In one of his recent books, William Willimon, offers some sound counsel concerning preaching with the aid of a manuscript in our current culture. The point is this I believe: don’t be bound to your manuscript, be bound and determined to communicate God’s Word clearly! Here is how Willimon describes the task for us preachers:
“Retaining a sence of orality is perhaps the greatest advantage of preaching without a manuscript. A sermon manuscript gives us preachers the illusion that we have ‘done’ a sermon when at last we have fixed words on a page. On the page, the reader is given clues by the writer when to pause, when to stop and ponder, when to move on. When spoken, the sermon has no puncuation marks, no paragraph indentations, none of these printed clues to help it communicate. In writing out our sermons, our sentences tend to be too long, our thought patterns too involved. We lose a sense of movement and rhythm.
Even when we know our manuscript well, we tend to look at the manuscript rather than look at our listeners. We miss clues that our listeners are sending us when they don’t understand, or when they are losining interest. Preaching is a visual as well as an auditory affair. Oral communication requires eye contact as sender and receiver send one another clues about what is being communicated….So, if we are moving from a once predominately print and literate culture to an oral and imaged culture, we preachers may be rediscovered. Our day has come!”
–William Willimon, Preaching Master Class (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010), 20-21.
