Effective Catholic Preaching

What makes good preaching “work?” What is “effective” preaching in the Christian tradition? What distinguishes the “excellent” homily from one that is merely satisfactory? Can we identify the qualities that make for homiletic success?

You might think that there are many scholarly volumes written on this question, a matter of considerable importance to the Christian community, but actually that is not the case. There is a lot of homiletic advice out there, but no consensus on the answer to this question in the homiletics community, and relatively little literature addressing it.

But, for now, allow me to get the ball rolling on this discussion.

The first clarifying question would be, to what “effect” is “effectiveness” pointed? That is to say, what do we want preaching to “do” in the life of the church? What is its goal or purpose?

To my mind, the single best succinct statement of what we’re after, at least in liturgical preaching, comes from the U.S. bishops: “The preacher then has a formidable task: to speak from the Scriptures… to a gathered congregation in such a way that those assembled will be able to worship God in spirit and truth, and then go forth to love and serve the Lord.”[1] In other words, the homilist’s goal is to facilitate the hearers’ encounter with God in Jesus Christ, to bring them close to God, to assist them in seeing the ways in which a living God is speaking to them, reaching out to them in friendship, offering mercy, healing, regeneration and transformation. When that happens, people move readily and spontaneously into giving God their love, thanks and praise, immediately at the Eucharistic Table and also in the unselfish way in which they live lives of generosity and service beyond the church building.

Many of us who preach settle too cheaply. We smile pleasantly in the back of church as parishioners file past and some say, “Nice homily, Father.” But occasionally we receive the incomparable gratification of the person who says sincerely, “Father, your homily really moved me…. It brought me closer to God…. Your preaching made me see my life and its possibilities differently…. You made me want to take Jesus and my relationship with him more seriously….” It can feel to us like this is what we live for – and for those of us with a vocation to ministry, it is! This is why we do what we do: to bring people closer to God. Nothing else matters as much as that.

But, as preachers, how do we do that? What sorts of words, messages, strategies, narratives, images make that intimacy with God more likely to happen? And, are there things we might be doing, unknowingly, that work against our goal?

Here are the four most important pieces of homiletic advice I give to my preaching students.

1. Every homily must be (the) Good News. The central message or theme of every homily must be really good news for our lives. This means it will center on God and what God has done, is doing and wants to do. Implicitly if not explicitly, such preaching always springs from the story of Jesus Christ and his abiding presence with us in the Spirit. Scolding and moralizing are out of place here (and ineffective, besides). Homiletic challenge is necessary and important too, but it has to flow obviously and naturally from the Good News we gather to celebrate, the Good News which empowers us to meet the challenge. Our task is to invite faith in and response to the Good News.

2. A homily should make one point, and one point only. If we want our preaching to be memorable, and make an impact beyond Sunday morning, it has to be unified. Every hearer should be able to go away from Mass and say what the homily s/he heard was “about,” even if such summary statements don’t reflect the full power of the message. And it cannot be a “light” point”; it must have some depth to it, some gravity for our lives. The coherence of a homily is crucial to its memorability and incisiveness.

3. Every homily should appeal to all three dimensions of the human person: mind, heart, and will. This one comes right from Saint Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, the oldest extant homiletic manual in the Western church. (Augustine got it from Cicero, who was relying on Aristotle.) It is still a very serviceable picture of the hearer. The power of God’s grace wants to reach into all corners of the human person. We leave any of these dimensions out at the risk of sacrificing the wholistic, integrating appeal of God’s Word.

4. We must preach in a way that animates, stimulates, calls forth, or focuses the proclamation of the Good News by all the baptized. Liturgical preaching is not meant to be the full compass of the church’s preaching mission, nor is it an end in itself. It is meant to embolden the faithful to discover and announce God’s goodness in their daily, secular lives. Our goal is to preach in such a way that our hearers want to accept and live into the full meaning of their baptism, which deputizes them as God’s witnesses in the world.

***

I concluded Part One with four key pieces of homiletic advice for effectiveness:

1. Every homily must be (the) Good News. (See Part One.)

2. A homily should make one point, and one point only. (See Part One.)

3. Every homily should appeal to all three dimensions of the human person: mind, heart, and will.

4. We must preach in a way that animates, stimulates, calls forth, or focuses the proclamation of the Good News by all the baptized.

Now let me add a fifth: We preach to facilitate the encounter with a living God. As the Pontifical Biblical Commission stated,

The presentation of the Gospels should be done in such a way as to elicit an encounter with Christ who provides the key to the whole biblical revelation and communicates the call of God that summons each one to respond.[2]

Good preaching does not settle for a “moral to the story”—in fact, good preaching avoids moralizing altogether. To be sure, the Scriptures offer us plenty of moral challenge, and good preaching does that, too. But it is a moral challenge that always plainly arises from, and is empowered by, an encounter of incomparable sweetness and life. The problem with moralistic preaching—and I’ve heard plenty of it, moralisms of both the right and the left, and have been guilty of it myself too—is that it makes demands without plugging people into the source of power for actually meeting those demands. That source of power cannot come from ourselves and our efforts alone; it can only be supplied by the experience of God. Only God is powerful enough to change hearts and transform lives.

Preaching is not primarily about instruction, though it must rest on a solid foundation of sound teaching. We seek not merely to inform people, nor to vaguely uplift or inspire people, but to bring them into nothing less than an experience of a personal, living, uncontrollable, caring, merciful God. Most immediately, this means that our preaching leads to the Eucharistic Table, where we give God thanks, are nourished, and are sent in mission. We want to bring God close, as it were, to make a true meeting of the divine with humans more accessible and more likely, thus inspiring spontaneous gratitude and loving response in service. We seek the kind of encounter which then ripens into stable relationship, commitment, discipleship. There is no sweeter music to the ears of a preacher than to have a hearer say to us, “You helped me find God in my life.” We desperately need preachers who aim for that kind of depth: the total conversion God wants for each of us.

How do we do that? Here again, one might think there is a lot of literature on that question, but such is not the case. Let me hazard a few suggestions, to invite yours too.

• Recall what Jesus said to Andrew and John: “What are you looking for?” (Jn 1:38). Don’t begin from the assumption that your hearers are intellectual or spiritual dullards. Start from what we know about human beings, namely, that we are hard-wired for God. Our deepest thirsts are for truth, meaning, love—in other words, for God who alone can satisfy. Cling to the truth that your hearers are hungry for God, whether they can name it as such or not. Learn the particular forms this hunger takes for the people of all ages of your community. Remember St. Augustine’s famous line in the Confessions, “O God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” (I, 1, 1).
• Keep the goal of encounter ever-present in your mind, both as you prepare and as you actually preach. Bring this concern to bear on how you conceive the focus of your preaching and what you hope this particular preaching event will do for your listeners. Ask yourself hard questions about how your choice of homiletic form or structure facilitates (or works against) encounter.
• Make rich use of story, illustration, image, and imagination. Remember that some aspects of spiritual reality are enigmatic, mysterious, or even paradoxical to our minds, and so better expressed through narrative, music, poetry, or other artistic expression. God wants to meet and transform us in all of our human faculties.
• Understand and use the language of spirituality. Yes, there are many languages of spirituality in our rich tradition, but they all have some things in common and are treasured precisely because people have found the path to God through them. What has “worked” in our spiritual tradition? Think of the saints, spiritual masters, and those mentors, spiritual directors, and pastors who have helped you deepen your relationship with God. How did they do it?
• Urgency, in two ways:

1. Have a message that is substantive enough and deep enough that it matters. Give people the depth to which they are entitled from us. As Peter Cameron, OP says, "Preaching exists in the Church to be a life-saving presence that reaches out to those in peril and that rescues them from their despair, their demise" (Cameron, Why Preach?, 48).

2. Infuse your preaching with the urgency of witness, that is to say, with your personal presence and investment in what you’re saying. No, you’re not perfect, and thank God, you don’t have to be. But you do have to be on the spiritual journey yourself, hungering for God yourself.

• Remember that “the essence of Christianity is not an idea but a Person. Encounter is God’s very method of salvation” (Cameron, 52). Or, as Pope Benedict XVI said, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (Deus Caritas Est, §1). It’s that important.

***

What follows is my complete list of twenty points on the characteristics of effective preaching in the Catholic tradition today. The first five have appeared in the first two parts.

1. Every homily must be (the) Good News.

2. A homily should make one point, and one point only.

3. Every homily should appeal to all three dimensions of the human person: mind, heart, and will.

To what I said in Part One, I would add:

a. The appeal to the mind engages both cognition (“left brain”) and imagination (“right brain”).
The use of the imagination is crucial to human understanding. Good preaching deploys both discursive and imaginative language.

b. The appeal to the heart both arouses and educates the heart’s desire, inviting the hearer to fall in love with Love itself.
Preaching doesn’t simply arouse emotion for its own sake. The purpose is to lead the hearer into relationship with the very source of Love.

c. The appeal to the will engages the body and moves the hearer to service and mission.
Preaching is not dictatorial, telling the hearer what to do. But through suggestions, examples, and invitations it makes the hearer want to enact the message in his/her own life. And as we put it into action, we actually know it better in our hearts and minds.

d. Preaching draws upon and inspires us to the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Experience confirms what classical aesthetics teaches us: the good, the true and the beautiful are inherently attractive to the human person, and pursued rightly, they lead us to God and change us.

4. We must preach in a way that animates, stimulates, calls forth, or focuses the proclamation of the Good News by all the baptized. (See Part One.)

5. We preach to facilitate the encounter with a living God. (See Part Two.)

6. Preaching offers or points the way to authentic human encounter, relationship, and community.

Catholic preaching is unapologetically ecclesial, communitarian. We believe that Christ is met and followed in company with others. We matter to one another, and what we share on the journey gives a special depth and quality to our relationships with one another.

7. We treat the listener with respect, as a well-disposed, intelligent adult.

Occasionally we preach to children or youth, of course, but preaching in the Sunday assembly is fundamentally adult business. We address the hearer as a person of faith and good will, who is seeking to grow in discipleship. We respect her/his conscience, free will, and life path. We seek to understand better how adults learn and grow.

8. Preaching has a (quasi-)narrative quality: you sense you’re going somewhere, on a journey of discovery, following a thread, part of something that has dynamism, movement, goal.

What keeps us engaged with the telling of a good story? Suspense, drama, the promise of a meaningful point of arrival. Good preaching draws us along in a way much like that. Even if we know where the homilist is taking us, we want to see how he gets there and what it means for us. There is a promise that even an old message will be rediscovered anew, with freshness and life.

9. Preaching gives the hearer a new way to see his/her life.

As Fulfilled in Your Hearing says, “The homily is not so much on the Scriptures as from and through them,” offering the listener “a scriptural interpretation of human existence.” The goal is not so much a lesson as a lens, a new way to look at the listener’s life and world, a horizon of vision filled with new possibility in the grace of a relationship with God. To put it another way, the Christian mysteries are opened up in such a way as to cast light on our lives. Our doctrinal tradition informs and guides preaching, and pushes us into deeper water, but is not so much a point of arrival as a point of departure for the task of interpreting our lives.

10. The preacher conveys personal authenticity, investment, and urgency.

The preacher’s goal is to draw attention to Christ, not to himself, of course. However, the preacher cannot and ought not disappear from view. The hearer needs to know that the preacher believes this message is urgently important and possible, with God’s help. Even when not explicit, a dimension of preaching is always personal witness.

11. The homily is challenging: it motivates the hearer to keep on reflecting and responding, conveying that change/growth is possible, within reach.

Fundamentally, our hearers want to be challenged. Good preaching “sticks,” that is to say, it is easily remembered and lays down a challenge worthy of continued reflection and response after Mass, holding out the hope of real transformation.

12. The homily is concrete in the ways that it touches real human experience; it takes all human experience seriously and seeks to put it into conversation with the Good News.

Good preaching has its feet on the ground, even as it invites us to soar beyond ourselves. It always takes human experience of all kinds seriously, both for the way experience can make faith difficult, and as the context in which God reaches out to meet us.

13. Preaching honestly confronts evil, in both its personal and social manifestations, and provides hope for overcoming it.

Evil in its various forms is not abstract but something every hearer must confront. Effective preaching is frank about naming this and calls attention to a God who is fighting against it. In Christ—who preached, healed, and cast out evil—we are not trapped victims of evil but share a hope for overcoming what mars creation. Good preaching joins us to God’s power to rout the force of evil.

14. The homily speaks to a concrete hearer and a concrete community.

Good preaching is local theology; it springs from personal relationship with the hearers, knowing and taking seriously the contours of their lives, their hopes and aspirations, their daily difficulties and griefs. The listener comes away from such preaching feeling, “Father was really speaking to me today.”

15. The homily is approachable: it invites participation by the listener, including feedback, real conversation, and mutual learning.

It is often remarked that good preaching has a conversational tone to it, albeit a conversation about matters of utmost importance. The hearer feels invited to a real dialogue, both during the preaching and after, in the back of church, over coffee and donuts in the church basement, or elsewhere.

16. Preaching recognizes and embraces both male and female life experience.

Catholic ordained ministers need to remember that men and women experience life in somewhat different ways. Preaching should not focus exclusively on the experience of one gender, but strive to draw upon and speak to both, building bridges between men and women.

17. Preaching is inculturated: it understands, affirms and challenges the cultural context.

Good preachers become amateur anthropologists, i.e., they get to know the values and practices which characterize the context they share with their hearers, and they assist their hearers in cultural discernment. Cultures contain both lights and shadows; therefore, they can be drawn upon for support for gospel living but must also be critiqued and challenged.

18. We preach a big God who is both transcendent and immanent.

Preaching a God who is always close and familiar could be preaching a domesticated God, a God who is too small. Similarly, preaching a God who is always beyond us and other than us is also too small to do justice to Judeo-Christian revelation. We stand firmly in the paradox of a mysterious God beyond our full understanding who nevertheless has come intimately close to us, especially through Jesus Christ.

19. Our preaching is always paschal, a liberating word from the paradox of death and resurrection.

Every Mass tells the story of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection. For us, it is the story of all stories, echoed in creation itself and time and again in our own experience: every death yields new life. Our hearers have many, many experiences of dying in various forms. We stand with them in faith that every death is the passage to some new grace, some new experience of God’s faithfulness.

20. Our preaching is incarnational: it affirms and elevates human life, creation, materiality, and recognizes the grace of God building on/working through nature.

It is not incidental that God chose to bring about redemption through becoming one of us; it is the key to the way God typically works with us, by working through the goodness of creation, bodiliness, and history. The Incarnation is God’s ongoing and permanent Yes to human life.

Does it sound like a complicated task, to preach in a way characterized by these twenty points? Indeed it is! Daring, exciting—and humbling.

***

You could call this a postscript, “What Not to Say or Do in Preaching for Effectiveness.” Here are some admonitions I give myself:

Avoid moralizing.

We have a lot of moralistic preaching today, I think. I’ve heard moralisms of the right (which usually have to do with sexual morality) and moralisms of the left (social justice). Moralism is moral challenge without the love relationship which makes discipline and right action desirable and achievable. Is there moral challenge in the Gospel of Jesus Christ? You bet, and plenty of it. But it is grounded in a vision of joyful discipleship, as Pope Francis continues to remind us. Before you challenge, you need really Good News to plug people into, making meeting your challenge possible. Avoid using the words should, ought, and must in preaching. However true or well-intentioned, those words sound dictatorial rather than persuasive. Lead people into the arms of God and they will rise to amazing heights of moral reform.

Avoid shallowness.

People don’t come to church to hear silliness, banality, or trivia. They come to be fed, to participate in something which gives meaning and direction to their lives. A consistently heard complaint about preaching is that it doesn’t go anywhere meaningful. People tune out what doesn’t matter. Go deeper—deep into their hearts, deep into the heart of the Lord. Lead them somewhere. Give them a faith worthy laying down their lives for. Point the way into the life of God. Offer a vision of a better life.

Avoid abstractions, generalizing, or principles shorn of examples and concreteness.

Abstractions and principles distilled from the text sound like academic talk, and this evokes the “Father is speaking over my head” reaction. Make it concrete. Give illustrations of the message. Suggest positive ways it can be lived. Learn to soar while keeping one foot on the ground.

Don’t read to us.

I believe that any of the three major delivery methods—manuscripts, notes or outline, or nothing—can be successfully used to produce effective, conversational preaching. I myself remain basically a manuscript preacher. But there is nothing deadlier to reception than a homily that sounds like it's being read. “A read sermon is a dead sermon.”[3] Manuscript or no manuscript, preaching is real-time, oral communication between a concrete, living preacher and a concrete, living community. It’s a conversation about something of utmost importance.

Avoid predictability.

Good preaching has an element of suspense. It makes hearers think to themselves, “Where is he going with this?” Even if they can foresee the message or goal, they want to be enthralled with how the preacher will get there. Vary the structure of your homilies; don’t fall into a rut such that your hearers know after 30 seconds where you’re going. Offer different angles of vision that surprise and engage. Make old truths sound fresh and inviting.

Avoid standing too far away from the scriptural text, or too close to it.

Christian preaching is bound to ancient sacred texts, and this is a good thing. But where you stand in relation to that ancient text matters. There is an appropriate degree of freedom and creativity in scriptural preaching. Preachers who stand too close to the text get too minutely exegetical and can miss the most important messages. Preachers who stand too far way, too loosely related to the text, risk compromising Scripture’s authority and thus making it about themselves.

Avoid or reduce speaking in the imperative, interrogative, or subjunctive moods.

The grammatical imperative, however well intentioned, lands on listeners’ ears as authoritarian or dictatorial. Your job is to exhort, not tell people exactly what to do. Likewise, too many questions make hearers feel interrogated, or lay out puzzles the preacher cannot solve, paving the way to disappointment. Use no more than an occasional, well-chosen rhetorical question to spur people’s reflection. The subjunctive is usually expressed in constructions like “let us . . .” and “may we . . .” Many preachers resort to these pious-sounding phrases in the closing movement of the homily. While this is meant to sound encouraging, in English the subjunctive has atrophied to the point where it sounds weak and vague. For best effect, stick with the indicative, and ordinarily in the present tense.

Avoid condescension, sarcasm, and cynicism.

Certain things are just toxic from the pulpit. Listeners respect you and the office you hold, but they don’t want to be talked down to, as if they were children or thick-headed. As for cynicism, it’s been called the last redoubt of highly idealistic people who are disappointed by the world. No matter how tired or discouraged you feel at a given moment—and all of us have these moments—don’t give in to the temptation to spread a spiritual infection by resorting to passive-aggressive, caustic, or cynical humor. Give people reasons to put their hope in God.

Don’t let silence be the end.

When you’re done giving a homily, or done with Mass, you’re still not done. Find ways to continue the conversation. Start by reading your hearers as you speak. Follow up by listening carefully to people in the back of church. Send multiple messages that you want and need to hear from them—because you do—and that you value their thoughts and welcome further conversation. Put your homily online and invite comment. Give them a homily response card in the pews to drop into a box in the back of church. Help hearers become more educated hearers by catechizing them on what the church wants and needs from preaching. Find ways to seek meaningful feedback on your preaching, and use that feedback to become a better preacher and better pastoral minister.

Preaching effectively is a complex challenge, and not all of us are going to be John Chrysostoms or Fulton Sheens. But we don’t need to be, thank God. If we love our people, and take our relationships with them and with God seriously, we can become preachers in whom our hearers dependably find a meaningful word of Good News.

Thanks for listening.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is the fruit of the preparation of the Marten Program in Homiletics for its sixth major preaching conference held at Notre Dame in 2017, entitled, “To Set the Earth on Fire: Effective Catholic Preaching.”