People live and move in story, and the effect of story is that it creates distance for them rhetorically which makes the hearer feel safe to explore and cared for by the preacher.
In his three-part Bookshelf series,[1] Adm. James Stavridis offers up a wide array of books to show how reading makes better leaders. Here at the Craft of Preaching, we believe this is equally true as we hone our craft as preachers. In this series “The Preacher’s Bookshelf,” we offer up reading suggestions from a variety of trusted preachers that we believe will help you in the homiletical task.
Michael Brothers. Distance in Preaching: Room to Speak, Space to Listen. Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans, 2014.
Unless you are doing graduate work in Homiletics, you might not always think that a book on preaching will hold your attention. There can be a way in which we feel like the textbooks we read at Seminary were enough to make us perfect preachers. However, I have really come to enjoy books on preaching and books by preachers for preachers.
Now, there are a couple of things I learned very quickly in this genre of literature. First, all my favorite books on preaching are noticeably short. To me, this is often the sign of an informative book on the subject matter. Honestly, the longer books are a snooze, but the shorter ones are perfect. They spend just enough time for you to enjoy getting through it and, likewise, they have just the right economy of words to help me to learn something without laboring the point. In this new series called “The Preacher’s Bookshelf,” I will take you through some of the most formative and enjoyable books on preaching that I have discovered.
This brings me to the first book off my shelf that I would love to pass along to you. It is called Distance in Preaching: Room to Speak, Space to Listen by Michael Brothers. In this helpful work, Brothers takes us into the dynamic experience of both drawing in and learning to create helpful distance for your hearers.
Immediately, you may be taken aback by the suggestion that we need to create distance for our hearers. This appears to be the exact opposite of so-called “good preaching.” However, consider your own experience as a preacher. Were there not moments when you have been actively preaching and you could see the sermon almost violating the personal space of one of the people you were talking to; that squirm, the tears, or even the moment they got up and left. I am not talking about the good clean crush of the Law. This is about the awkward moment when you were speaking rather nonchalantly about something which has just destroyed their entire world. In that moment, “distance” is the exact thing you want to have. In fact, you likely want to run right out of the pulpit and flee for your life. The reason this problem happens is because you got “too close” to something you needed to stay away from. Not being equipped with a strategy to adapt in the moment of preaching leaves us just shrugging our shoulders and digesting a whole lot of pastoral guilt.
Not being equipped with a strategy to adapt in the moment of preaching leaves us just shrugging our shoulders and digesting a whole lot of pastoral guilt.
This is where Brothers work becomes useful when he talks about “distance.” With “distance” in preaching, he is referring to aesthetic and performative moves you can do in the moment while you are preaching to create room or space to let the hearer process what you are saying and what they are going through without throwing them for a whirl rhetorically. He uses Fred Craddock’s “homiletic of story” to demonstrate how narrative creates a shared space for people to explore the text of scripture and a teaching of the faith that does not distract from the main point of the text/sermon. People live and move in story, and the effect of story is that it creates distance for them rhetorically which makes the hearer feel safe to explore and cared for by the preacher.
The three goals of this method are that we preserve the text, protect the hearer, and respect their experiences. It effectively turns the sermon into an extension of your soul-care for your people. The reason I can say this about his book and recommend it so wholeheartedly has to do with how it helped me care for my people during a tragic event in our city.
On October 1, 2017, there was a mass shooting in Las Vegas that was, up to that point, the largest in American history. Preparing to preach into that situation left me more than a little out of my depth. How do you speak about this tragedy without moralizing or polarizing your people who have suffered directly (people shot at the event were present in the service all bandaged up) or indirectly because of it? At a certain point, I had to admit I had no right to speak into all their shared grief. Yet, I was called to be their preacher and pastor. How do you draw close to a public tragedy and still create respectful distance to allow for people to process their grief without getting in the way?
Michael Brothers gave me the tools to navigate those troubled waters. My text was John 11, the story of Lazarus, and I chose it to draw my hearers into a story where they could encounter Christ. Poetically pouring their words and feelings of grief through the other people in the story allowed me to acknowledge and work through every stage of grief without explication or editorializing. The entire sermon was an imaginative retelling which allowed everyone to live in the story of the text and encounter Christ without me becoming the “answer man” in the midst of a tragedy I could never explain away. This method taught by Brothers allowed me to care for their soul by simply telling them a story of Jesus, while being flexible and adaptive in the retelling so I did not violate personal boundaries or push too hard into an experience of grief that we were all just trying to process together. The result of the gospel proclamation was hope in the power of Jesus to resurrect the dead and bring an end to the curse of evil and sin by His shed blood and third day resurrection. It was quite helpful if you ask me.
Hope you take a minute to give it a read. I highly recommend it.
[1] Admiral James Stavardis has three books in his Bookshelf series: The Leader’s Bookshelf., The Sailor’s Bookshelf, and The Admiral’s Bookshelf,
