Our pastor knew of the situation and was able in one week to present an excellent message clearly addressing the subject in a way that would reach not only that individual but any others in the congregation who might have had the same theological issue as well as those who had perhaps never even considered the subject seriously.
Going back to my own experiences, after I had sat through years and years of both good and bad sermons of the topical sort, I reached the point where I had convinced myself that I knew the Bible forward and backward. That was until I began attending a congregation associated with a different denomination. The pastor began bringing up Bible passages that I would have sworn weren't in Scripture at all until I looked them up myself. I then realized that there were a handful of favorite “proof-texts” that my previous pastors always referred to while totally ignoring huge chunks of the Bible as being either irrelevant or contrary to the teaching of our denomination.
In addition, I began to realize that my knowledge of even the part of the Bible that was preached from was only skin deep. That was because, a given passage was rarely discussed from the pulpit in any depth at all since it was only mentioned to bolster up some point or other that the pastor was trying to get across. This exposes the two major weakness of the topical approach. (1) Because of the preacher's personal favorites in Bible passages and topics, a congregation may be subjected to the same “meat and potatoes” dinner to eat every week, and (2) Few passages of the Bible are ever explained in any sort of depth.
Expository Sermons
For any of you who have never been exposed to much preaching of this type, it is really eye-opening. The only thing I can compare it with is an in-depth Sunday school class which goes through a whole book of the Bible verse-by-verse over the period of several months, or even years on occasion.
For me, who loves an in-depth Bible study, this was quite a refreshing change when I first started attending a congregation which practiced this sort of preaching exclusively. At one point, our pastor explained that this brand of preaching was actually hard for him to do since he was forced to confront every single verse in the book being studied, even those that were difficult to explain or didn't seem to fit in with the beliefs in the congregation's doctrinal statement.
A typical series of expository sermons might include a comprehensive study of a book like Joshua or Colossians and last up to a year long. The congregation always knew exactly what would be covered each week, and a given sermon might deal with 1-3 verses at the least or a half-chapter at the very most.
Immediately, some of you might respond, “That sounds like a Sunday school teaching, not a sermon!” If you did, you would be to a large extent correct. Most Sunday messages were much more concerned with going into the original Greek to define exactly the intended meaning of the text than they were with subsequently drawing any application lessons out of that text. My experience has been that this sort of sermon benefits three types of people:
those in the congregation who approach the Bible mainly as an intellectual exercise (and I am afraid that I might class myself in that category),
those in the congregation who are already mature Christians and have individual ministries, but feel that they need a much deeper understanding of the Bible, or
the preacher himself, since it is quite easy for him to recycle his sermon series on a given book of the Bible in the form of a publishable Bible commentary.
To illustrate type #1, a friend of mine who attended our Bible church told me that he was working on pinning down each and every passage of the Bible as to its meaning so that he could go on to the next passage. As to type #2, I was amazed at the large percentage of full-time missionaries or those with significant personal ministries who attended our church. They did not need to be told how to live the Christian life as much as they needed to make sure that their understanding of the Bible was correct. To illustrate type #3, just browse a Bible book store or Christian Book Distributors catalog and you will see a number of commentary series put out by prominent pastors who practice the expository style of preaching.
There are a number of weaknesses to this approach. It tends to shortchange the practical application side of a good pastor's responsibilities to his or her congregation. This deficiency was certainly evident within the Bible church I attended for years in the selfish, materialistic attitudes of most of the church staff and elders. And it rapidly rubbed off on the members of the congregation as well as their children. With time, the situation deteriorated even further to the point where the elders decided that they could dispense with a full-time missions minister and the minister in charge of all pastoral care. But even the elders drew the line when our senior pastor said that he wanted to be excused of all duties except preparation of his one weekly sermon.
A second drawback to this approach is that it purports to preach the whole Bible, not just selected proof-texts, but in reality it is no better in exposing the congregation to Scripture than the topical method. The reason is quite simple. While a preacher is spending two years or more slowly digging through Romans verse-by-verse, for example, the congregation is being exposed to virtually nothing from the rest of the Bible.
And lastly, the strictly expository approach does not have the flexibility to adapt the messages to the real needs of the congregation in a timely manner.
Mixed Approaches
Fortunately, few pastors restrict themselves to only one of these two approaches. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool expository preachers will on occasion take a break once or twice a year from a prolonged book study in order to present a few weeks on some subject of current interest instead. Conversely, most topical preachers will vary their approach with an occasional two- to four-week series on a particular Bible passage.
Personally, I think that a regular 50-50 mix of the two styles is the best way to meet the congregation's need for both variety and continuity, head knowledge and practical application.
The Impact of Sunday School
One last aspect of this subject that must seriously be taken into account by the church leaders and teachers as well as anyone who considers attending a new church is the role of the Sunday school classes. I have treated some of the aspects involved in Bible teaching in my two posts on “Advice to Adult Sunday School/Bible Study Teachers.”
Most loyal church members and attenders will at least come to the worship service and hear the sermon on a somewhat regular basis. Fewer will attend an Sunday school class, assuming that the church even has one or more of such to offer. And even rarer is the person who will become involved in a home or church Bible study during the week.
Because of the above reality, the pastor and staff must not automatically assume that the congregation is being fed spiritually in ways other than through the sermon. And if the pastor still chooses to follow exclusively either a information-driven morning message or an application-driven one, it behooves the rest of the church ministries to attempt to supplement that sole teaching elsewhere as best they can.
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