The seven aspects of the fiction writer’s craft are sheroes and heroes (character), story line (plot), sequence (form), sensation (imagery and sensory detail), scene, setting, and sightline (point of view) . Novel Preaching; Tips from Top Writers on Crafting Creative Sermons. p. 47
Individual sermons can fit more than one, none, or all of the categories. They are as follows:
• The sermon that is coherent and entertaining but lacks depth (congregational symptom: malnutrition)
• The sermon that tries to teach, but is incoherent (hard to follow) (congregational symptom: mental confusion)
• The sermon that is coherent but boring (congregational symptoms: general loss o f interest and pleasure; numbness or lack of sensation)
• The sermon that, while it may be interesting and teaches people something, offers false teaching (congregational symptoms: mood swings between false optimism and false guilt)
Notes from Professor on above: Great Way to evaluate sermons
Sermon that is coherent and entertaining but lacks depth:: None of us purposely, week after week, offers sermons intended only to entertain, without concern for teaching our people the knowledge and wisdom that come from plumbing the depths of life and Scripture. But lite preaching happens to just about all of us some of the time.
Perhaps, in preaching on Psalm 121, we quickly decide to preach on “God helps us in times of trouble.” T hat does seem to be the obvious theme of the psalm. We offer four or five examples of God helping people in times of trouble. Never mind that lifting up our “eyes to the hills” (v. 1) may refer to the fact that that’s where the robbers and ambushers hid to swoop down on travelers below. Never mind that the experience of many in my congregation belies an easy assurance that God “[keeps us] from all evil” (v. 7). Nobody will be able to accuse the sermon of not having a theme that ties it together, but neither will they experience it addressing the depth of Israel’s faith as expressed in the Psalter as it intersects with our lives today. The excuse that we are trying to appeal to people who are new to the faith is just that, an excuse. The long-term effect on a congregation of a steady diet of shallow sermons is malnutrition. Vital nutrients are habitually missing from our sermonic diet.
By describing a sermon as lacking in depth, I mean it is a sermon that fails to be attentive to key aspects of congregational context or text. For xample, suppose I’m preaching on Exodus 15 and I ignore verses 4 and 5, where the pharaoh’s soldiers and chariots “went down into the depths like a stone.” I would think that it would be important to tag that as morally troubling, to point out that their lives have value as well as those of the Israelites, and to raise the question, “W hat we are to make of a God who champions one people at ^ e expense of another?”
Suppose I’m preaching on Proverbs 16:17, which assures us, “The highway of the upright avoids evil; those who guard their way preserve their lives.” I would want to acknowledge that the experiences of many in the congregation contradict that promise: illness, deaths of loved ones, experiences of injustice. A preacher’s obliviousness to the realities of his listeners’ daily experience is a key characteristic of the shallow sermon. I need to dig into the meanings of key words in the context of the book of Proverbs to pull the nuance out of what seems to be the surface meaning. I need to put this saying in conversation with others that affirm it or contest it in the Old and New Testament.
Advice from fiction writers