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Few books, if any, have had more "staying power" in preaching over the past
century and a half than John Broadus' 550-page volume called A Treatise on the
Preparation and Delivery of Sermons. It was first published in 1870. Between 1870
and 1899, it went through 37 printings; and it was in print, under various editors,
throughout the Twentieth Century. It still is.

Much of what it says is, as would be expected, dated, which is why one usually
finds it being read mostly in evangelical seminaries and circles, those places where
changes in the nature of sermon preparation have been downplayed. It is very
unusual for a student in a mainline seminary today to have heard of John Broadus.

But Broadus knew his stuff. And one of the things that Broadus knew well was that
HOW a sermon is delivered is every bit as important to its effectiveness as WHAT a
sermon says. Probably more so. That is an insight that has been lost in preaching
education in today's mainline seminaries. Moreover, one can say unequivocally that
there is still--to this day--NO BETTER GUIDE to sermon delivery than the 100
plus pages on sermon delivery in John Broadus' book.

Broadus discusses at length three different ways of delivering a sermon. With each
one, he meticulously-and fully-considers the "advantages" and "disadvantages" of
each one. It is good inductive scholarship.

The first one he considers is the reading of a fully-written-out sermon manuscript.
He lists its major advantages as (1) greatly assisting the preacher's work of
preparation "by rendering it easier to fix the mind upon the subject," (2) as
compelling the preacher toward "greater completeness of preparation" (his
emphasis); (3) as securing "in several respects, greater excellence of style;" and (4)
as placing the preacher more at ease, "both before and during the delivery." This
ease, Broadus says, comes from the preacher knowing that he or she will be
"preserved, and knows that [he or she] will be, from any utter or mortifying
failure."

On the negative side of reading a manuscript in the pulpit, Broadus says that this
method of delivery is never the same as what he calls "public speaking." Reading is
reading, he says, a skill unto itself, and NOT public address. And if the sermon, in
the end, is to rise to its highest level, it needs to be public address, and not reading.
He then summed up his discussion of the read sermon like this:

As to delivery itself, reading is of necessity less effective, and, in most cases,
immensely less effective, for all the great purposes of oratory, than speaking.
Greater coldness of manner is almost inevitable. If one attempts to be very
animated or pathetic, it will look unnatural. The tones of voice are monotonous, or
have a forced variety. The gestures are almost always unnatural, because it is not
natural to gesticulate much in reading; and they scarcely ever raise us higher than
to feel that really this man [or woman] reads almost like speaking.

Broadus next discussed, briefly, the second mode of delivery, which is the
memorization of a scripted sermon. This he called the "recitation" of the sermon,
something that appears to have been fairly common in the latter part of the
Nineteenth Century. The bottom line, for him then and for us now, is that this
simply takes too much time and effort to do it on anything resembling a weekly
schedule. So this is not really an option for anyone except the person who preaches
only sporadically.

Broadus' most extensive discussion was reserved for the third method of delivery:
what he called "extemporaneous preaching." By this, he meant preaching either
from notes or without notes; and his view was that if one could preach with notes,
one could, with minimal effort, preach without them.

As he did with the other methods of delivery, he carefully mapped out
disadvantages and advantages. Among the disadvantages of this "free form" of
public address, he said that it promotes a tendency to neglect careful sermon
preparation, to make the preacher sloppy or even lazy in the making of the sermon.
Another disadvantage, he said, is that it places the preacher in danger of "making
blunders in statement," of saying things that are "irrelevant, ill-considered,
improper, and sometimes, alas! even untrue."

Then there is the disadvantage that arises from the fact that "the success of the
extemporaneous sermon is largely dependent upon the preacher's feelings at the
time or delivery, and upon the circumstances." This means, he added, that the
preacher is "liable to decided failure."

The advantages, however, to extemporaneous speaking in the pulpit are so great as
to overwhelm all its disadvantages. When they are all listed, they boil down to this,
in Broadus' words:

As to delivery itself, it is only in extemporaneous speaking, of one variety or
another, that [the sermon] can ever be perfectly natural and achieve the highest
effect. The ideal of speaking, it has been justly said, cannot be reached in any other
way. Only thus will the voice, the action, the eye, be just what nature dictates, and
attain their full power. And while painstaking culture vainly strives to read or recite
precisely like speaking, the extemporaneous speaker may, with comparative ease,
rise to the best delivery of which he [or she] is capable.

There is one other advantage, Broadus said, to extemporaneous speaking. It is, as
he put it, that "with the masses of the people, it is the popular method." He added
that, as a preacher, one should never play to the masses as far as one's message is
concerned. But since the delivery of the sermon is a "mere question of
[expedience]," the popular preference "is an exceedingly important
consideration." There are, Broadus noted, "fastidious people who greatly prefer
reading or recitation" from the pulpit; but they are seldom more than a small
minority. There are even, he said, some congregations that "have been educated
into a toleration of reading, but it is almost an unwilling acquiescence."

Should you happen to find a good second-hand copy of Broadus' book someplace,
buy it. Read it. Few books on preaching today are as comprehensive, or even as
insightful about so many things related to preaching, as this great classic. And to
learn HOW to do what Broadus proposes about sermon delivery, order a copy of
my book, Preaching Without Notes from Abingdon Press.

--Joseph M. Webb