Welcome to Sermon Storying 

This site is dedicated to an intentional use of Bible narratives as sermon format and primary content. The rationale for this emphasis comes from a lengthy experience with emerging oral leaders among newly planted churches. The orality of congregations as well as the orality of many of the new pastors calls for a renewed emphasis on the use of narrative format sermons.

There is somewhat of a dilemma of what to call this focus on the use of biblical narratives in sermons. There is already an understanding regarding narrative preaching in the U.S. Narrative preaching without specifying what kinds of narratives is free to include Bible narratives (stories), paraphrased Bible stories, as well as personal and even fictional narratives. After considerable thought, it was decided to use a new term that could be explained and identified apart from any bias that one might have either for or against what is commonly called narrative preaching.

This is not a polemic against expositional preaching. This should be a future objective for all emerging pastors and their churches. It will depend upon their literacy, their access to hermeneutic study resources, and the ability of their congregations to benefit from appropriate expositional sermons. Since this concept of Sermon Storying relates to a wide range of orality competency and preferences in churches, it is realized that Sermon Storying may be only the beginning point. At the same time it is a major need among pastors and churches where rapid church growth is taking place and orality is the de facto way of learning and use of Bible stories is already growing in use and effectiveness.

So Sermon Storying then is preaching sermons that are primarily Bible narrative-driven and formatted to be attractive, memorable, and reproducible by even oral church leaders whether they are literate or not. To some extent this is a logical progression of what is now widely called Bible Storying (see www.Bible-Storying.com). In fact, many oral leaders who have already been trained in Bible Storying began incorporating the newly learned Bible stories into their preaching. These narratives may be discrete Bible stories, groups of stories, or other passages which may be presented in narrative format.

In addition, many of those working among oral leaders and asked to preach in their churches are finding that storying their sermons or preaching sermon stories is greatly appreciated by the church congregations. This has been encouraging to the oral leaders to see seminary trained Western workers preach in a manner that they can emulate and that affirms what they are already doing.

There are issues to consider and these will be addressed in future articles and Frequently Asked Questions.

J.O.Terry