I wish I knew how to save a 24-second video uploaded to Facebook that I watched yesterday. It is a video of the late John MacArthur with Phil Johnson, in which MacArthur said at the beginning of the clip, "I think great preachers write their sermons." Oh, how I wish I could show it to you.
Granted, the short video's purpose was not to present a coherent philosophy of homeletics, but to show the great chemistry MacArthur and Johnson shared on camera. That said, there is a great deal of truth in what MacArthur said. It is, in my opinion, after delivering about 10,000 sermons over the past fifty years, a common error that most preachers make when they forgo preparing a manuscript of the complete sermon they are preparing to deliver.
It is a short-sighted approach to sermonizing to decry the development and use of a manuscript whenever possible. And I say this despite the fact that I have delivered thousands of sermons with as few as three phrases jotted down as my main points and a proposition decided on before beginning. I am a propositional preacher (the subject of a future blog).
Allow me to illustrate with some examples. While pastoring a Church with a Christian school, it is entirely appropriate to approach the school's chapel service with the barest of sermon outlines because #1, my audience of children needed the simplest of Gospel messages, using the most basic Bible vocabulary and concepts. And #2, my relationship with the youngsters was so well-developed that I could rely on them to trust me enough to provide me with honest and helpful feedback as I delivered the message to them. It is entirely possible that the facial expressions of one or more students would provide a valuable indication of a direction to proceed with the sermon you had not anticipated. And this without a manuscript, but with the intentional eagerness to read facial expressions and body language for pertinent feedback.
George Whitefield is an example of a Gospel preacher who did not use a manuscript, having only 30-40 sermons, well-developed and frequently delivered, to a great variety of audiences as an itinerant evangelist. With so few sermons and with such a varied audience, Whitefield had no need for manuscripts. In like manner, it is sometimes the case that missionaries and those who speak at Bible conferences can deliver a few well-rehearsed messages without manuscripts because of their concentration on similar messages delivered to a wide variety of audiences.
But what about a pastor who delivers three messages per week to the same audience? Does he have the luxury of preaching, preaching yet again, and re-preaching the same sermons like itinerant evangelists typically do? He does not. He needs a fresh spiritual meal to serve his audience every time they gather. The midweek service that is not carefully studied and prepared becomes quite obvious over time.
My first pastor was a very credible evangelistic preacher who had planted six Churches before I came on the scene. 82nd Airborne, he was a man's man, and I was devoted to him. That said, I noticed three things about his preaching.
First, his delivery was terrific, with energy and conviction. He was an excellent Gospel preacher.
Second, about 18 months into my time there (before God called me to the ministry and I followed his advice to go to Bible college), I knew what he was going to say before he said it. I surmised that he had a year and a half of sermon outlines prepared before recycling them. The problem, of course, was that I paid attention and picked up on that right away. That approach served him well when establishing the first five Churches, but at this place, he stayed so long he served leftovers.
Third, without using a manuscript, he did what many preachers who do not use manuscripts do. His habit is best described as leaving his house and taking a different route each time, while always returning along the same path. Thus, in his typical 40-minute sermon, though the initial portion of the message would vary, the final twenty minutes were always exactly the same, almost verbatim.
Did he realize he had fallen into that predictable pattern? I do not know. Had he prepared a sermon manuscript, such a pattern could not have developed.
Another tendency that accompanies the absence of a manuscript is the length of a sermon. The primary reason I began preparing manuscripts was to shorten my preaching time, to get it under control, and to say, in forty minutes with a manuscript, what would usually take me an hour to put into words without a manuscript. And in our day of diminishing attention spans and audiences who don't have the listening skills their grandparents had, that is a very significant factor. I am persuaded that one reason some preachers resort to entertainment-style deliveries is to offset their audiences' shortened attention spans. I am not persuaded that it is the appropriate remedy for shortened attention spans, but that is the subject of another blog.
Granted, God raises up the occasional C. H. Spurgeon, who typically prepared his Sunday morning sermon outlines on Saturday night after excusing himself from his dinner guests. However, I am no Spurgeon, and neither are you in all likelihood. So, while some preachers are quite skillful at delivering sermons without manuscripts, I am persuaded most of us are not, though we should strive throughout our preaching years to improve.
You might be thinking of preachers you are certain do not use manuscripts. Let me mention three, two of whom were great and the third extremely well-known.
W. A. Criswell was the extremely well-trained and longtime pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. Trained at Southern Seminary in Louisville, he was not only proficient in Greek but was also a master pulpiteer who never preached with notes. He was also famous for encouraging preachers to preach without notes of any kind (and, by implication, without manuscripts). However, it is not precisely accurate to say he did not use a manuscript. Having an almost photographic memory, Criswell studied diligently and wrote out his sermons, without ever taking the manuscript to the pulpit. And if you ever watched him preach, you could almost see him read in his mind what he had written. He had no written manuscript behind the pulpit because he had a picture of his message in his mind as he delivered.
A. V. Henderson is another of those great Texas preachers who preached without notes. Henderson was known for delivering quite abbreviated but potent sermons. What few realize is that every one of those short and potent messages had been written out, edited for brevity, and then committed to memory. Thus, his approach was very much like Criswell's, with a stronger commitment to brevity.
My final example will stir things up a bit. Jerry Falwell was the most well-known Baptist preacher in the second half of the twentieth century. But he would be on no one's list of great preachers, and he would have admitted that himself. His spiritual equipment package did not include what God gave to Whitefield, Spurgeon, Criswell, or Henderson. Yet he used no manuscript. This is because Harold Wilmington, his colleague for scores of years, prepared every sermon outline Jerry delivered for thirty years! This, according to Harold Wilmington! He handed Jerry his sermon outlines before each Church service, without enough time to familiarize himself with the outline and the verses to be cited, and would give him sermon outlines for conferences he spoke in before leaving Lynchburg.
The point I seek to make is that while notables such as Jonathan Edwards and John Gill used manuscripts, missionaries such as Carey and Judson did not. Whitefield and Moody's approach to evangelistic preaching of a relatively small number of sermons to a great many audiences meant their sermons were typically memorized. And when a sermon is preached again and again, it is refined and sharpened and edited on the fly.
Pastors do not have that luxury. The first time through a sermon, mistakes will be made, better wording has not been considered, and new insights will not have arrived at your thinking. The benefit of a manuscript is that in developing a written sermon, you think through the entire message, consider and revise your remarks (sometimes many times to make sure you say it just right), settle on key words (another blog) and transition sentences, and end up making fewer mistakes.
Don't tell me you have not engaged in conversations in which you later wish you had said something you didn't, didn't say something you did say, or that you had turned a phrase differently at a crucial point. The same is true of sermons, which are one-sided conversations, only with fewer regrets when using a manuscript.
