LaRue, Cleophus J., ed. Power in the Pulpit: How America's Most Effective Black Preachers Prepare Their Sermons. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. Pp. 191. $22.95.
Cleophus LaRue has pursued an important and critical component of American religion and culture—African American preaching. LaRue is the Francis Landey Patton Associate Professor of Homiletics at Princeton Theological Seminary and before that served as a pastor in Corpus Christi, Texas, a state known for its support of preaching by acknowledging and respecting the power in the pulpit. Power in the Pulpit shows how an array of popular African American preachers prepare their sermons. All of the preachers in this book are trained practitioners of the art and craft of preaching. This book is helpful to anyone who teaches or preaches because methodology is a critical element of the homiletic enterprise. While the preachers in this volume provide an excellent description of how they go about developing their sermons, they also provide the reader with an understanding of several types of sermons: dialectic, expository, narrative, correlational, and so forth.
There are several things I like about the book, beginning with the editor's helpful introduction. It highlights the black church's “unquenchable thirst for the preached word” and the correlation between black preaching and the “black worshiping community.” He suggests that the dialogical nature of black preaching is inherent to the genre. In my view, this “thirst for the word” has its roots in slavery and the “brush harbor” church where slaves felt more kinship to the word if it came from one whose experiences were similar to their own. The slaves' desire to hear a black preacher superseded their desire to hear a sermon from the white plantation preachers because of the shared experiences of racism, injustice, and oppression. The slave preacher could connect the sermon to a mutually shared pain and longing for freedom.
All of the essays and sermons are enriching and exciting; however, I was particularly struck by the essays of Charles G. Adams, Charles E. Booth, H. B. Charles Jr., Prathia L. Hall, J. Alfred Smith, and Ralph D. West. For example, in Adams's essay “Preaching from the Heart and Mind,” he preaches in every paragraph: “I believe that every sermon is dictated, directed, and delivered by the Holy Spirit or it is not a Sermon,” or “If I must preach well, I must pray without ceasing. Only lively encounter with God can be the creative source of a new word from God.” Prayer is also a critical element in his preparation vis-à-vis reading and studying what others have said about the chosen text.
Charles E. Booth gives us a clear and useful description of the dialectical method of sermon construction while acknowledging the contribution of Samuel DeWitt Proctor's adaptation of G. W. F. Hegel's dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Proctor was a master of using this method while augmenting it with his own narrative. Inasmuch as Charles Booth taught with Proctor, he is a master of the method in his own right. Incidentally, Booth does not generally take a manuscript to the pulpit; however, my recollection of Proctor was that he always preached from a full-length manuscript.
H. B. Charles's essay on how to expose and explain the text is a refreshing achievement for someone who admits “I hate writing sermons.” His essay could have been strengthened by the thoughts of Paul Ricoeur, Hans Georg Gadamer, and James Cone, but what he has written is nicely done and maybe better without the complicated explanations of the aforesaid thinkers.
Prathia Hall has written one of the most incisive essays in the entire book. In “Encountering the Text” she says, “The preacher I most hear in my own voice is my father, although his was a totally male voice. This has nothing to do with gender but rather with the passion and pathos my father exhibited when he talked about suffering—the suffering of Jesus and of our people. The sound and style that I heard in my father now comes through me.” In Hall's essay and sermon we get a sense of her reckoning with her own death, a real-life “Lesson Before Dying” or what I call a wrestling with “life to life.”
In the final essay, “Weaving the Textual Web,” Ralph West re-emphasizes the need for “textuality” on the part of the preacher vis-à-vis the need for planning and preparing sermons well in advance of preaching them. I find this to be more than commendable, given the myriad demands on the pastor.
Cleophus LaRue has edited a wonderful volume of essays and sermons that will benefit the novice as well as the experienced preacher. This book is full of nuggets that the preacher can mine to enrich his or her sermon development and delivery. I encourage anyone interested in the preaching task to absorb the wisdom found in these pages.
James Henry Harris
Virginia Union University
© 2004 THEOLOGY TODAY ISSN 0040-5736.