But the preacher needs to realize how he or she can forfeit that

opportunity to connect with the audience by importing a message

prepared by someone else for another group of people in another time
and place. Barbara Brown Taylor talks about today’s trend of preachers
gleaning from other preachers, subscribing to print and online journals
to get stories and sermon ideas from “expert” preachers, and then
crafting sermons that are variations on their themes:
If I were to choose one single thing that is the matter with
preaching today, then it would be the way that habits like these
encourage both preachers and their listeners to think of the
sermon as a solo performance that is brought to the congregation
from beyond them somewhere—from the biblical, theological, and
homiletical experts—instead of from God in their midst who gives
them their lives.193

This is not simply a matter of a lack of originality, or worse yet,

plagiarism. Borrowed sermons don’t connect well for two reasons: they
don’t spring from the heart, soul, and mind of the preacher, and, they
are developed for another audience living in another place and time.
Even if such a sermon was memorized and delivered without the use of
written notes, it is unrealistic to expect as much success for that sermon
as one crafted specifically for and with the audience at hand.
Barbara Brown Taylor explains the special dynamic that exists
when a sermon is created by both the preacher and the audience, giving
the sermon a collective ownership:

193
Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Weekly Wrestling Match” in What’s the Matter with Preaching Today?
ed. Mike Graves (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 171-172.

Barbara Brown Taylor said it best

The truly great preachers in this world are people whose
names no one will ever know, because their sermons both arise
from and are entirely absorbed by local communities of listeners
who labor with them to embody God’s word. In cases such as
these, the success of a sermon is not measured by how many
people said they liked it, nor by a preacher’s own sense of
accomplishment, but by how the spoken word cleared a space for
people to be met and set in motion by the Spirit of the living God.
When that happens, ownership of the sermon shifts from the one
to the many.203
203
Taylor, “The Weekly Wrestling Match” in What’s the Matter with Preaching Today?, ed. Mike Graves,
172.
Haddon W. Robinson talks about the preacher endeavouring to
have his or her mind bent toward the Scriptures rather than using the
Scriptures to support his or her thought.185 As previously noted,
Barbara Brown Taylor “reads and reads and reads” the text, waiting to be
addressed by it—waiting for that moment of revelation and discovery:
This means that I never know ahead of time what I will
preach. If I did, then my sermons would be little more than
lessons, expositions of things I already know that I think my
listeners ought to know too. While there are preachers who do this
sort of thing well, I am not one of them. I do not want to scatter
pearls of wisdom from the pulpit; I want to discover something
fresh—even if I cannot quite identify it yet, even if it is still covered
with twigs and mud. I want to haul it into the pulpit and show

others what God has shown me, while I am still shaking with
excitement and delight.186

While Taylor’s delightful and excited eagerness is to be lauded, the

notion of hauling the big idea of a Scripture passage into the pulpit not
fully identified and “still covered with twigs and mud” most certainly
would rankle the likes of John Henry Jowett, whose words on the subject
have been, as Bryan Chapell has stated, “virtually made canonical” by
homiletics instructors.187
I am of the conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, nor
ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short,
pregnant sentence as clear as crystal. I find the getting of that
sentence the hardest, the most exacting, and the most fruitful
labor in my study. To compel oneself to fashion that sentence, to
dismiss every word that is vague, ragged, ambiguous, to think
oneself through to a form of words which defines the theme with
scrupulous exactness—this is surely one of the most vital and
essential factors in the making of a sermon: and I do not think any
sermon ought to be preached or even written, until that sentence
has emerged, clear and lucid as a cloudless moon.188

186
Taylor, The Preaching Life, 81.
187
Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Baker Books, 1994), 139.
188
J.H. Jowett, The Preacher: His Life and Work (New York: Doran, 1912) 133, quoted in Chapell, Christ-
Centered Preaching, 139-140. (Also quoted by Hogan, Marquart, Stott, Demaray, Davis,
Robinson, and
many others.)

Graves, Mike, ed. What’s the Matter with Preaching Today? Louisville,
Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

Hybels, Bill. “Reading Your Gauges”, ChristianityToday.com. 1996

http://www.ctlibrary.com/5520.

Jackman, David. “The Invisible Interpreter: We need to let the text

question our framework. PreachingToday.com.
http://www.preachingtoday.com/skills/article 30880.