How to Preach a Narrative Sermon: Eugene Lowry's Plot Loop

A Narrative Preaching Option

Narrative preaching can be done in many ways. Eugene Lowry's textbook 'The Homiletical Plot' has become a classic way to preach a narrative sermon . Seminaries and colleges alike assign this preaching textbook as a primer for narrative preaching. I know one mega-church pastor who re-reads this book every year. Here is a how to article based on Lowry's preaching classic that makes his concepts of narrative preaching easier to grasp and apply.

Difficulty:

Challenging

Instructions

1. REALIZE IT ISN'T ABOUT PREACHING STORIES.

   Narrative preaching is not the stringing together of stories, or the expansion of one story into twenty minutes. It requires STRUCTURING the sermon on a PLOT line. This book gives you the plot structure. Think of it this way: instead of building a sermon on points, you are building a sermon on conflict/tension.

2. GET COMFORTABLE WITH PREACHING TENSION IN A SERMON.

   In Lowry's mind every good sermon has some level of ambiguity. Something is 'up in the air' and that needs a solution or resolution. This tension is the key to narrative. All narrative has some level of tension or conflict that needs resolved. If you want to preach a Lowry loop the tension has to stay until almost the very end.

3. FIND THE TENSION IN THE PASSAGE YOU ARE PREACHING.

   Decide whether the passage you are preaching provides an 'itch' or a 'scratch'. Does the passage itself upset the reader, or resolve things for the reader, or both. Ask how the gospel undoes the problem, or turns the 'itch' upside down, or complicates things that used to seem simple.

4. IMAGINE WHAT HOLDS THE CONGREGATION BACK

   This point is key. Once you have the tension or problem (why does James say Elijah was an ordinary person? Why don't we have a prayer life like Elijah if we are indeed 'just like him'), you then need to press the gospel against it to discover a new way. Most people have too many obstacles to change because a preacher provides another 'should' or 'ought-to.' Ask how the gospel enables new possibilities that weren't there before. This is a word of grace and release not burden and guilt. This is the most difficult and more important step.

   Along the way you will imagine false solutions. Those are not irrelevant, but helpful preaching material to bring the congregation along with you in the process.

5. STRUCTURE THE SERMON BASED ON PLOT.

   Here is the basic plot structure Lowry outlines:
   - Upset things (the equilibrium)
   - Complicate the tension (discrepancy) through analysis
   - Give a clue to resolution (the gospel)
   - Unfold the implications of the gospel

   Many point-based preachers have been helped by thinking of it this way: Introduction (upset things), Give a few possible but false solutions (complicate the tension), Describe your main idea (clue to resolution, gospel), explore the new possibility in real life situations (unfold the implications).

Tips & Warnings

• The key is to diagnose the real tension inherent in the passage and people's experience of it.

• Bring the tension of your study with the passage into the pulpit as you preach. Help listeners wrestle with the passage.

• Buy the book and read it through. It is worth the read. This brief summary can't address all of the nuances the book provides.

• Don't use this pattern for preaching every Sunday or it too will become boring.

• Don't turn preaching into a problem-solution moment where God always solves our problems. Once you have the problem, ask how God might completely reframe the problem, or 'swallow up our questions with a bigger question' as Barth put it. Sometimes we are asking the wrong question after all.

Resources

• Homiletical Plot Book
• Preaching from the Soul, by Ellsworth Kalas
• Saturday Morning Post: All Things Interesting
• As One Without Authority, by Fred Craddock