David Murray has a couple of posts about preaching without notes or with less notes at his blog Head, Heart, Hand.
In part one, after noting (from John Broadus) four main methods of sermon delivery (Reading, Reciting, Extemporizing, and Freely delivering), Murray explains his concern:
The method chosen will determine how much paper is brought into the pulpit. I do not want to set down rules on how much we should read or rely upon notes. Much will depend on the speaker and the hearers. However, if there is a danger in our days it is probably too much reliance upon notes. We are all horrified at the idea of someone going into a pulpit unprepared and just rambling around for a time. However, the Reformed Church is perhaps in danger of going to the other extreme, of having such over-prepared sermons that the amount of paper required to preach them is increasing more and more – as is reliance on the manuscript.
This is happening at the same time as the people, especially younger people, are going in the opposite direction. People want to be spoken to personally, directly, and relationally. President Obama understood that before he was President, although since inauguration he has resorted mainly to the autocue, diminishing his appeal. In the UK, the present Prime Minister, David Cameron, burst on to the scene at a Conservative Party Conference when he spoke passionately about his vision for the future of the UK, and what caught everyone’s imagination was that he did it without notes. After the Blair/Brown years of polished marketing and spin, it seemed much more authentic.
In part two Murray details “the method I follow to decrease reliance on paper in the pulpit”, which impressively all start with the letter ‘S’:
1. Saturation
2. Scriptural
3. Structure
4. Summarize
5. Stress
6. Study
7. Start
Helpfully he also embeds a Scribid outline of one of his own sermons. If you take a look you’ll see that it not without a substantial amount of detail.
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