It’s Friday morning and the sweet lady who does the church bulletins is hounding you for a sermon title. You’re still laboring over the text and not quite sure what shape the sermon will take. You’ll have something by that evening surely but you aren’t getting a decent sermon title before noon and so you just look at the text and make something up.
I’ve been there. Done it several times and then whenever you go to actually preach the sermon you look like a silly person because the content of your sermon doesn’t seem to match the title.
As I read the sermon “Accusers Challenged” by John Newton I couldn’t help but think that Newton’s secretary was hounding him for a title a bit before he was ready. The sermon seems to have nothing to do with the title. There isn’t much discussion of an accuser and there isn’t much display of how these accusations are challenged by the blood of Jesus.
Newton didn’t print bulletins and so I’m not really too sure why the title doesn’t fit the sermon. The sermon was good but the dissonance between the title and the sermon has left me unsettled. Because of this I want to use this experience to learn from Newton—this time in what not to do.
So let’s imagine that it is Friday morning and you don’t know your sermon title. What do you do? Do you just make something up that seems to fit the text or do you just leave it blank? (If there is a third option I’d love to hear it).
It’s possible that if you choose the just-make-something-up option you’ll get lucky and the sermon will fit your shot in the dark title. But there are a couple dangers of doing this. First, you can try to make the sermon fit the title you’ve got in the bulletin rather than the text. Secondly, you’ll end up being faithful to the text but your faithful bulletin readers will be distracted the whole sermon trying to figure out when you are going to get around to those “accusers” and how they are “challenged”.
That second one is what happened to me as I read through Newton’s sermon. I had a difficult time following his argumentation because I wasn’t sure how it fit in with the title. When we give confusing titles our people are going to have a difficult time discerning our main point.
So, I’m not a big fan of just throwing something together. If it’s Friday and I’m pressed I’ll just leave it blank and put the text up there. Or if the sermon does end up not fitting the sermon I’ll tell people early that they should change the title (but this isn’t ideal because you are wasting precious sermon time).
What I’ve tried to do when I’m preaching is get the sermon title in my mind early. I want to study the text and get the main idea and try to put together some sort of a title early on. I can change it as I interact with the text—but if I can work on the main idea early in the week then I’ll be able to give a better title if pressed on Friday morning.
Of course Newton never had to worry about this. But we do. What do you do when you’ve got to print the bulletins but you don’t have your sermon title yet?
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Photo source: here
Oh, I love this. Thank you for the humor and the insight into life in the pastor’s study!
If I was in a pinch, I would just give her the passage reference or common pericope name if it had one – anything that could complete the sentence, “Oh! He’s preaching on…”