Two Kinds of Ministry

In 1 Peter 4, the apostle identifies two broad categories of ministry in the body of Christ, speaking and serving. 

¹⁰ As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: ¹¹ whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. (ESV)

Both speaking and serving matter, but from my (albeit limited) perspective, much of our discipleship infrastructure in local churches tends to emphasize the how-to-serve side of things more than the how-to-speak side. We train people to set up chairs, run sound, and serve in the nursery, all of which are really important, but are we also training them to open the Bible and teach it faithfully and effectively?

Ephesians 4 reminds us that every believer is called to speak the truth in love. Not just those specially gifted to do so. Speaking is not just the role of the pastor-teacher. And notice it’s speaking the truth (biblical content rightly understood) in love (effective manner and delivery of that content).

Why Hermeneutics Matters for Everyone

One of the questions I keep coming back to in my own mind is this: Why isn’t hermeneutics (theories and principles for interpreting the Bible) a more prominent part of local church training?

The ability to rightly read Scripture is not just for a select group of seminary-trained professionals. The study of hermeneutics equips every believer to read the Bible for themselves with confidence and discernment instead of being completely dependent on someone else’s interpretation. It enables them to evaluate what they’re reading and hearing in books, podcasts, and sermons from the pulpit. It helps them engage more meaningfully in those sermons as active, thoughtful, Berean-type listeners. And it gives them a genuine appreciation for the craft of exposition, an understanding of what it actually takes to move from a text to a faithful, clear, applicationally-sound communication of it.

I think there’s also a parallel need for church members to be equipped in basic rhetorical skills. It’s not enough to know how to interpret the Bible if you don’t know how to share it. Whether someone is leading a small group, teaching Sunday school, sharing a devotional at a men’s breakfast, or doing family discipleship around the dinner table, these are all Word ministries, and they all benefit from learning not just what to say (getting it right) but how to say it (getting it across). 

Cutting It Straight

This burden of mine led to a conference called Cutting It Straight, a name drawn from Paul’s charge to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:15 to rightly handle the word of truth. It’s a weekend intensive designed to train men in the skills of biblical interpretation and communication, working through a specific book of the Bible and equipping participants to understand the text and teach it in whatever context God they’re in.

The seed for this conference was planted during my twenty-plus years of serving as the coordinator for the annual High School Preaching & Teaching Conference at Bob Jones University. As part of that annual event, we offered young people the opportunity to learn how to interpret and teach God’s Word. What had once been a sermon contest (not a great idea) eventually became a workshop-style track for teens. It was a significant shift, and the students who participated (and their parents and their pastors) genuinely valued the emphasis on equipping them not just evaluating them.

But the format had some logistical problems. Students who were also involved in the choral and fine arts competitions frequently had to miss sessions due to scheduling conflicts. It felt disjointed, and after some reflection, we concluded that the preaching and teaching track would work much better as a standalone event instead of something tacked onto a larger festival.

When I reached out to churches that normally sent students to the high school event, Calvary Baptist Church in Westminster, MD expressed an interest in hosting something at their church dedicated not just for teenagers but also for adults. Their instinct proved right. The turnout the first year well exceeded our expectations, and the response from participants told us that this was something we needed to do again.

The Conference at Calvary

So for the past two years, I’ve had the privilege of going up to Calvary to lead the Cutting It Straight conference. The event drew men from at least nine churches last past March, with over 70 attendees gathering Friday evening and spending most of Saturday digging into one particular book of the Bible.

The model is intentional. Each year, we focus on a different genre. The first year we focused on discourse-type texts. We discussed interpreting and teaching from the New Testament epistles, using 1 Peter as our anchor book. This March we turned our attention to narrative texts. We focused specifically on Old Testament narrative, devoting our time to the four chapters of Ruth (this may be the first time in the history of the church that a men’s conference has studied the book of Ruth together!). 

The philosophy and principles stay constant. What changes is the text-type or book we focus on. That means someone can come back year after year and be challenged to apply the same principles to new material, but all rooted in the same philosophical foundation. It also means the conference can grow a stable core of returning participants while remaining accessible to first-timers.

For years I’ve benefited tremendously from attending Charles Simeon Trust workshops here in Greenville. Cutting It Straight definitely draws some inspiration from those CST workshops, though it’s distinct in important ways. The Simeon Trust model is oriented toward pastors and those aspiring to pastoral ministry, with participants completing worksheets in advance and presenting their work in small groups. Cutting It Straight is for any church member, young or old, and it follows more of a seminar teaching-and-discussion format. I teach a segment, and then table groups, each led by a facilitator, work through the material together and apply the concepts in real time. There’s no preliminary homework, so the bar of entry is much lower. We also send participants home with books and resources to support their ongoing work as students and teachers of God’s Word.

How the Host Church Has Benefited

One of the most encouraging aspects of this kind of training is what it surfaces in a local church as a result. There is transformative value to this kind of investment in equipping the saint for the work of Word-based ministry.

For a church that is actively sending members into church planting and missions, the need to develop the next generation of teachers is critical. When leaders go out, gaps are left behind, and a church that has been intentionally training men to handle the Word is far better positioned to remain healthy through those transitions.

The seminar also proved to be a catalyst for identifying emerging gifts. One of the teens who wasn’t on anyone’s radar for being interested in this type of training attended the conference and ever since has been reading everything his pastors have given him. His hunger for the Word and his desire for ministry were unknown until that weekend. Who knows. Training like this may have the effect of revealing a desire and hunger that is already present in your church; it’s just waiting to be drawn out.

The gathering of men from nine different churches also created something special. Pastors who brought men they were mentoring found themselves in the room alongside other pastors doing the same thing. That shared commitment to raising up the next generation of teachers, with mentor and apprentice learning side by side, generates a kind of synergy that is difficult to manufacture any other way. 

A Vision Worth Pursuing

The local church should be a place where every believer has the opportunity to be trained to handle the Word of God. Not just professionally credentialed preachers, but parents, small group leaders, and Sunday school teachers – anyone who wants to grow in their ability to communicate God’s Word to others in a wide array of contexts.

I don’t think that training in biblical interpretation and exposition should be reserved for the academy. They are tools for discipleship, and the church that invests in them invests in the long-term health and stability of its people, forming up men and women who won’t be easily blown about by every wind of doctrine, and who are equipped to speak truth in love wherever God has placed them.

This post grew out of a recent conversation I had with Ken Casillas on the Theologically Speaking podcast. The interview will be released in the near future. But if your church is interested in hosting a Cutting It Straight seminar, I would love to hear from you. Whether you’re a pastor looking to invest in your people, a church seeking to develop the next generation of teachers, or a ministry leader curious about what this kind of training might look like in your context, please reach out. Nothing would encourage me more than seeing this kind of equipping spread to more churches.

If you’re committed to biblical exposition I doubt you’ll have any hesitation answering the first part of the question. Of course the biblical text should drive the content of the message. But the second part of the question may be less obvious. In fact it may be a question you have never really given much thought to.

Should the structure of my sermon mirror the structure of the text itself? Should my sermon outline and organization reflect the order and organization of the passage I am preaching from? 

That’s the question. 

Some refer to this as textual mirroring or textual conformity. 

What We Mean by Textual Conformity

Let’s be clear: textual conformity is not the same thing as textual fidelity. By “fidelity” I mean saying what the text says, accurately representing what the passage says and means by what it says. This is non-negotiable for any expositor, but it’s a separate question from the structure one. 

Textual conformity goes further. Here’s how David Helm defines expository preaching: 

Expositional preaching is empowered preaching that rightfully submits the shape and emphasis of the sermon to the shape and emphasis of a biblical text. (Expositional Preaching, 13)

In this way of viewing of exposition the sermon does not come to the text with a pre-determined structure. The text provides the structure. The preacher’s job is to represent it, not redesign it.

But is that always the right standard? Is that always possible? 

Three Ways to Define Expository Preaching

One reason the textual conformity question is complicated is that people use the term expository preaching in different ways (I’ve written about this here.), and the answer you give to the conformity question depends partly on which definition you are working from.

Some people define expository preaching etymologically. The word “exposition” comes from the Latin expositio, which has the idea of setting forth or exposing. On this view, expository preaching is simply preaching that exposes and explains the text. It is explanation-centered. It sounds like a running commentary, working through the text verse by verse, word by word, bringing everything to the surface. Under this definition, you are preaching expositorily as long as you are explaining the Scripture. In one sense this approach mirrors the structure of the text, since it moves from verse to verse, but in actuality, the structure of the passage is often lost in the micro-level details.

Others define expository preaching morphologically, in terms of its form. In the expository form, both main points and subpoints come from one text, one literary unit. The sum and substance of the sermon, its structure and its argument, are drawn directly from the passage. This stands in contrast to the textual sermon, where main points come from one text but subpoints range freely outside of it, and the topical sermon, where the preacher determines the topic, selects the texts, and governs the organization of the whole message.

It is more common today, however, to define expository preaching philosophically, as an umbrella term for any truly biblical preaching, regardless of the form it takes. On this view, you could even preach a topical sermon expositorily, as long as the individual passages are handled in a way that is true to the author’s intent and the text’s context.

I prefer to define expository preaching in terms of form. That means any discussion of expository preaching must wrestle with more than content. It must engage with the text’s form and its relationship to the sermon’s form.

Here’s the dividing line: Does your definition of expository preaching include anything related to structure? If we define expository preaching simply as “the point of the passage is the point of the sermon,” then there is no obligation to structure our sermons in a way that re-presents the structure of the text. 

However, my brief, working definition for expository preaching is this: the Christ-centered explanation and application of a biblical text that represents its structure, argument, and purpose. The key word is represents. The sermon does not just extract ideas from the text. It reflects the text. But what does it reflect? Its how (structure) and its why (purpose), not just its what (argument).

The Case for Textual Conformity

Here are four arguments for making textual conformity your default approach. 

1. The Structure of a Text Is Not an Accident

This is a fundamental point. The biblical authors were not arranging their material arbitrarily. They were skilled writers and rhetoricians operating within ancient literary traditions, and the way they arranged their material was deliberate and purposeful.

Form communicates emphasis. The biblical author arranged his material rhetorically to put certain things first, to build toward certain conclusions, to withhold certain statements until they had maximum impact. When you reorder that material, you are making a decision about what matters most, and that decision may not align with the decision the Spirit-guided author made. You may be inadvertently muting what the author was emphasizing.

2. Following the Text Protects Against Importing Your Own Agenda

Every one of us has tendencies – favorite themes, doctrines we gravitate toward. For those of us who are pastors, pastoral concerns are always at the forefront. These are not bad things in and of themselves, but there is a danger when those tendencies begin to drive the structure (and therefore emphasis) of our preaching. 

Topical preaching is the form most vulnerable to this, as I mentioned earlier, because you are the one choosing the topic, choosing the texts, and choosing how to organize the message. There is a lot of you in that process. But even in expository preaching, if you impose your own structure on a text, you can end up distorting its emphasis.

Textual conformity is a guardrail against that kind of drift. When you follow the text’s structure, you follow the author’s emphasis (convey through the structure), not your own. You are constrained to deal with what the text deals with in the order the text deals with it. The Spirit’s emphasis in a passage is harder to override when you have committed to representing the passage’s structure.

This doesn’t mean you have no voice or personality in the sermon. Obviously you do. But there is a difference between your rhetorical choices serving the text and your choices replacing it. 

3. You Are Teaching Your People to Read the Bible

This argument is one I find compelling from a pastoral standpoint, but I didn’t fully appreciate until I had been preaching for a while.

Your people are watching you model how to read Scripture. They are seeing, week after week, how a careful reader moves through a text, what the structure reveals, how the argument builds, where the weight falls. And if your sermon outline mirrors the text’s structure, then when they sit down with their Bibles on Monday morning and read that same passage, they can replicate what they saw you do.

That is an enormous gift. The goal of preaching is not to produce people who are dependent on the preacher for their understanding of Scripture. The goal is to equip people who can open their Bibles and read it for themselves.

When your sermon outline feels like it could only have been produced by someone with a seminary degree and a clever mind, you may be undermining that goal. I want people to leave saying, “I see how this works; I could trace that same movement in my own reading.”

I don’t want my preaching to be a form of wizardry. I want it to be a window through which people can see the text for themselves.

4. It Rescues You from Predictability

There is a practical benefit to textual conformity that preachers often overlook. It keeps your preaching from becoming formulaic.

Most preachers, if left to their own devices, will drift toward a preferred structure. Three points and a poem, right? An introduction that sets up a problem, two or three points that address it, and an application that lands the solution. Alliterated main points in parallel grammatical form. These are not necessarily bad structures. But when you stamp the same structure on every biblical text regardless of what that text is doing, you may be failing to represent the amazing variety of God’s self-revelation.

The Bible is not formulaic. A Pauline argument is structured differently from a narrative episode in Acts, which is structured differently from a lament psalm, which is structured differently from a proverb. When you let each text shape its own sermon outline, your preaching takes on the variety that Scripture itself has. Each text has its own logic, its own movement, its own shape.

This type of exposition is eager to avoid imposing a foreign structure on the Word of God. Rather it seeks to represent the Word of God in the form God gave it.

The Case for Flexibility

If everything I have just said is true, then the question naturally arises. Should a preacher always follow the text’s structure, in every case, without exception?

Perhaps this will surprise you, but I don’t think so. 

1. Some Texts Are Genuinely Difficult to Preach Sequentially

Not every biblical text translates naturally into a sequential outline. Some texts are structurally complex in ways that would require significant background explanation before a congregation could track the argument. Some texts are cyclical rather than linear, revisiting themes rather than advancing through a logical progression. 

Romans 5 is a good example of a complex text. The argument in verses 1 through 11 moves through a series of clauses and sub-clauses that are interconnected in ways that are easier to see on the printed page but hard to track in real time as a listener. A strictly sequential treatment of that passage might leave your congregation more confused than helped.

Psalm 63 is an example of a cyclical text. David moves between expressions of longing and trust, then back to longing, then to praise, in a pattern that does not have a simple linear logic. If you preach it section by section, treating each section as a separate point in a sequential argument, you may end up obscuring the emotional and theological arc of the psalm rather than representing it. The psalm is doing something through its cycles, not in spite of them.

Sometimes providing your own structure for a complex or cyclical text, for the sake of clarity, is not a departure from faithfulness. It’s consistent with your calling as a communicator.

2. Your Listeners Are Not the Original Audience

Biblical texts were written to specific people in specific historical and cultural contexts. And they were written in specific literary genres shaped by ancient conventions that aren’t always natural for twenty-first century listeners to follow in real time. A Pauline diatribe, an apocalyptic vision, a Hebrew lament psalm are forms that worked powerfully in their original contexts. But if we simply replicate the surface structure for modern listeners, it may not work the same way or have the same effect.

The rhetorical strategy you use to communicate the meaning of a text to your congregation is a pastoral decision you have to make. Sometimes that decision will look like following the text’s structure closely. Sometimes it will look like finding a structure that helps your audience receive the text’s meaning more effectively. Perhaps some of this is similar to the differences in Bible translation philosophies between form-based and meaning-based translations.

Consider a text structured inductively, building toward its main conclusion. You could follow that structure and let the argument build toward the payoff at the end. Or you could state the conclusion first, then walk your audience through the passage showing how that conclusion is established. Both are legitimate choices. The first honors the text’s rhetorical strategy. The second serves a congregation that may need the framework before it can track the argument. Which is better depends on the passage, the occasion, and the people you are preaching to. That is a pastoral judgment, and I don’t know that there’s any formula for it.

3. Time and Rhetorical Clarity Are Real Constraints

I have preached ten-minute messages and forty-five-minute messages; the constraints are different for each. Working through the argumentative structure of a complex Pauline paragraph section by section in ten minutes is often not possible. Something has to give. And I think what gives in that case should be the complexity of the structure in favor of making the author’s argument clear.

There are also basic rhetorical principles that might lead you to override strict sequential fidelity. Unity is one of them. A sermon needs a single, clear organizing idea that everything else serves. If following the text’s sequence produces a message that feels fragmented, like a collection of separate observations rather than a unified argument, something has gone wrong. The fault may not be in the text but in the way the structure has been handled.

Progression is another principle. A sermon needs to move somewhere. If following the sequence produces a sense of treading water, if the same idea seems to keep recurring without development, the congregation may disengage because of the repetitiveness. 

Simplicity is a third principle. If strict sequential preaching requires so much scaffolding and so much cross-referencing between sections that the main idea gets buried, the structure is not serving the sermon.

None of this means abandoning the text. It means being a thoughtful communicator as well as a faithful interpreter.

Genre Matters More Than We Sometimes Admit

One of the things that complicates the textual conformity question is that different genres of Scripture are structured differently, and those structural differences have real implications for how you preach them.

New Testament epistles are generally structured around extended arguments. Paul is making a case, and the sequence of that case matters. The movement from premise to evidence to conclusion to application in a Pauline letter is not arbitrary. It’s the logic of persuasion. When you preach an epistle, following the text’s argument usually means following the text’s sequence, because the sequence is the argument. 

Gospel narratives are structured as stories. Jesus acts and speaks, and the sequence of his actions and words is part of how the story communicates. The narrative builds through scenes, often with rising tension and a moment of resolution or revelation. Textual conformity with a gospel narrative typically means telling the story in its order, because the story’s movement conveys its meaning, particularly at the intersection of the crisis/climax and resolution. 

Old Testament narrative is similar in some ways, but adds the complexity of typological and redemptive-historical development. You’re dealing with a story that points forward to Christ, and the Christ-centered reading of the text may require you to draw connections that go beyond the text’s own immediate structure. The narrative sequence can guide the sermon’s movement, but the sermon also needs to go somewhere the text’s immediate horizon doesn’t take it on its own.

Poetry and the Psalms are different again. A psalm does not have a logical argument in the same way an epistle does. It has an emotional and lyrical arc, often structured around repetition, intensification, and reversal. Perhaps it is wise here not to follow a logical sequence but to follow the emotional movement of the psalm. Where does it begin? What is the turning point? Where does it arrive? The structure of a sermon on a psalm should probably reflect that arc.

Wisdom literature presents yet another challenge. Proverbs does not have an argument to follow. It’s more like an accumulation of observations. Here, a topical or thematic approach that synthesizes the chapter’s observations around a dominant theme is often more faithful to the genre than strict sequential conformity.

All that to say this: Let the genre shape your default posture. For epistles, lean toward following the argument. For narratives, follow the story. For psalms, follow the emotional arc. For wisdom texts, organize thematically. Textual conformity looks different depending on what kind of text you’re working with.

Where I Land

Because I try to teach students how to prepare expository sermons, and because I try to preach expository sermons week after week, I think about this issue of sermon structure a lot.

At present here’s where I land. This would be my general counsel to preachers: Deviate from the text’s structure only when you have good rhetorical reasons.

To put it positively: If possible, follow the flow of the text. Make that your default, knee-jerk approach unless there is a genuinely good reason (genre, audience, time) to go a different direction.

But the impulse to reorganize should always be interrogated before you act on it. Ask yourself honestly: Am I making this clearer, or am I making it mine? Is this reorganization serving the text’s message, or am I quietly rearranging the text’s emphasis to match my own?

Here’s an example. Psalm 1 is structured inductively. The thesis, the summary statement about the two ways and their two destinies, comes at the very end in verse 6. The psalm spends verses 1 through 5 describing the blessed man and the wicked man before revealing in verse 6 that the Lord knows the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked will perish.

Textual conformity would follow that inductive movement. You would walk through the description of the blessed man, then the description of the wicked man, and arrive at verse 6 as the conclusion. The congregation experiences the psalm the way a first-time reader experiences it.

A slight deviation would be to start the message by referencing verse 6, establishing the two categories up front, and then moving back through the psalm with those categories and that contrast in view. The reason for that deviation would be purely rhetorical. Some congregations will track the description in verses 1 through 5 better if they already know what the two categories are. Others will find the arrival at verse 6 more impactful if they did not see it coming.

Which approach is better? It depends on the congregation and the occasion. What matters is that the decision is a conscious rhetorical decision made in service of the text’s meaning first and then in the interest of the listener. What we should avoid is simply starting with a preferred prefabricated structure and superimposing that on the text without regard for how it impacts fidelity to the text and clarity/impact for the audience.

Practical Guidelines

Here’s some practical guidance for implementing textual conformity in a way that serves your preaching.

You Do Not Need to Give a Technical Lecture

Following the text’s structure does not mean turning your sermon into a Bible study on the structure of the passage. Does your congregation really need to know that verses 1 through 3 form the protasis and verses 4 through 6 form the apodosis of a conditional argument? Maybe (though not using those terms)? But what’s more important is that understand the major movements of the text and how they relate to each other.

Communicating structure to a congregation is a different skill from the structural analysis you might do in preparation, although that study is foundational for being able to explain the structure clearly and simply. The goal is not to expose your exegetical process but to help your people follow the text’s logic in a way that’s natural and accessible. You can do that without all the technical vocabulary (like epexegetical, although that’s a fun word to say).

Main Points Can Be Applicational

One practical question that comes up is whether the main points of a sermon have to be worded as exegetical statements or whether they can be cast in applicational language. My answer is that applicational main points are fine, as long as they genuinely represent what each section of the text is doing.

There’s a difference between taking the exegetical meaning of a section and recasting it in language that addresses your congregation directly, and taking your own applicational agenda and finding a section of the text to attach it to. The first is good communication. The second is imposing your own outline on the text, which is exactly what textual conformity is meant to prevent. The test is whether you can go back to the text and show how the applicational point is actually rooted in and derived from that section of the passage.

Cross-References Should Go Out to Come Back In

There’s nothing wrong with bringing in cross-references and other passages in the course of preaching a text. But the way you use those cross-references matters. The cross-reference should go out from the text in order to come back around to the text, illuminating the passage you’re preaching rather than displacing or overshadowing it.

Show the Original Structure Even When You Deviate

When I do deviate from the text’s structure for rhetorical reasons, I try to make a point somewhere in the sermon to show the congregation how the passage is actually laid out. Sometimes this is a slide that diagrams the structure. Sometimes it is just a sentence or two where I say, here is what the author is doing in this section and how it relates to what came before.

The reason I do this is that even when I have deviated from the structure, I want my congregation to know that there is a structure and to have some sense of what it is. I want them to feel the constraint of the text, even when I have adjusted its sequence for rhetorical reasons. 

The Bigger Picture

I’d like to end with something that goes beyond the mechanics of sermon structure, because I think the textual conformity question is directly related to the question of authority.

When you consistently follows the text’s structure, you’re making a statement every week about who’s in charge of the sermon. You’re saying, by what you do, that the text determines what gets emphasized, what gets developed, what gets the most time, and in what order your listeners encounters the message. The text is in the driver’s seat in every conceivable way.

But if you consistently impose your own structure on the text, even when the intent is faithful and the exegesis is careful, you may be making a statement you don’t intend to make. You might be suggesting that your judgment about how to organize the material is better than the original’s.

Pause. I have already argued that there are legitimate reasons for structural adaptation, and I believe that. You are not necessarily being unfaithful when you make conscious, justified rhetorical decisions to adapt the text’s sequence for the sake of clarity or impact. That’s not always equivalent to imposing your own agenda. That may be the best way to serve your congregation while remaining faithful to the author’s intention.

But there is a difference between a preacher who defaults to following the text and adapts when he has good reason, and a preacher who defaults to his own structural and rhetorical instincts while completely ignoring the text’s structure and its contributions. 

From my experience as a preacher and listener of expository sermons over the decades, I would argue that the discipline of textual conformity, practiced over years, shapes you, the preacher, as much as it shapes your sermons. It trains you to come to a text asking “what is the author doing here and how,” rather than starting with the question of “what can I say about this text?.” It forms in you a posture of submission to the text that carries over into every kind of preaching you do, including the topical or thematic messages that do not lend themselves to tight sequential conformity. Once you’ve internalized the instinct to follow the text, you bring that instinct with you everywhere.

That is why, in my preaching courses, I insist on the expository form as the foundation. Learn to do this well first. Master the constraint and develop the muscle. And then, when you’re in a position to adapt the text’s structure for rhetorical reason, you know what you’re deviating from and why.

Learn to dribble the ball first. The behind-the-back stuff can come later. 

Not long after that, I had the chance to continue the conversation on BJU Seminary’s podcast, Theologically Speaking.

Delivery as an Act of Service

Most evangelical preachers (including me) would instinctively agree with the statement that “content is king.” And of course, what we say in preaching is critically important. But one potential unintended consequence of that conviction is that we can begin to dismiss delivery, as if caring about how we say what we say is somehow unspiritual or unimportant.

But the more I’ve taught preaching (and the more I’ve listened to sermons over the years), the more convinced I’ve become that delivery is not mere decoration; it is an act of service. For me this conviction is anchored in 1 Peter 4:10–11. Speaking is a gift meant to serve others. And those who speak are called to speak “as the oracles of God.” So if my goal is truly to serve the flock with the Word, I cannot ignore the question of whether people are actually hearing what I say in light of how I say it.

And that’s where the discussion of notes comes in. The notes you bring into the pulpit, and how you use them, directly impacts your effectiveness in serving the people of God with the Word of God. Once that connection is made, it becomes harder to treat the use of notes as a mere preference or personality quirk. It becomes a pastoral question.

Five Non-Negotiables of Delivery

It doesn’t matter if you preach with a full manuscript, a detailed outline, a skeleton outline, or no notes at all, there are certain essentials of good delivery that allow you to serve your audience well.

1. Eye contact. You cannot look at your notes and your people at the same time. Eye contact communicates sincerity, helps maintain attention, and lets you read the room.
2. Physical freedom and embodied communication. One author says, “Your body follows your focus.” When your focus is locked on the page, your body will often communicate that.
3. Vocal variety and energy. God’s Word deserves more than a flat recitation. We aim (as best we can) to communicate something of the weight, tone, and urgency of the text.
4. Authenticity and credibility. Over-reliance on reading can (sometimes) communicate that the message has not been internalized. That can create a credibility problem even when the content is orthodox and carefully prepared.
5. Responsiveness and flexibility. Preaching is not mail delivery. We are not merely dropping off content. We are shepherding people, and shepherding requires attentiveness and, at times, adaptability.

These five non-negotiable of good delivery help us evaluate whether our approach is actually serving the people God has placed in front of us.

Precision or Freedom at a Cost

I’ve found it helpful to describe the tradeoffs this way: Manuscript preaching offers precision but with a cost, and notes-free preaching offers freedom with a cost.

• Manuscript preaching can sharpen language and preserve careful thought. But it can also reduce eye contact, flexibility, and naturalness if we are not careful.
• Notes-free preaching can strengthen connection and responsiveness to our audience. But it can also increase cognitive load, invite rabbit trails, and create anxiety about forgetting something important.

The goal of my session was not to argue for or against a particular method. I simply want those of us who preach to think carefully and deeply about our methods and evaluate whether or not they are best serving the flock with the Word.

• Ask whether your current approach is more about your comfort than their good.
• Seek feedback from trusted people who will tell you the truth.

The Example of Jonathan Edwards

One of my favorite parts of preparing for this session was doing research on the preaching of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards is often viewed as the poster child for monotone manuscript preaching. But the manuscript evidence suggests that Edwards’ delivery developed over time. John Carrick makes a compelling case that Edwards’ sermon notes demonstrate that he moved away from the use of full manuscripts to the use of notes that allowed him to preach more extemporaneously.

Why does that matter? Edwards’ example reminds us that that growth is possible, and that our current method does not have to be our permanent method.

I hope the session and podcast will encourage you to keep growing, not only in what you say, but also in how you say it, so that God’s people are served, and God is glorified.

Since then I’ve had several encouraging conversations with pastors and teachers who are intrigued by the idea, curious about how it actually works in practice, and wondering whether it’s realistic in the press of weekly ministry.

That’s why I was grateful for the opportunity to talk through these ideas at greater length on BJU Seminary’s Theologically Speaking podcast. In that episode we move beyond the written article into a wide-ranging conversation about exposition, book-level preaching, long-range planning, and the pastoral payoff of helping God’s people see Scripture from a higher vantage point. I also give a teaser about the session I’ll be doing at this year’s CoRE Conference on the use of notes in preaching as an aid to sharpen our delivery.

Key Questions We Explore in the Podcast

Here are some of the questions we wrestle with during the interview:

• What if preaching a book too slowly actually obscures the author’s intent?
• How does preaching only at ground level shape (or misshape) a congregation’s sense of the whole Bible?
• What vantage points are your people never getting if you never step back and look at the book as a whole?
• How might preaching the same book multiple times over several years (each time from a different angle) actually relieve pressure rather than add to it?

These aren’t merely methodological questions. They’re pastoral ones.

Takeaways for Preachers

Here are a few key takeaways from the conversation:

• High-altitude preaching helps congregations know where they are before they zoom in.
• Faithful exposition isn’t confined to paragraphs; it can occur at the level of themes, structure, and canonical function.
• Selectivity isn’t a weakness. It’s a necessity when preaching whole books.
• High-altitude spiral preaching assumes you’re thinking in terms of years, not just weeks.
• Ground-level exposition remains essential; high-altitude preaching enriches it.

If the article sparked your interest, I think you’ll find the podcast conversation clarifying, realistic, and pastorally grounded. It gave me the chance to explain not only what high-altitude spiral preaching is, but why I believe it can serve the long-term health of the church.

You can listen to the episode here:

My hope is that this conversation encourages you, not necessarily to change everything you’re doing, but to lift your eyes occasionally, help your people see the landscape, and then lead them back down into the text with greater clarity and confidence.

As always I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about these things in your own preaching ministry.

That question led to my recent article, “High-Altitude Spiral Preaching: A Philosophy and Methodology for Preaching from a Whole Book of the Bible in One Sermon as Part of a Long-Range Plan.” In it I explore a way of preaching that periodically ascends to a higher altitude, allowing preachers to cover an entire book in a single sermon while still remaining tethered to careful exposition.

Rather than replacing verse-by-verse preaching, this approach is designed to complement it. Think of it as flying a spiral pattern over a book of the Bible, occasionally rising to a broader view so that your audience can see

• The book’s main structure and flow
• Its central theological themes
• How individual passages fit into the larger whole

My aim in the article is both philosophical and practical. I lay out the rationale for this kind of preaching and then walk through a proposed methodology for planning and delivering these high-altitude messages as part of a larger, long-term preaching plan.

If you’re reading this you probably care deeply about preaching and pastoring. You wrestle with questions like

• How can I help people see the forest without losing the trees?
• How can I plan my preaching more intentionally over the long haul?
• How do I keep a congregation engaged when working through longer or more complex books?

If those questions resonate with you, I think you may find this article helpful, or at least worth interacting with.

If you do read it, I’d love to hear from you. 

You can read the full article here:

High-Altitude Spiral Preaching: A Philosophy and Methodology for Preaching from a Whole Book of the Bible in One Sermon as Part of a Long-Range Plan

If you have a few minutes to engage with it, thank you. I hope it encourages you in your own preaching and teaching, and ultimately serves the people you’re seeking to shepherd.

Consider the following except from Jonathan Leeman and Matt Chandler’s book Reverberation: How God’s Word Brings Light, Freedom, and Action to His People.

A group of American Christians in the nineteenth century planned to visit London for a week. Their friends, excited for the opportunity, encouraged them to go hear two of London’s famous preachers and bring back a report.

On Sunday morning after their arrival, the Americans attended Joseph Parker’s church. They discovered that his reputation for eloquent oratory was well deserved. One exclaimed after the service, “I do declare, it must be said, for there is no doubt, that Joseph Parker is the greatest preacher that ever there was!”

The group wanted to return in the evening to hear Parker again, but they remembered that their friends would ask them about another preacher named Charles Spurgeon.

So on Sunday evening they attended the Metropolitan Tabernacle, where Spurgeon was preaching. The group was not prepared for what they heard, and as they departed, one of them spoke up, “I do declare, it must be said, for there is no doubt, that Jesus Christ is the greatest Savior that ever there was!”

I recently heard this story from Richard Phillips. He heard it from his seminary professor. Whether it actually happened or is a piece of folklore that has grown up around Spurgeon, known as “the Prince of Preachers,” I’m not sure. What is sure, however, is that this is the response Christian preachers want to produce in their congregations–a reveling in Jesus Christ. And this is the response, I hope, that Christians want to have Sunday after Sunday.

Christian preaching, if it’s about anything, is about announcing the amazingly good news of Jesus Christ. (emphasis mine)

So, preachers, make it your greatest ambition to impress your listeners with the person and work of Jesus Christ. Pray to that end. Prepare and craft your sermon to that end. And preach the Word in the power of the Holy Spirit to that end.