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Introduction by Dave McClellan: For years I've been studying the differences between oral and literary approaches to sermon preparation and delivery. In fact, I focused an entire dissertation on it. Even more formative for me than the theoretical study, though, has been the chance to develop an oral homiletic before the patient congregation that I serve. The weekly practice has evolved into a rhythm that feels normal now, even though it's miles from how I was originally taught to preach. I've seen an oral approach yield dividends in terms of better rapport, freedom, and passion in preaching.

Our church now has a young intern named Ben who wants to learn preaching, and it's been great fun to pull him into the process.

The following is what I might say to him to summarize my homiletical week—a literary account of an oral practice:

Ben,

Considering that all our recent conversations on oral homiletics have been, well, oral, I thought perhaps it might help you if I put some things down on paper. You know how I feel about the value of face-to-face communication, but I also have to admit that the world of text does have some advantages. In terms of longevity and precision, writing still works well!

So maybe you could see this as a supplement to our conversations. I won't really go into the theology of orality and the historical grounding since we've previously covered all that. But it occurs to me that I've never really explained how to put this into practice as you prepare a message. After all, when you get to the point where you're preaching every week, you have to find a rhythm that you can sustain week in and week out. That's different than preaching just one good message or even preaching once a month. The weekly grind is demanding, and here's where an oral approach has some real advantages. It doesn't save time over a purely literary approach, but it can use non-study time more effectively (as when you're preparing while you're showering or driving or taking a walk).

This outline is not a rigid structure, but more like a generalized week in the life of an extemporaneous preacher. Not every phase happens on the same day every week. But there is a common sequence of preparation that has developed over years of working it out. So here goes. See if this helps.

Monday

You want to get a feel for the chapter. We've talked previously about why it's worth taking a whole chapter at a time, so I won't get into that now. You also know how important it is to preach all the way through a Book. Context is everything when it comes to hermeneutics, so there are great hermeneutical advantages to staying in a Book.

So on Monday start by reading the chapter quietly to yourself, and then out loud as well. You have to get all your literate preparation done early in the week, so you can jump to oral composition and preparation way before Sunday. This is when you work in the original languages and try to hear the text with fresh ears. Pretend you've never heard this before. This is tough because our familiarity with passages tends to push us to premature conclusions. Listen to the author's flow of thought. In other words, chapter 7 doesn't arise in a vacuum. It follows chapter 6. So you still have to be hearing 6 when you read and study 7.

After sitting with the text for a while, try to picture the flow of thought in chunks. There's a chunk on this, which leads to a chunk on that, and so on. If you can picture and describe the flow of thought from chunk to chunk, that's all you want out of Monday. Oh, this is when you can also record yourself reading the chapter into your laptop. Then dump it to your iPod and take it on the road to listen to while you drive or walk.

Tuesday

Finish any research in history, culture, geography, and so on. Here's where you get the great advantage of staying in a Book. Once you're up to speed on the historical background to Romans, you can utilize that for 16 weeks. That saves you the work of reading the history and culture every week (as you'd have to do if you bounced around to a different book each week). Of course the congregation benefits, too, by that consistency.

On Tuesdays you can begin the dialogical preparation. As you know firsthand, my weekly discussion group is open to any guy in the church who wants to participate. You saw how the dialogue not only invests the guys in the sermon, but how it also starts to uncover connections between the text and real life. The questions and observations that come up there add fuel to the homiletical fire, and some form of them often ends up in the sermon. This is sermon preparation happening in the oral instead of the literate environment. You have to adjust your thinking here, because you've always thought of sermon prep being a literate skill. This is more of an oral skill, but it counts. It's real sermon preparation the old-fashioned way.

Wednesday

Start talking the sermon as you drive around, not the whole sermon, just pieces of it. Refine your thinking by speaking. All the thoughts will end up being spoken on Sunday anyway, so why not begin now? Why foster an addiction to notes and outlines, only to try to wean yourself away from them? Better never to develop the dependence.

So as you speak about observations and the flow of thought, illustrations will come to mind, some out of dialogue with others, and some from your own life and experience. At this point, just keep them in your head. Don't even write them down. That's one thing you have to change as you start preparing this way. When you have a good idea (often while driving), you'll want to pull over and write it down so you don't forget. What you eventually realize is that your mind will never develop its innate oral capacities if you constantly revert to text. That's like trying to improve your mental math skills by using a calculator. Calculators don't build anything except dependence upon calculators.

But as you talk and ruminate about ideas from the text, certain ones tend to rise to the surface. These are usually the ones you think people will be able to catch, universal experiences that everyone can picture. Some of these stories you can sense are ripe for telling. Maybe it's a metaphor that connects the text to contemporary life, an historical story, or a current event. It's something that draws out the meaning of the text. It's a story you find yourself wanting to tell. This is oral composition.

Thursday

It's time to start organizing these ideas into a flow. This is important, because extemporaneous delivery is not impromptu or spontaneous (both of which connote a lack of preparation). In contrast, though extemporaneous delivery has some spontaneous overtones, it is, in fact, highly prepared. But it's prepared orally with narrative structure instead of being prepared literately with outline structure.

Traditionally, when preachers write an outline, they are trying to capture the essence of a text and then form those ideas into an outline with multiple points. Since the biblical author didn't have enumerated points, the preacher may end up contriving the points in the outline. In other words, the preacher may squeeze things out of a text to fit into an outline template. The resulting points are the preacher's valiant effort to pull meaning from one communicative environment into another.

You don't have to work that hard, because the flow of thought is already there. That's because the original author's brain was already working to connect to an audience when the text was first penned (or spoken, depending on the passage). Why should you try to improve on that? Your job is just to gather in, digest, and reanimate the chapter. So the chapter itself, and nothing else, will always be the basis for the sermon. Just take the author's chunks of thought, explain, illustrate, and apply them. That's it. It's that simple.

Here's where the roadmap concept comes in. Most chapters don't have more than three or four chunks. Then if you add an introduction and conclusion as additional chunks, you end up with five to sevenchunks in a sermon. These are sort of like points, but different. When sermon points have a parallel structure, as so many sermons do, the sequence of points can usually be switched around without consequence. So if your sermon is about "Five Ways That God Cares for Us," switching the order of four and five probably doesn't matter.

Chunks are different. Since they are tied to the author's flow of thought, they have to stay in order because an author is usually moving sequentially and logically (or maybe emotionally) from chunk to chunk. Another difference is many preachers write points in just a phrase rather than in a full idea expressed in a complete sentence, while chunks are fully developed units of thought.

So when you build your roadmap, start with your introduction and devise a little icon or stick figure that will visually call it to mind. Then develop an icon for each chunk that captures the way you'll illustrate it. It might be a band-aid, tree, rope, snake, cell phone. Next you just arrange your little icons into the right order and add your concluding icon. Put them on a winding path instead of a straight line so that you get the sense you're moving along a journey from chunk to chunk.

When you're done with your roadmap, you have a piece of paper with five to seven icons on it. No words. Not a single word. It's all visual reminders or oral preparation.

Friday and Saturday

Fridays are my day off, so I don't do any formal preparation. Although with as much work as I've done, I can't help thinking about some of the illustrations. You can still be alert for new or better metaphors and connections to flesh out the chunks. Saturday works the same way. You don't actually have to do much on the sermon except maybe think about it as you drive. When you go to bed, you can just run through the flow of thought in your head. Or if you wake up early, do the same thing before you get out of bed. If you're doing mindless tasks like mowing or painting or shoveling snow, you can ruminate on things as you work.

Sunday

On Sunday you'll want to get up early enough to do the last part of your preparation. You can sit and whisper through the message from chunk to chunk, or you can go to the room where you'll preach and walk around in that setting and practice. Here's when you work on transitions between chunks and uncover any remaining foggy thinking. If something doesn't flow well, just back up and keep speaking it until it does. You'll find you don't usually need your paper roadmap now, since you can remember the five pictures in your head. That brings a sense of freedom. When you're well prepared, you can see the pictures and know where you're going at all times.

Finally, on Sunday morning you need to forget, in a sense, everything you've learned—not your roadmap, just the ways you've spoken it up till then. You want to discover these truths with the people, not report to them, so you have to back up to where they are. They don't "get" this chapter. So you have to start where they are and move them along chunk by chunk. Convince yourself, and you'll convince them. Argue yourself along, and they'll eavesdrop on the process.

Here's where extemporaneous preaching makes a difference. Although you know what you'll say, you don't know how you'll say it until you look at real faces. You have to talk to real people. You can't decide everything in advance, or your sermon will feel cut-and-pasted into the room. The people in the room have to decide how things are described, the exact word choice and sentence structure. If those people are helping you decide how to say things, they get the sense they're participating in it instead of just listening. They won't be able to put their finger on it, but they'll have the subtle sense that you're sharing a space instead of invading their space.

Of course that means sometimes you won't be precise. You might have verbal glitches, unfinished sentences, and redundancies (all of which are only a problem in the world of literacy). You might even adapt on the fly and add something that wasn't on your roadmap. That's okay too, because whatever else you have, you'll have fluency. You'll have fluency because you started speaking these things on Tuesday and Wednesday instead of Saturday. That's the problem with literate preparation: it doesn't move to the oral environment until the last minute. You, on the other hand, have been talking about this message all week. So it literally is on the tip of your tongue.

I hope that helps you sense the flow. Try it the next time you preach and see how your own flow develops. Remember, the sermon is always already there in the text. But it's frozen there in print. Your job is to melt it back to life.

Dave McClellan is senior pastor of The Chapel at Tinkers Creek in Streetsboro, Ohio, and an adjunct professor at Indiana Wesleyan University's Cleveland campus and at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School's Akron campus.