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Different eras call for different ways of doing things. We all know that, I suspect.
It is certainly true about how sermons are prepared and preached. Or perhaps we
should say that it is certainly true about how sermons are heard and responded to.

My father was a preacher and a teacher of preaching almost all of his adult life.
He died in 1982 at the age of 66. He loved the pulpit and worked incessantly on
the sermons that he delivered to his small rural Illinois congregation every
Sunday. He taught preaching to ministerial students at a religious college during
the week. He also knew homiletical literature well and was a close student of
preaching form and style. Among his favorite preachers, his models, were James
Stewart, G. Campbell Morgan, and F. W. Robertson, all classical preachers of the
past.

When he died, by my count he left behind more than 1,500 fully manuscripted
sermons, the early ones closely typed, the ones from the later years written out in
Palmer longhand on 20 or so sheets of paper. Several boxes of those sermons fell
into my hands. I read them, meticulously and with affection.

What struck me more than anything else in reading them in the mid-1980s was
that they contained no-I want desperately to say "very few-stories. But there were
no stories. Nothing about his family, his life, his experiences-no stories. There
were illustrations scattered here and there, tidbits he had taken from a magazine
or that he had clipped from a newspaper, some statistics on teen violence, or
something like that. But there was nothing that would qualify as a story.

It was not that my father was not a storyteller, or could not tell a good story.
Evenings around our dinner table when I was growing up were storytelling times.
Not only would the day be recreated in story, but both he and my mother would
spin stories about the past, particularly when pressed by two growing boys. Tell us
about Grandpa Morris, I would say. He was my father's father who died when I
was three; a guard at Menard Federal Penitentiary in Marion, the person for whom
I was named-my middle initial M, of which I am proud, stands for Morris. And the
stories would come. Good ones, too. My father loved storytelling, and he had a
million of them.

They just didn't, as far as he was concerned, belong in his sermons-ever.

Nor was that his choice. He knew the homiletical theory of the hundred years or
more than had preceded him. He had read the sermons in the book sets behind
his desk. And he knew--as I subsequently learned--that there were no stories in
those sermon books, either, whether the sermons were expositional, as so many
were, or textual, or topical or even thematic. The common wisdom of the pulpit for
at least the previous century or more--and my father's carefully practiced
wisdom--was that one preached the "word of God" and that storytelling, whatever
else it was, was not the "word of God."

There were Bible stories to tell, of course; and at appropriate times they could be
told. Even then they were to be told sparingly, lest the Bible story itself interfere
with the "gospel" that was to be articulated in as didactic and passionate a way as
possible. Still, the bottom line, not to be crossed, was that stories from the present,
stories of the here and now, however good they were, were not only inappropriate
but would seriously undermine the very purpose of preaching itself. It was what
he taught all of his preaching students, of whom I was one.

Then something happened. During the 1960s the world changed, and
everything--including the church and its preaching--was profoundly affected, if
not thoroughly changed as well. For want of a better way to designate this seismic
shift of that era, we now talk about the jolt from a modern into a postmodern
world.

While this is not the place for an extended discussion of postmodernism, it is
important to indicate a few of the clearly-identifiable shifts that took place.

For one, all forms of "authority" were undermined, whether the authorities were
political, military, educational, corporate, or religious. The old authorities were
trashed; in fact, the very idea of authority was largely undermined. Suspicions of
anyone or anything that would "tell us what to do" were pervasive. Hierarchies of
all sorts were also damaged, as the emphasis shifted away from "recognized
power" to the legitimacy of "grass roots" control of things. From now on, we will
make our own decisions, thank you.

Second, a new sense of the "communal" emerged. People did not want others, no
matter who, to order them around, to "lead" them, or even try to "tell them"
anything. Instead, "sharing" took over. We will need each other, and depend on
each other; but if I need your help, I will ask for it, if you don't mind. Even in
higher education, professors and students were to "interact" with each other, to
"learn" from each other, to "teach" each other, as it were. Students and faculty
were new, if uncomfortable, "partners" in the curriculum.

Third, experience, as vague as that word seemed to be at first, became the
coinage of human interaction. Logic, cognition, didaction, all things cerebral, not
only had to make room for the emotional and the intuitive, but actually had to give
way to them. This new mix, with feeling or emotion now high on the list, was
designated as experience. We all knew what experience was, and we treasured it.
Our experiences were valued. We counted. We all were living and struggling with
life in our own very legitimate ways.

This list of changes could be subdivided and extended at length; but these are
some of the key materials out of which postmodernism has been, and is still being,
forged. The point is that during that 60s decade, now more than forty years ago, a
profoundly different world emerged, one bringing with it new ways of
understanding, living, and being. For those readers who were, shall we say, not
there, the ample literature of that era provides a handy barometer of the shift.

With that new world (for our purposes here) there emerged as well a new and
pervasive art form, and a very democratic art form. Not one that had previously
been unknown; in fact, it is easy to argue that it was the original human art form,
the one that the earliest humans practiced around their campfires eons ago. But it
was an art form that had not existed with any degree of prominence for at least a
couple of hundred years. It was the art form of the story--storytelling.

Ironically, the story emerged quickly as well, since it seemed to fit perfectly the
new postmodern assumptions and outlook. It is a democratic art form because
everyone can and does tell stories. We grow up telling stories. Moreover,
storytelling is a decidedly non-authoritarian form of "discourse," as the scholars
would say. In storytelling, one relates, but does not argue, or lecture, or direct, or
even assert. As a result, a story is not threatening to those who hear it, which is
precisely what the new postmodern person was, and still is, seeking.

In addition, storytelling is, in every way, communal. You tell me a story, and then
I will tell you one. Stories draw people close to each other--it seems to be in the
nature of story itself to do that. More importantly, in storytelling the boundaries
that exist between people, however they were enforced in the past, seem to melt
away. We do participate in each other's lives when we share our experiences.
Stories don't just build bridges; they dry up the rivers that make bridges
necessary.

Stories, too, are about our "experiences." They are not, ultimately, about "ideas,"
or "conclusions," or "thoughts." Stories are about what happened to us and to
those around us today. They capture our emotions, our hurts and joys, our
longings, and how those longings are affected by the situations and machinations
of today's activities. We all know about those "experiences," the ones about which
we tell our stories. And in our stories, every part of us--heart, body, mind, spirit,
soul, impulse--seems to coalesce. If only we had a better word for it than
"experience," but that will have to do for now.

If my father were alive and preaching today, I have no doubt in the world but that
he would be among the best of the storytellers. The world, our culture, in its very
broadest sense did change dramatically over the past few decades. Our preaching
is different now than it was just a generation ago-my father's generation. It has to
be. What we have to do now is become masters, not only of storytelling, but also of
the ways in which stories themselves become crafted into vibrant, exciting new
sermons.

--Joseph M. Webb