As his new book was about to be released, Dr. Dennis Prutow of the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary sat down with Witness editor Drew Gordon to talk about the book and its goals. So Pastor, What’s Your Point is being published by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (www.alliancenet.org).

There are a lot of books on preaching. Why is there a need for this book?

Great question! I did a search on Amazon and something like 11 thousand books came up on homiletics.

As I’ve talked to pastors and asked them if they were given a specific procedure for preparing sermons in seminary, the answer generally was no. They received some guidelines but not a very specific procedure. So one of my motivations in teaching at the seminary and in writing this book was to put together a pretty specific outline—or a sermon preparation procedure, as I call it.

You say that good preaching today is not enough. What do you mean by that?

There is a lot of good preaching, but there’s a competition for attention. In media you realize that this is the case. Being good is not enough; you have to push the envelope a little bit further than that. That’s one side of it. The other side of it, the principle thing, is: Why would you just want to be good if you can be excellent? I tell the fellows in class, “I’m glad if you’re good, and if you’re good you can take a step forward and become excellent in your preaching.” Excellence in preaching is then going to accomplish the ends in a more effective way. So that’s what I’m after.

You talk about something you call a “bushel basket” approach to preaching. What is this?

The bushel basket approach is something a lot of pastors use. You fill up the bushel basket with a lot of details, maybe some illustrations, maybe some explanation of the text; then you throw it out to the congregation. The idea is that people will reach forward and grab the things that are of interest to them or the things that they think will be helpful to them. I think preaching is much more than that.

What are the problems with that approach?

In many ways it can be helpful because everybody is at a different place in their Christian walk, so they’ll take away from a sermon what is helpful for them. But preaching is application. When you read the sermons in the Bible you find that the preaching is very pointed. Scripture is that way; for example, Psalm 145 uses the idea of an arrow piercing the heart. Paul uses the idea of the Word as the sword of the Spirit. The whole idea is the power of penetration. And where do you get that power of penetration? You get that force, as some of the homiletitians would call it, from unity in a sermon. That means the sermon is developed around one main point. There are ancillary ideas but a sermon would be developed around one main point. And that’s where the force and the power and the penetrating power really come from.

What we’re interested in is what people take away from the sermon. The bushel basket approach assumes that people will take away what they need from the sermon. But there is another factor which enters in. As individuals sit in the pew, they’re going to try to put together the pieces of the sermon to synthesize what’s happening in the sermon, so they can put it in a point that they can walk away with.

Dr. Calvin Troup, in teaching communications, talks about the ring around the bathtub. It’s what’s left after you drain all the water out. That’s the residual message; it’s what people go away with from the sermon. You want your residual message to correspond to the point that you’re making. If the residual message that people go away from the sermon with is this the point you’re making then you’ve accomplished a wonderful purpose. And if people from every sermon go away with one point that they can think about and chew on and pray about during the week, then you have accomplished your purpose.

You say that preaching is application. I can hear someone saying, “Well, preaching is exposition; application is what comes after.” Is there a difference?

Yes. Exposition is simply laying out the facts. A newspaper report would be an exposition. The reporter lays out the facts of an automobile accident: It happened at a certain time and place and there were certain vehicles involved, etc. And exposition as far as the Bible is concerned would be simply laying out the facts about the text, the background, some exegetical ideas, meanings of words, etc. Exposition is normally what a commentary does.

Expository preaching would differ from simple exposition in that expository preaching would include exposition but always have application in mind. If you read Calvin, for example, he takes a text, talks about it a little and then—boom—he’s into applying what the text is about. In his sermons the pattern basically is: go back to the text, expose the meaning of the text, apply it, and mix in some illustrative material. Go back to the text, explain a little bit about the text, labor in application.

Calvin was really heavy on application—heavy enough that when you read some of his sermons you wonder if he is straying from the text. But he always has a text in mind, he goes back there and what happens in many sermons today is that we’ll labor on the exposition aspect of the sermon, then we’ll look at the clock and say, “Well, we’ve got a couple of minutes left; let’s see how we can apply the text. We’ve spent 25 minutes on explaining the text—on the exposition—but pitifully little time on the application. What the people in the pew are asking, and I don’t think it’s a selfish question, is “What’s in it for me?” What they’re saying is, “How can I apply this teaching to my personal life?”

I can also hear someone saying, “Yes but, when you as a preacher exposit the words of God you’re covering the inspired Word of God. When you get into application, you’re getting into your own opinion. How would you respond to that?

Let me go back to the procedure I would use. The basic principle of biblical interpretation would be that each text has one main point. There’s not a hidden underlying point, there’s not some sort of spiritual idea underneath the text. The words are plain, and every text has one main point. Part of the task of the pastor is to determine the point of the text. As I say to my students, when you determine the point of the text—which we call the exegetical point—after you do your exegesis, you get that exegetical point and you have a clear statement of the meaning of the text. You’re putting, say, a larger portion of Scripture in one sentence. And this is the meaning of the text. If you’ve done your job well, if you’ve done your exegesis properly, this statement is a statement of the truth of God.

Now what you have is a truth that has ramifications. There are clear implications to understanding this truth. What are these implications? What are these ramifications? Well, they’re applications, really. This is what it comes down to. What does this text mean? What is the significance of this text in our contemporary life? This is the nagging question of the people in the congregation. What is the significance now of this truth as you’ve given it to me? There’s your application.The significance of it turns out then to be the application, or it’s leading you into the application. You have to ask them, What are the implications of the text to contemporary culture, to marriage, to the family, to the church, and these kinds of things? So, application comes out of a proper understanding of the text and proper exegesis. Whenever you or I read the Bible, what are we asking? What is the significance for me? You’re asking, then, “What is the application?”

Your book is set up in a unique way to help preachers apply your point. You don’t spend the whole book talking about how we need excellent preaching, but you actually help them apply that. Tell me about that.

Well, this gets at the heart of what I call my sermon preparation procedure. I want to lead the students or the readers through a specific procedure to develop a sermon that they can preach. In the first section of the book I talk about worship and my definition for preaching. Since worship is the context in which most preaching is done—the corporate worship of God’s people in the church—I felt this was the place to start. I give a basic definition of preaching [see page 9 of this issue]. And then I go through my sermon preparation procedure in some detail.

In that section of the book I zero in on preaching from Epistles, where it seems easiest to start. I talk about how to develop the point of the text, how to develop a sermon point, how to put together an outline, what the details of the outline are, the explanation of the text, the illustrative material, applications (I think application needs to take place throughout the sermon) how to put together a conclusion, and how to put together an introduction. You put the conclusion together before you put the introduction together because, once you’ve gone through the whole process, now you know how to introduce the topic. Then, having gone through the basic procedure, I want to show how the same procedure is applied to Hebrew poetry. So I take a look at the Psalms, applying this procedure to the Psalms, because you can’t treat Psalms like you do Paul’s Epistles. It’s an entirely different kind of literature. The better way to approach the Psalms is in large portions. When you’re preaching the Epistles you may take a verse or two. To get the idea of a psalm you need to take the whole psalm if you can. So then I go through Psalms and take a look at the prophets because the prophets use poetry. I take a look at Old Testament narratives. Narrative preaching seems to be the most difficult for us, and most pastors have questions on narrative preaching. How do you tackle some of these stories in the Bible? How do you do this without moralizing, that is without saying to the congregation, “Be brave like David and be faithful like Daniel,” etc.? What’s the point of this story and why is it in Scripture? And then I also take a look at apocalyptic literature.

I’d like to take a little time talking about the person sitting in the pew. You’ve had a somewhat unique experience in that you have spent a lot of time preaching but you’ve also spent a lot of time sitting in the pew. Is that lay person sitting in the pew let off the hook if they’re sitting under fair preaching, a fair preacher, not a good preacher, not a great preacher but a fair preacher?

I don’t think the person in the pew is ever let off the hook. Nor is the fellow in the pulpit ever let off the hook. I think the person in the pew will always be striving to gain something from the sermon. When we used to travel with our kids and we’d visit churches, they’d say, “Oh, Dad, why do we have to go here?” I’d say, “Well, this is where we are and this is where we’re going and you listen and you’ll learn something.” I guess this is back to the bushel basket approach. I think that the people in the pew will always be working to learn from the pastor, and as they do so they’ll learn how to listen to the particular pastor. Like it or not, the pastor is involved in teaching the people how to listen. Part of my motivation is to help the person in the pew. I think very often the pastor may criticize the congregation because they don’t understand what’s coming from the pulpit. Maybe the problem is in the pulpit and not in the congregation. The pastor needs to help the people in the congregation because there is a dynamic here. Communication is a two-way process. I teach my fellows to begin to discern what’s happening in the congregation between them and the pulpit.

The person in the pew needs to look for things they can hang their thoughts on in the sermon. This is why I think one main point is helpful. People in the pew need to look for things they can hang their thoughts on and go away with during the week. That is really important. Then they’re going to be thinking about, “Given what I’ve heard, how can I apply the text in the situation I find myself?”

Let’s say you hear a five-point sermon. Does that mean that it doesn’t really have one central point to take away?

It depends on how the pastor prepares the sermon. What happens too often is that the pastor will say, for example: “Today our topic is prayer. We’re going to talk about the power of prayer, the perseverance of prayer,” etc. Let’s say we have three ideas then, which could actually be three separate sermons. What the pastor needs to do is tie those together in a central point. I like the idea of a sequential outline. This is how we normally think and is how we normally converse with each other, in a sequence of thought. One idea leads to another. This occurs in normal conversation over a cup of coffee. If this is the normal pattern of communication, then there can be movement in a sermon or in a teaching. One thought leads to another; what’s happening is that you’re leading the congregation to your objective in the sermon. I think that this is part of our shepherding work, to lead God’s people rather than saying, “Here’s what the Bible teaches, now this is what you need to do.” There’s room for doing that. But when I say, “This morning what Paul is teaching us is about the power and perseverance of prayer,” I want to lead the people through some steps so that when I arrive at the end of the sermon the people say, “Whoa, I get it! If I persevere in prayer, there’s going to be power present and God is going to use that to change my life and to change the lives of others.”

The homiletics people say that movement is required in a sermon. But it turns out that a lot of outlines in sermons are static. They give three points but often there isn’t movement toward a goal. The sequential outline can be quite dynamic.

Could you talk for just a minute on presentation? You say that presentation is a big deal. If you’ve got your content, isn’t that pretty good? Beyond that isn’t it just charisma and is good for the camera but really unnecessary?

No. Presentation really is important. And part of the reason is that there’s a connection between the pulpit and the congregation. And part of this dynamic has to do with body language, with nonverbals, with inflection of voice, with facial expression. You know yourself that if you have something urgent to say to your children and you say it in a very nonchalant way, that information may be undermined in the way that you give it. In the pulpit, if I stand before the people with my hands in my pockets looking out the window and say to them, “The gospel is a life-and-death matter to you,” what are they to take from that statement? By the same token, the people in the congregation are sending messages to the pastor in the pulpit. If the people in the pew are looking at their psalters, shuffling through their purses, looking out the window, then the pastor should take note of that. He’s not communicating with the people in the pew.

Very often what happens is that we have information that we want to give to the congregation and we’ll drone on and not pay attention to the feedback we’re getting from the congregation. You can sense that there is not a vital dynamic between the pastor and those who are in the pew. Constructing your sermon with a sequence and application throughout will help get them back.

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, which is the publisher, is going to market this book far beyond the RPCNA. I know you have a passion for helping preachers within the RPCNA but also well beyond that. In the broader church, what would you say is the cost of settling for mediocre-to-good preaching versus excellent preaching? What’s the cost to the church?

Often in mediocre or good preaching, what we settle for is that the preaching and the teaching and going through the worship service become an end in itself. We do this, then we’re glad we’ve done it. Maybe this is a caricature of where we are, because I think in the end all of us as pastors or elders in the church or people in the pew say, “Well, we’re not going to church as an end in itself.” But often we wind up practicing our church attendance and our teaching as an end in itself. What we’re after is to see lives changed. We want to see God glorified in lives changed. Excellent preaching goes after this—to change the thinking of the congregation and to change the attitudes in the congregation so that lives really are changed and that there is a new and a different outlook, not only on the Bible, not only on church life, but on who God is and what God is up to in the world. That’s what I’m after. This is what excellent preaching is pointing toward.