I’m a preacher’s kid who grew up to be a preacher herself, and the experience of being a PK taught me a valuable lesson about using family anecdotes in preaching: don’t!

It was sometime in January, and I was somewhere around the awkward age of ten—neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring; and my preacher papa, at a loss to connect with this mysterious prepubescent daughter of his, bought me a BB gun for Christmas. I tried, I really did try, to like it, especially because he did so much. But I couldn’t, and we both tacitly and gratefully let the matter drop.

Except that he then decided to open a sermon with it. It was told entirely at his own expense (though he did manage to mention that “Sarah snuck off to play with her dolls,” which, though true, is a little mortifying to hear broadcast publicly when one is a mature ten years old): how he got something that he would like and got so caught up in it that he didn’t even notice that I didn’t like it. But that, to me, was the most awful part—he was announcing to the world his failure as a father; and if only I could have done more to like his kindly-meant gift, this family scandal would never have been aired to all and sundry. I don’t think my dad could have anticipated this reaction—which is all the more reason for preachers to avoid preaching about their families and friends.

I think, though, that this social awkwardness is but a specimen of the larger problem in this style of preaching. Somewhere in the past five years I began to realize that there is a kind of implicit style in much Lutheran preaching, a two-movement kind of approach. Part One is a philosophical discourse about some concept or thing. A preacher might, for instance, discuss “heroes,” or “messages,” or “the experience of getting lost.” This is apparently the appeal to common experience, that baseline we all must share, the mental train we all must board to get where the preacher wants us to go. Once we have all climbed on, then the preacher can cart us off to Bibleland for Part Two, powered by an analogy. “We all have heroes, but Jesus is more than a hero.” “The gospel is the best message we ever have heard.” “We all know the relief of being found—and this is how we feel when God finds us.”

I contend that this is a lousy approach to preaching. For one thing, the whole scriptural part will fail if the listener can’t relate to the philosophical discussion. For another, the transition functions as a signal to shut your ears off: oh, that was an interesting bit about how whales communicate, but now here comes the Bible stuff I’ve heard a zillion times before. Parishioners have a remarkable ability to remember the anecdote and not a thing about the theological conclusion drawn from it (I could certainly cite you plenty!). Perhaps worst of all, everything about the biblical world is filtered through a secondary layer of experience. There is no direct, immediate claim of the Scriptures’ words on the hearts and minds of the people, reinforcing the notion that it is so alien that we have to somehow work ourselves up to a point where the gospel can get to us at all. Such a preaching method doesn’t reflect Lutheran theological convictions at all. We believe that the Word comes down and claims us, confronts us, in person. Preaching doesn’t need to be a buffer zone between us and the Word.