PreachingToday.com: There are two ways to look at how-to preaching—a broad definition and a narrow definition. The narrow is the way that how-to preaching is used pejoratively, which we will talk about shortly. The broader definition is sermons that are framed as how-to—that is they give steps or principles about how to get whatever you're after in your life: the knowledge of God, a peaceful marriage, whatever.

Given that broad definition, do you preach how-to sermons?

Dave Ferguson: I'm not sure I would have thought of our church's teaching as "how-to," but, on the other hand, if someone was to leave after a weekend experience and not feel like they had a new way to live out the Jesus mission we talk about, I would feel like we didn't do our job.

We have a teaching team, and we collaborate on all our talks. We write our messages in community. When we're doing that, in the same way that an individual will get stuck when trying to write a message, we will often get something like writer's block. Those times we get stuck, we'll come back to Stuart Briscoe. He gives this outline for preparing to preach: What? So what? Now what? And whenever we get stuck, we go back to that. What are we trying to say? So what's the big deal about this; what's so important that we need to take this thirty minutes? And now what do we want people to do? And on that now what part, that's where, every time, we want to give them either a new way to think, a new way to act, or something new that they're supposed to be. So, in that respect, I guess I'd feel comfortable saying our teaching is "how-to."

Colin Smith: I come from the perspective of being committed to expository preaching. But all preaching has to be earthed. It has to connect with the lives and experience of people. Although preaching can arise directly from the Scripture and be driven by the Scripture, that is not enough. Where does it land?

Give me a recent example of a how-to sermon that you felt bore fruit.

Smith: I did a series called "Keeping Yourself in Spiritual Shape" that came from the last few verses of Jude and walked through principles of what it means to build yourself up in faith, to pray in the Spirit, and so forth. But the way in which it was titled and the image of spiritual fitness and keeping in shape seemed to open people up to the message in a way that was entirely different from if I had said there's going to be a series on the end of Jude for the next few weeks.

Ferguson: The series we just finished was called "Impossible Is Nothing" based on Jesus' teaching that if you have the faith of a mustard seed, when you say to this mountain move from here to there, it will move; nothing will be impossible with you. The second week into this experience we had everybody write one prayer on a Post-it note—because we wanted them, for that whole month during this series, to dare to pray a mountain-moving prayer.

People came up after the meeting and put the prayers on a giant poster board that said faith on it. During the series I was back in the café area after the message, and a guy who was there for the first time, just taking his first steps on his way back to God, came up to our campus pastor and told him he wanted to be baptized. The campus pastor said, "What brought you to this decision?"

He said, "I don't know. I just feel like God's really working on me today." Then our pastor noticed over the man's shoulder that there was a lady crying behind him. It turned out it was his mom. She said, "I just have to tell you. When I filled out my Post-it today, I was praying that you would decide to get baptized."

What percentage of your preaching would you say is presented through the title, promotion, announcements, in such a way that it could be called a how-to sermon? People are promised something that they would want in their life.

Smith: I would hope that it was most, if not all, of what I'm doing now. Which I hope is some evidence of growth from where I was before. I look back with embarrassment on my early years in preaching. In my second year as a pastor, I preached a series on Jeremiah that lasted fifty weeks, and it was called "Jeremiah."

I would not do that nowadays. Now, I would preach Jeremiah, but I would find a way of framing it that shows the connection upfront. I preached a series on Micah for ten weeks last year, and we called it "Close Encounters with the Living God." We played up the Close Encounters image. We're doing an expository series at the moment on just one psalm: Psalm 73. It's called "I Almost Gave Up: Practical Help for Discouraged Believers."

Ferguson: I'd share the same sentiment. I think there are only two series in the last four years that had a title that began with "How To__." But our intention every week is to make sure that people walk away with something that helps them better live out the mission of Jesus. And when we're living out the mission of Jesus, we are always living in our best interest. Not necessarily success-wise, but at least significance-wise.

In part two of this interview, Ferguson and Smith discuss the benefits of how-to preaching and address some of its criticisms.

Let's talk about advantages and disadvantages, the "why" of how-to preaching.

Dave Ferguson: The advantages, to me, feel like part of our calling. I feel like a message has to be a challenge, and the challenge is to move people along on this Jesus mission.

Colin Smith: In speaking to folks who like myself are committed to expository preaching, I come across a number, particularly of younger guys, who are so committed to preaching Bible and to the expository method that what they're doing is expository but it's barely preaching. They're teaching Bible. They're giving a collage of biblical information.

And so the big positive that I would want to take from how-to preaching is, there is something to be learned about connecting with the people who are listening, and not simply thinking about imparting information. Preaching is, in its very essence, imparting a message. And so there must be that sense of message, and message does not exist without audience.

As we think about disadvantages, is there anything about the broader definition of how-to preaching that could be considered a downside?

Ferguson: It's possible that it could degenerate into a talk-show format where it becomes a self-help kind of thing. At the point when it ceases to be biblically grounded and Christocentric—at that point, maybe you've forgotten what you're really doing.

Smith: If I get to the place of deciding what to preach on the basis of what people want to hear or what is going to be comfortable for people to hear, then I'm going to have a serious problem.

I have to watch myself so I don't end up teaching in a way that communicates God as my servant and God fulfilling my agenda, but rather me being swept up into his.

Another concern is that the Christian life is a lot more than what we do. In fact, it arguably is more about what we are, what we believe, what we embrace, what we become.

Some will say that the underlying message of how-to preaching is that it's all about the hearer rather than the glory and purposes of God. The Christian life becomes something you make work by technique rather than by dependence on God.

Ferguson: Ireneaus said the glory of God is man fully alive. If our message is allowing people to be reconciled to God through Jesus, I think we're going to be fully alive, and I think that is the glory of God. That was his whole intention in Jesus. So I don't see that as a technique. I see that as complete dependence on God, either style.

Smith: But why would you want to separate these two things? The glory of the gospel is that believers are caught up from our tiny little lives into the immense plan of God for the ages. So we want to show the connection between these two things. But the connection is between the minute me and the awesome, eternal God. And so the perspective between these two things is important. I have to watch myself so I don't end up teaching in a way that communicates God as my servant and God fulfilling my agenda, but rather me being swept up into his.

Ferguson: When we prepare messages answering the questions what, so what, and now what, you can capture both the importance of depending on God and of what we should do. There is a genius to the and. You don't have to reduce a message to the level of solve-every-world-problem-in-twenty-five-minutes. There can be mystery and still challenge people to a real, solid application.

In the series I was previously talking about, "Impossible Is Nothing," the last sermon in the series was, "What Happens When the Mountains Don't Move?" There had been some awesome stories of God answering prayer, but other times—and every one of us have this—you go, "Hey, Jesus said, if I have the faith of a mustard seed…" and you know you had at least that much faith and it still feels like the mountain didn't move. What's up with that? In our teaching team, we banged our heads against the wall and said, "We don't know the answer to that." The talk ended up being: "You know what? We don't know. It's a mystery. But here's what we can do…." And we ended with the application that we're going to pray the way God asks us to pray. I'm going to do my very best to pray as best I can, with all the faith that I can, and do everything that I can, but accepting that there's going to be a part of how God responds to prayer that I'm still not going to understand. And that's okay.

So, in that way, you give practical help without sucking the mystery out of the Christian life. Everybody lives in that mystery. But at the same time, it doesn't leave people thinking they are stuck in a situation they can do nothing about. No, they can continue to trust God, continue to hope, and continue to be faithful. But it's still a mystery.

In part three of this interview, Ferguson and Smith continue their discussion of potential downsides to how-to preaching. They also address the value of this style and alternative ways to approach it.

One criticism of how-to preaching is it is often based on biographical or narrative texts, and the sermons violate the intent of the text. As Haddon Robinson says, the book of Ruth was not given to teach you how to deal with your mother-in-law.

Colin Smith: That's going to be a struggle for every preacher. Recently, in the series I preached on Micah, I came to Micah 7, where he says, "Oh, what misery is mine." He talks about going to gather summer fruit and not finding the fruit there. In preparation for this message, I started out talking about frustration and your dreams not being fulfilled, and then came to realize as I looked at the passage more closely that that actually wasn't the point at all. The issue was not that Micah's dream was not fulfilled. The issue was that the godly had been swept from the land. Therefore his misery was not a misery to try and be resolved; it was the kind of misery that we need much more of.

We need this kind of misery that aches over the fact that believers are too often living lives that are like unbelievers.

Can how-to preaching be overused?

Dave Ferguson: If we're talking about the narrow definition, yeah, I think so. Or if it's poorly done, then, yeah. But if we're constantly interacting with the text and saying: Now what? What's the application here? Is it grounded? Then no, I don't think it can be overdone. I want every message to have that component to it.

Smith: A congregation is built around the diet they are fed. If folks are regularly fed how-to preaching, there will be a demand in that congregation for how-to preaching. If folks are regularly fed expository preaching, there will be an appetite for that, too. It's self-fulfilling. Therefore, there is a responsibility on all of us as pastors and leaders to think deeply about the long-term implications of what we're doing. What is going to be the best kind of diet? And what is the way to present it most effectively?

If I can fill my words as full as possible with His words, then I can be fairly confident that there will be some blessing that comes from God as a result.

Many pastors have never heard or used a preaching approach that is not in the narrower how-to mold. What are other ways to approach a sermon?

Ferguson: I want all of our sermons to have life application, using the broader sense of "how-to." The one refrain that comes up a lot in our teaching team meetings, usually toward the end of the meeting as a check, is, "Okay, where's Jesus in this?"

If the teaching is Christocentric, whether it happens to be expository—which I think is terrific—or topical, which I think is equally effective, we feel like we're doing what God wants us to do.

Smith: I try to think about three main questions when preparing to preach:

1. Does this say what this text says? Sometimes I'm seeing something that's generally about the theme in the text but not actually what that text says about the theme.

2. Is this a sermon? I got that from Jay Adams. I'm gathering information from the Bible, but is this a message? Is this earthed, to use that phrase again, with where the people are?

3. Is it Christian? Again, this is from Jay Adams, who says the definition of a Christian sermon is one that will get you thrown out of a mosque or a synagogue. That's what happened to the apostles when people realized what they were saying. And so the question really is, Is it taking me to Jesus Christ?

God has never promised to bless my words, but he has promised to bless his Word. If I can fill my words as full as possible with his words, then I can be fairly confident that there will be some blessing that comes from God as a result.

Dave Ferguson is the lead pastor of Community Christian Church in Naperville, Illinois. Dave provides visionary leadership for NewThing and he is the president and board chair for Exponential. Dave is also an adjunct professor at Wheaton Graduate School and the author of many Christian leadership books including The Big Idea (Zondervan, 2007).