Customer Reviews

The Homiletical Plot, Expanded Edition: The Sermon as Narrative Art Form

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This book is for anyone who is serious about preaching; even if you have been preaching for a while! For the new preacher, Lowry explains how to make your sermons interesting, Biblical, relevent, specific and memorable! For the seasoned preacher he illuminates several ideas that you may already be aware of subconciously by using in depth analysis of the five parts of "the sermon as preached" and by giving excelent examples and analogies. Even if you do not adopt his specific format this book enables you to make your style more effective and crisper. This book should be in every preacher's library!

Lowry challenges the usual preaching style (tell them what you're going to say, say it, then tell them what you've said). He says no good storyteller gives away the climax of a story like that. Rather, sermons should be stories with: plot, tension, climax, etc. The book was easy to read, and his advice for sermon preparation has been very instructive. Experientially, the times I have used this approach, I have gotten many favorable comments on the sermons.

Lowry's book is the best I have read on narrative preaching. He is easy to read and his suggested homiletical plot is remarkably simple and yeteasy to apply to all kinds of texts, regardless of their genre. A narrative sermon - as Lowry has made clear - does not have to be preached from a narrative passage of Scripture. Another excellent point he makes (which needs to be heard by today's preachers) is that the sermon ought NOT be constructed like an essay, which is pieced together one point upon another. No, a sermon is an event which HAPPENS. Therefore the congregation needs to hear and experience the sermon in such a way that it transforms their thinking because they have had an experience which leads them to greater faith in Christ. In teaching homiletics courses in the future, I will certainly make use of this book as a required text!

Eugene Lowry says that each sermon ought to begin with the human predicament, then it should be diagnosed, then the sermonic idea should come as it intersects with the gospel answer. Lowry believes that the sermon will best hold the attention of the hearer if you proceed inductively and do not resolve the tension until the Weee!!! and the Yeah!!!! stages.

He compares the sermon to a Columbo episode where you know who dunnit, but you are wondering how in the world Columbo is going to figure it out. In the same way, we know that the gospel is the answer to man's problems, but we don't know exactly how and in what way it is the answer to a particular problem.

He also discusses how the movie High Noon holds the viewer in tension until the end, and he wants preachers to follow suit. Giving away your proposition at the start of a sermon is like giving away the punchline of a joke before you tell the joke!

Lowry takes us through the five stages of the Homiletical plot and makes a compelling case why we ought to make our sermons compelling. He is realistic, he knows that preachers cannot weave a thriller every Sunday, but he does give us the way in which we can plot out the sermon in a way which will it will intersect with the lives of our listeners.

I agree that this is a valuable way to preach, and looking back on my old sermons, I have been inductive and have begun with the issues in people's lives about 95% of the time.

Yet it should also be stated that there are times and places and passages where the deductive method can be effective. Perhaps you can begin with the sermonic idea and then make it your goal to explain how this idea can be applied to our lives. I can certainly see parts of James and 1 John being preached deductively.

But this is a very helpful primer on preaching as a narrative art form. Recommended.

Story telling is an art and preachers thouroughout history have tried to use this for effectiveness in preaching. Eugene Lowry presents different methods of story telling and the one he describes in section two of the book is an excellent and delightful way of achieving this end. This artistically presented work would enlighten any reader interested in preaching and would inform and instruct even the seasoned preacher of our day.

It has been a guidebook for my own preaching and study of the art of preaching.

Xavier Thelakkatt

Story telling is an art and preachers thouroughout history have tried to use this for effectiveness in preaching. Eugene Lowry presents different methods of story telling and the one he describes in section two of the book is an excellent and delightful way of achieving this end. This artistically presented work would enlighten any reader interested in preaching and would inform and instruct even the seasoned preacher of our day.

It has been a guidebook for my own preaching and study of the art of preaching.

Xavier Thelakkatt

The propositional, three point sermon. That's what I learned in seminary. I was good at it, but I soon got bored. I started checking into other forms. Thus I read the Robinsons' "It's All In How You Tell It", which explains first person preaching. My Biblical characters visiting our church were great successes.

Then I found this little gem and I was able to develop into narrative preaching. I have no plans to go back to the three point sermon. As soon as the narrative starts, people hear and pay attention. My last endeavor was so succesful, people approached me afterwards thanking me for the form and the content that touched and moved them (they even applaud, don't ask me why though).

If I have one complaint, it's this. As a total neophyte, with no idea what narrative preaching looked like, I would have liked to see a few samples in the book. The Robinsons included about seven sample sermons in theirs, so I was expecting the same. But then again, this book is much older.

Still a great book that I credit for putting me on a completely new path. I thoroughly enjoy preparing and preaching these sermons (much more than the traditional ones) and people respond more eagerly to them too.

This book tells how you can make people listen as long as you speak, rather than that they finish listening before you stop speaking.
And it does so in an interesting way, so the author knows his case.
Time reading this book is well spent if you ever speak in public.

For me this was an excellent and timely book. Suggested by another pastor I highly regard, I have been looking for ways to challenge myself and grow in my preaching abilities. This book did just that. The author does away with the more traditional "three points and a prayer" exposition and introduces the reader to the idea of taking your audience on a ride. He wants you to think of the sermon as a type of mini-drama, where a tension is introduced, different efforts at relieving that tension are explored before it is truly relieved (through the Gospel), and then the follow-up of how we are to live now that this tension is gone. It is a story-telling model that is modeled after the story-tellers in Scripture and is appropriate for modern audiences.

Overall the book is well-written and easy to read. It is not a "revolutionary new technique" that will bring revival to your camp. But it does bring a few "Aha!" moments that you should be able to apply to your own sermon prep and delivery and get out of the same ol', same ol' rut.

Eugene L. Lowry. The Homiletical Plot Expanded Edition The Sermon as Narrative Art Form. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.
This book is a reissue of the Homiletical Plot published in 1980 and the author and editors have presented the text without change except to add clarification in an afterward. The goal of his book is to transform "our intuitions into articulate form"(xix). Lowry says, "Our task [in preaching] is to tell it, to form it, to fashion it -- not to "organize" it".(xx) He suggests utilizing the plot form as a way of encouraging preachers to develop their sermons using a play or a novel as their primary form rather than using logically developed pasted together construction.
Fred Craddock's words are telling when he says, "Let someone give valuable and needed attention to form and style, and soon comes the charge that substance and content are to the writer inconsequential. Let a book on any subject reveal literary artistry on the part of the author, and immediately its scholarship is questioned. "(xiii) Craddock's evaluation explicates an academic bind which is detrimental to homiletic development. My sense is that Lowry is encouraging us not to get caught up in this academic debate but rather to utilize whatever creative tools are helpful to communicate. His method allows preachers to follow their initial intuitions so they can take an idea that they experience to be alive and present it to others who can in turn hear it with excitement and anticipation the way the preacher did early in the week. Preachers who want their preaching to be relevant, comprehensible, and inspiring will discover that Lowry's Homiletical Plot form offers a creative and intelligent tool for sermon development. In addition, when preachers choose to use their intelligence creatively, they encourage and model for the hearer how to do likewise.
Lowry's model suggests that sermon development is best understood as a process of pruning rather than a block-by-block construction.(9) The pruning process he describes is reminiscent of a watercolorist who has to take care not to pull too many colors out of the palate, creating a murky convoluted canvas. In the preliminary stages, many colors and textures might be tested but in the final painting, the artistic way will lead the painter to take an idea and focus it by minimally indicating shadow and leaving open space for light. Likewise, the pruning process allows the preacher to nimbly negotiate through deep exegetical waters, which can overwhelm the sermon.
Furthermore, Lowry suggests a sermon plot "has as its key ingredient a sensed discrepancy, a homiletical bind... An issue not resolved."(12) Likewise, in a good painting, there is a similar tension between light and dark that draws in the viewer. Once the attention is focused, multiple discoveries and different levels of meaning reveal themselves. This is reminiscent of Lowry's concept of the plot moving toward resolution. However, that movement is not always in a forward direction. Lowry says, "The novelist may begin a novel with the final resolution and fill in the plot backwards".(20) Any art form including a sermon is open to this kind of creative direction.
As a sermon is developed using these movements its final form will reflect these experiments, either in full or by implication, and as a result, multiple layers of meaning will emerge. Freed from logical steps subplots develop, challenging choices emerge between the good and the better, complicated motives and the important "aha" moment occurs. In this way listeners will not only hear a sermon, but will both experience a text and be given a model for critical thinking to help them live out the gospel. In addition, this method encourages the preacher to plan the placement of the good news so that the preacher is assured to include the good news in their message. The inclusion of the good news in the sermon may sound obvious but recently both Paul Scott Wilson and Eugene Lowry have bemoaned the lack of "Good News" in contemporary preaching. The narrative preaching model is one way to assure that neither an ethical response nor grace is left out of the sermon.
In his afterword, Eugene Lowry addresses some of the critiques he has received for his Homiletical Plot method. As Fred B. Craddock wisely said in his forward "One cannot say everything in one volume; to attempt it is to dull the edge of all that is being said. To say everything is to say nothing. One writes of one thing with such conviction that the impression is given that this one subject rises above all others."(xiv) As human beings who would like answers for every question, the Homiletical Plot could have been an easy answer. In this updated version Lowry does not let us off that easily by clarifying that "the good news of the gospel... is not reducible to answering people's every felt need; the good news of the gospel involves a transformation of human experience."(127) Lowry's outline of some alternative plot formations was also very helpful.
The one area of this book that seemed to be deficient was the lack of sample sermons. Though there are samples in each chapter to explain the plot line, this addition would help the preacher to gain a clearer understanding of the transitions, the varieties of forms and enable a comparison of the working form to the final form. However, this exclusion in no way diminishes the fact that this book has made an impact on many preachers and is still relevant today. This slim book is jam packed with practical advice and encouragement for the preacher and the student alike. Having used this method in a traditional pulpit in a downtown mainline church, a contemporary rural congregation and as a guide for dialogue preaching in an emergent-missional community I have experienced how this book helps the preacher assist people to begin to grasp the spiritual and biblical relevance, understanding, and inspiration for which they yearn.