The Story of Narrative Preaching

Book excerpt: Forty years ago the one thing that could be said about sermons was they were biblical. Unfortunately, they were sometimes tedious too. Narrative preaching aimed to fix that, advocating for a dynamic experience of the text over against a static lecture. Preaching could be like the parables of Jesus, intriguing and compelling. The Story of Narrative Preaching is the story of seven students who are enrolled in Professor Freeman's preaching course. Once a new trend, narrative preaching is now older than most of them. As Professor Freeman notes, two things went wrong with narrative styles: over time the church became biblically and theologically illiterate, and the promised stress on experience didn't always measure up to the weight of the gospel. Readers are invited to sit in on the class, to reflect on the expositional nature of preaching and to experience the stories of some modern storytellers--Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and others--to see what they might teach us about narratives of depth. In the end we discover what may be the most important word in preaching.