Preaching + Advertising? (A Guest Post)

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Our guest author is The Rev’d Dr. O. Wesley Allen. Dr. Allen is the Lois Craddock Perkins Professor of Homiletics. He is the co-author with Carrie La Ferle in the first book of the “Preaching And…” series out of the Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence.


more in common than you might think

Recently, I was fortunate to be able to work on a book with Carrie La Ferle, a professor who teaches advertising at SMU, called Preaching and the Thirty Second Commercial.[1]

While advertising and proclamation of the gospel may be at odds at times in defining what is important in life (in the sense that the Christian faith strives to be counter cultural while advertising bolsters materialism), I learned a great deal about preaching by learning a little about advertising.

The primary reason the study was so helpful is that both endeavors struggle to get a message across in a world cluttered with noise that makes it hard for anyone with ears to hear.

Because of this common struggle, the two communicative disciplines (preaching and advertising) share a lot of the same concerns and methods.

This means that a lot of what I learned was less of a radical re-thinking of preaching and more a confirmation of some standard elements of homiletical methodology to which advertising methodology offered some new nuance.

For example, both advertisers and preachers spend a lot of time thinking about the form or structure of their communication.

Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that proposals concerning sermonic form have dominated homiletical literature since the rise of the New Homiletic in the early 1970s.

A long-standing way of considering form in advertising is through the use of the acronym AIDA, as we write in the book.

AIDA

First, the advertiser must gain the attention of consumers so they can be aware of a potential message, then the message must maintain the interest of consumers to generate the next step of having a desire to want the brand, and finally the advertiser must provide tangible action steps for consumers to undertake such as purchasing the brand or visiting the company’s website for more information.[2]

Preachers can use AIDA to enhance narrative/inductive approaches to preaching.

Attention

The introduction of the sermon should not be some throwaway joke or such but should direct the hearer’s initial attention toward what is coming in the sermon.

People have come wanting to hear a word, but if the opening does not grab them, they may quickly tune out.

Following advertisements, introductions can grab hearers with an unexpected element used to start the sermon.

Interest

Having the hearers’ attention, the preacher’s first major move then should be creating congregational interest in the good news the preacher intends to share. Interest is not created by informing people of the good news.

Instead, this might be done by telling the hearers about some aspect of the human condition that begs to be addressed by God.

This explanation might be exegetical in nature, unpacking the role the human condition plays in the biblical text for the day, or theological, discussing the aspect of the human condition in light of contemporary existence.

Desire

Next the preachers must move the hearers from simply be interested (which might imply intellectual distance) to the point of having a desire for the good news. This move has two elements.

First, it includes a shift from simply “telling” the hearers about the focal aspect of the human condition to “showing” them how their lives are affected by that aspect.

That is, the preacher must use metaphor, imagery, and stories to assist the hearers in experiencing the focal aspect of the human condition in the hearing of the sermon.

Second, the preacher must begin showing how the good news from the text for the day addresses that aspect of the human condition.

Action

Finally, the sermon concludes with a focus on action.

At times, like advertisers, this will be an invitation for the hearers to act in response to the good news.

But unlike advertising, we are in the proclamation business, not sales.

So usually homiletical focus should be on proclaiming God’s actions today in a way that relates to the providential and salvific work of God as found in the text, that accords with the preacher’s and the congregation’s theological worldview, and that can be experienced by the hearers in today’s world in the midst of their own lives.

[1] O. Wesley Allen, Jr., and Carrie La Ferle, Preaching and the Thirty Second Commercial: Lessons from Advertising for the Pulpit, “The Preaching and…Series” (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2021).

[2] Preaching and the Thirty Second Commercial, 63–64.


Want to learn more about cutting through the noise with your sermons?

Dr. Allen will be speaking to the Collective+ this Thursday, Sept. 9.

Join The Collective+ now to hear more insights from advertising to ensure your preaching grabs your listeners’ attention and sticks.

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