Customer Reviews

Discovering a Sermon: Personal Pastoral Preaching

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This is not your typical preaching text. That much is obvious when Robert Dykstra spends half of the first chapter drawing on the work of child psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. You're probably wondering "child psychology and preaching?!?!" I was surprised too.

The central theme of the book is, in Dykstra's words, "Interest in sermons is generated...less from any exaggerated rhetorical attempt on the part of the preacher to be amusing, provocative, or for that matter, even interesting, than from a much more private and preverbal or even infantile encounter with a biblical text in an environment that minimizes pressures for social and doctrinaire compliance." Thus, Dykstra believes that preachers should approach a text with the same freedom that a child approaches a newly found object.

Though his expository prose is sometimes cumbersome, the example sermons Dykstra includes are filled with life. It did take me a few tries to get into the book rather than leaving it languishing on the shelf. In the end, it was well worth the effort. This book has given me some new angles from which to approach preaching.

Topical sermons are the norm in my religious tradition rather than sermons based on lectionary texts. Dykstra has prompted me to consider how I might recover the freshness that can be found by confronting an assigned rather than selected text. That a book can make me reconsider my own preaching style is high praise indeed.

I don't think this would be a good first book on preaching. However, if you are looking to reexamine and revitalize your preaching, Discovering a Sermon is a good book to read.

This book was a required reading for my "Preaching and Spiriutality" class. It was not an easy read for me in the beginning. But the content and insights of this book is revealatory. The author's "four steps" in discovering a sermon is most helpful.