Proclaimer Blog
Full text or notes?
What should I have in front of me when I preach? This issue came up a few times at the NWA seminars. There’s no right or wrong of course. But I think it’s important to be aware of some of the practical consequences of always opting for either notes or full-text.
When I have just notes, the danger is:
- I will waffle
- I will not express it as well out loud in the sermon as I did in my head when preparing
- my ad libs will be same-y and repetitive (what comes first into my mind when this topic comes up).
When I have a full text, the danger is:
- I won’t step aside from the lectern at key moments of application in order to address people even more directly
- People will know I’m reading, if I haven’t been shown how to preach from a full text properly
- I will deliver a piece of written communication, rather than oral communication.
On that last point, I have a particular dislike of the phrase ‘writing my sermon’ (as Cornhill students will soon be discovering). My problem is with the word ‘writing’. If what I’m doing this morning is ‘writing’ my sermon, then it could well be a piece of writing that I produce: elegant sentences each with a few sub-clauses, rather than short punchy single-clause ones; no earthy language: long Latinate words instead of short Anglo-Saxon ones; reaching for my thesaurus to express the same thing with stylistically different words, instead of hammering a memorable point home by repetition. Many faithful sermons could be made all the more effective just by being translated from writing-ese to natural speech.
For what it’s worth, I think I go stale if I preach from either a full text or notes consistently for too long, so I try to mix it up. It might be different for you. But whichever, it’s good to think of a full-text not as something I’ve written, but as my word-for-word cues for the powerful piece of spoken communication I want to deliver. And you don’t write that, you just note it down.