Stripping preaching to its bare essentials

Preaching is a joke?

STRIPPING PREACHING TO ITS BARE ESSENTIALS
By Simon Coupland
Monarch. 160 pages. £7.99
ISBN 1 85424 712 3

This is a lightweight book about lightweight preaching. The author’s aim is to stimulate preachers into making their sermons more interesting and effective. In the Introduction he bemoans the prevalence of boring sermons and then claims that his book is the one he has been seeking for 25 years but has not found. So he has written it.

The following chapters deal successively, in an entertaining way, with the basic matters of sermon preparation and delivery.

Obviously in a book of this size these topics cannot be covered in depth, but each is introduced thoughtfully and humorously. In fact the author majors on jokes and has liberally spiced his book with them, believing they should play an important part in preaching. This is an easy-to-read and simple introduction to the practicalities of preaching. Anyone desiring to preach would find some help by beginning with this book, but would be advised not to end with it. There are richer and more thorough books available.

Sometimes the author’s penchant for telling jokes plays too large a part. For example, he takes five pages to discuss whether or not a preacher should use sermons more than once (on the whole he is against it), but just over one of those pages is taken up with a lengthy joke. Dr. Coupland seems to make the classic mistake of confusing expository preaching with sermon structure, describing ‘the expository sermon’ as taking ‘the listener through a passage, explaining and expounding upon each verse, each phrase, or even each word’, contrasting it with one point sermons, two point sermons and narrative sermons. But exposition is a method not a structure, and one point, two point or any point sermons may also be expository in nature.

The author has read widely in homiletic literature and brings in telling quotations. This book could be useful to some, but might raise the hackles of others. Recommended with reservations.

Stanley Jebb,
retired Baptist minister engaged in itinerant preaching,
a member of Truro Evangelical Church

© Evangelicals Now - September 2005
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