What Advertising Teaches Us About Sermon Outlines

We are in this series of posts about what we can learn from advertising that might make our sermons more impactful. The first in the series of posts is here. In this post we want to consider what advertising teaches us about sermon outlines that we use for our messages.

The Sermonic Form

You may not have heard that phrase before. The phrase, the sermonic form, simply refers to how a sermon unfolds. Let’s get a little bit of history here to help us understand what advertising teaches us about sermon outlines for today.

Before the 1970’s

Before 1970 the most common sermonic forms were these: The Puritan Plain style and the traditional three-point sermon. The Puritan Plain style followed a predictable form:

Begin with an exegesis, or explanation of a biblical text;
Then there is an interpretation of the text, usually using theological terms;
And finally, there would be an application to the congregation that is being addressed.

The Traditional Three-point sermon became the norm sometime in the 1950’s (at least as far as I can tell) here in the United States. Here is what that sermonic form looked like:

The preacher opens by presenting a theme for the sermon.
The preacher breaks that theme up into three parts, each giving a different point or subthemes to the main theme.
The presentation was very deductive by nature, presenting thoughts that asked the hearer to agree.

Starting in 1970

Fred Craddock, author of many books on preaching, began some different thinking about preaching. Here’s how one article describes the motivation for the change in emphasis.

As Fred Craddock looked out at the American mainline church around 1970, he saw some major problems. People were not listening or attending church. People did not care about an inspired, authoritative Bible or about societal institutions—especially after the countercultural movements in the tumultuous 1960s. All this could not help but affect the American pulpit. This was the time when, according to the homiletical historian Hughes Oliphant Old, the great era of American preaching simply was coming to an end.¹ The American pulpit needed something new. So Craddock helped launch this grand movement away from deductive, authoritative preaching. He was convinced preaching needed to be done in an inductive way much more sensitive to the hearer—as one without authority.

The change was described as a turn to the hearer. As one of my early mentors in the skill of preaching put it after hearing me preach, “Everything you said was true, but after the first five minutes no one was listening.” Why? Because I was presenting truth that was separated from the needs and desires of the people to whom I was preaching.

In this new homiletic, there was a turn to the hearer–what does the hearer need? There was a turn from deductive to inductive and narrative as the approach to preaching.

In this brief history, I am not including the development of Black preaching, which was always more inductive and tailored to the audience.

Thinking About What Advertising Teaches Us About Sermon Outlines

Advertising experts generally turn to two different approaches, or outlines, to assess the effectiveness of an advertisement. The first is what they refer to as the FCB Grid. An advertised product fits in one of four quadrants, dependent on a consumer’s level of involvement with the product. The emphasis is on what a consumer knows or thinks about a product, and what they feel about the produce. Here is how it looks in graphic form:

The emphasis is on the audience. the main question asked is how the message relates to the audience. The fact that the message is true is not enough. It must relate to the audience.

Conclusion

In the next post we’ll look more carefully at how this kind of grid can help us evaluate our sermons. For the time being, look at your next sermon through this grid. Know that sermons that are remembered usually relate to our emotions. So, join us next time as we continue to consider what advertising can teach us about sermon outlines that we use.

February 4, 2025/by Bruce Ballast