The Peoples’ Sermon

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Proclaiming the Word through a sermon is meant to be a shared effort, rather than a solo performance, claims Shauna Hannan. Yet our actual practice may be far from this ideal, as we perceive this will take more time, while Sundays keep coming, and the people in the pews might have become conditioned to listen quietly to the “expert.”  

Time restraints are real, but preachers can still commit to not crafting a sermon in isolation, and instead involve other people in the process. On the podcast episode introducing Hannan’s book The Peoples’ Sermon: Preaching as a Ministry of the Whole Congregation, she introduces multiple practices to integrate before, during, or after the preaching moment, to make the sermon a dialogue more than a monologue. 

But first, there’s the reason why: primarily because making the sermon a communal effort, finding meaning in the Scripture together, gives the Holy Spirit more room to work. When the non-preachers engage the text ahead of the day it is preached, they listen differently. When listeners to sermons hear their peers engaging Scripture, they realize they can do it too. It is less about finding the meaning of a text and more about what is striking you, in this moment, in your context. That could be the Holy Spirit speaking. 

Before: Is there a weekly Bible study in the congregation that draws out participants’ wisdom of how the next Sunday’s text intersects with their lives? 

In such a Bible study, we can integrate some of the exegetical exercises a preacher may do, but do them together: read different translations; write down what the experience of one of the characters in the story must be like; imagine how you would hear this if you were living in a certain circumstance… What do you wonder about? What do you notice? 

Bring the text with you where you go—for example, to a hospital visit. 

Check in with different people about how certain illustrations you might use would land for them. If a member of the congregation shares an illustration with you, invite them to tell it during the sermon too. 

Ask a musician to reflect on the text. Or an artist. Have people draw responses to it. 

Challenge the congregation to snap a photo during the week and send it to you of a place where they noticed the text connecting with their life. Have those photos scrolling as people enter church. 

During: Learning through actions (kinesthetic learning) can be an effective way to bring Scripture alive and imprint memories for a long time for listeners. Ask people to strike a pose of one of the characters in the Scripture story. Pass the mic to hear people’s input. Invite a call-and-response with a certain phrase. 

After: Normalize asking for feedback that continues the conversation: 

  • What did you hear today? 
  • Who is God, according to our text? 
  • Who are you going to talk about these insights with this week?

A drawback to making the sermon more communally shaped is that the preacher does have to give up procrastinating on choosing which text to preach on, in order to gain input ahead of time. Another is that you may not get to address your favorite angles on a particular text. 

Shauna gives examples of biblical preachers who can inspire our own proclamation, in her book and on the podcast episode, including Jesus reading from the scroll in Luke 4 and living into the prophecy, and multiple women in Scripture who witness, then dare to tell others about their experiences with Jesus.  

Near the end of each Working Preacher Books podcast, the hosts ask guests what the hardest sermon was they ever preached. Shauna describes preaching for the funeral for her first grandparent to pass away, and thereby illustrates what we often do with funeral sermons … centering a characteristic of the deceased and how it relates to God’s promises. 

But what if all of our sermons did that exegesis of the listeners?  

For more on this volume in the Working Preacher Books series, The Peoples’ Sermon: Preaching as a Ministry of the Whole Congregation, listen to a podcast episode or watch it on YouTube, in which Shauna Hannan discusses the book with Rolf Jacobson and Karoline Lewis.