Why Johnny Can’t Preach (Book Review)
“I may be the last person who gives you an honest evaluation of your preaching. So, I’m going to tell you what those people in your churches should or want to say.”
Some variation of these words were shared by my preaching professor in a seminary class called Bible Exposition II. They’ve stuck with me for now almost two decades.
We preached in a lab setting. There were 12 of us in the class. During the semester we preached 4 short sermons in front of the class and our professor. After each sermon, we sat down and received the promised honest evaluation. It was one of the most stressful helpful practices I experienced.
This semester I’m teaching the same class to a few young men in our church through our church’s partnership with Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. One of the required readings for the class is T. David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach.
Gordon’s book is written from the same spirit as the words from my preaching professor: “honest evaluation” of our preaching. Gordon teaches Media Ecology at the college level and is a professor of Religion and Greek. While walking through cancer treatment, he wrote Why Johnny Can’t Preach, concerned about the state of preaching in our society and (in my words not his) feeling someone needed to say something. Gordon’s premise or focus is that “profound shifts in dominant media in the last half of the twentieth century have profoundly misshaped the sensibilities of the typical American, and that this, in turn, has led to a profound decline in preaching” (10).
It’s typical for pastors to lament the effect of current media on their listeners. Still, Gordon’s observation is focused not on the effect media has on the pew but on the pulpit. In brief, Gordon’s observation of preaching has been that preachers are failing to preach sermons that have unity, order, and movement. The result is “hearers strain to attempt to discover what the minister thinks is significant in all of this” (66). As someone who preaches and teaches often, this is one of my greatest concerns, and why I believe this book is worth reading for both preachers and teachers of God’s Word.
Gordon identifies the challenges or pitfalls many preachers fall into, but his conclusion is somewhat unexpected. The solution he offers is a change in lifestyle.
“Our culture, at this moment, will not develop those sensibilities, and so Johnny will cultivate them only if he makes some self-conscious and deliberately countercultural choices about how he wishes his sensibilities to be shaped” (108).
Gordon explains his conclusion this way,
“...preaching well requires more than preparing sermons; it requires preparing oneself as the kind of human who has the sensibilities prerequisite to preaching” (107).
The skills needed to preach sermons and teach Bible classes are developed by reading not for information but by reading texts. Gordon gives examples of Shakespeare, Robert Frost, and David McCullough (my favorite historian). He says reading these texts develops patience that television and social media cannot develop. He moves on to point out that most pastors (among others) no longer develop writing skills. To state the obvious, most writing in 2024 is judged by the number of characters rather than the number of pages. We lack a practice of reading or writing that develops the skills needed to develop a sermon that demonstrates unity, order, and movement.
Gordon’s book is 108 pages of excellent thought for those who preach and teach. It does not deal with exegesis or the character of the pastor. You can find stacks of those books. But, what it does offer its reader is the voice of someone in the pew saying what they wish their pastor/teacher would hear. For our sermons and teaching to be effectively understood, they must have at least these three traits: unity, order, and movement. This is the means by which we should evaluate our sermons/teaching, and the solution to more effectiveness is not simply identifying and working to improve our sermons. The solution may be to make changes to our lifestyles that cultivate reading good writing (counted in pages not characters) and improving our own composition.
Why Johnny Can’t Preach is a book I would recommend to anyone who teaches/preaches. It is an easy and challenging read that may lead to drastic improvements happily received by our listeners.
