John McClure: Sermons Still in Demand

by Ray Waddle

It happens thousands and thousands of times every Sunday morning, an event so crucial to the faith that no one much ponders its impact.

It's called the sermon, and John McClure, for one, has been busy thinking deeply about its stubborn prevalence in 21st century Christian experience.

Whether or not a sermon is long or short, good or bad, funny or forgettable, its role in church life shows no signs of fading. Despite society's non-stop techno-revolutions and therapeutic trends, laypeople still value the old-fashioned face-to-face connection between pulpit and pew.

"Laypeople have high expectations, and those expectations are not always met," says McClure, who teaches preaching, or homiletics, at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

"Research shows that they are very aware of sermon preparation. They can detect when there's been a lot of preparation and when the sermon has been just thrown together."

Either way, laypeople take from the sermon what they need for deepening a relationship to the faith.

"A lot of meaning-making goes on during sermon time," he says. "Laypeople are grabbing hold of phrases or words they hear and doing their own meaning-making."

McClure is the author of Preaching Words: 144 Key Terms in Homiletics (Westminster John Knox), a new book of short entries on the discipline of pulpit sermonizing and the far-flung trends that shape it. The wide range of entry titles suggests the broad horizon of homiletics — "funeral sermons," "postliberal preaching," "narrative preaching," "wedding homily," as well as "metaphor," "imagination," "mentoring," and "preaching with notes."

McClure has been a student of preaching his whole life. His father, Scott McClure, was longtime minister at Independent Presbyterian Church in Birmingham. John McClure has been a parish minister himself and taught at Louisville Theological Seminary for 17 years before arriving in 2003 at Vanderbilt, which has one of the nation's few doctoral programs in homiletics.

He is no stranger to other sorts of public performance. McClure is an accomplished musician (guitar, keyboard, bass) and producer who spent years in various bands (Southern rock, Americana, Celtic) between here and Scotland since his student days at the University of Glasgow. With his home studio he has assisted his daughter Leslie McClure, who has launched a career of her own as a singer-songwriter-guitarist (see lesliemcclure.net).

On the sermon front, McClure has in recent years immersed himself in studying lay attitudes toward preaching. He interviewed churchgoers for a Lilly Endowment study and edited a resulting book, Listening to Listeners: A Homiletical Case Study.

Are sermons changing? These days, a theological drama is underway. Various models of preaching vie for attention — a rivalry of styles in a 21st century setting, depending on a church's personality and history. It appears that contemporary "authentic" preaching has emerged as a modern ideal, McClure suggests. He defines authentic preaching as emotionally open, accessible, vulnerable and self-searching.

Which Sunday sermon styles prevail across the country? Much depends on the idea of authority at work in a congregation — the authority that laypeople entrust to a preacher representing their hopes and values.

One sort of authority is the traditional respect that worshippers have for the office of preaching, McClure says. Assaults on institutional authority of all sorts since the 1960s damaged this model in many quarters, though some churches still revere it.

A second form of authority is based on the relationship established between preacher and biblical text. McClure says: "The preacher gains authority by demonstrating a clear commitment to the exposition of Scripture."

Or authority can arise from the minister's charisma or other unique gifts that suggest a special relationship with God. (Such gifts can, of course, be abused or unravel into authoritarian bullying.)

But another kind of authority has emerged with great momentum — "relational authority," which comes from "developing good pastoral and personal relationships and fostering a sense of a human quest for authenticity ... , " McClure writes.

Authenticity isn't really the same as sincerity, he suggests. The difference has to do with shifting public attitudes toward the self. In previous times, sincerity assumed a stable "solid self" that a preacher could reveal in public. But in today's climate, authenticity refers to a "more private, fluid, elusive and hidden self" and the preacher's willingness to reveal an "ongoing search for, or awareness of, a fluid and hidden (real) self," he explains. This preaching style is especially important for connecting with media-savvy spiritual seekers who are suspicious of church hypocrisy or phoniness.

Beyond the homiletical dramas playing out in today's congregations, McClure sees a deep connection at work between listener and preacher. It doesn't seem to matter whether a worshiper can later recall the particulars of this or that sermon or not.

"For many people, sermon-listening is a spiritual practice, a skill developed over time," he says.

"The attitude of many is, ‘I would not be in church if there were no sermon.’"