Junction-Guy:
I agree about the note part, we dont use notes in my church, if they ever did I would bail quickly.
What about Martin Luther King, Jr.? (I read somewhere that he would spend many hours preparing a sermon, bring a folder of notes up to the pulpit – and snap the folder shut and never look at it!)
tijkmo:
you have got to be kidding
Not necessarily. In American churches, especially African-American ones, there's a long, long tradition – hundreds of years! – of sermons being *performed* like monologues. It was a high art, and a necessary skill of the preacher, to memorize entire sermons and be able to preach them without preparation.
And – but I believe this is much rarer – I once knew a Unitarian preacher who was able to improvise a sermon every week, with nothing in his mind but twenty or thirty hours of reading and thinking. It would all come together, he once said, as he was walking through the sanctuary door.
Nowadays, though, he preaches from notes; partly because it got to be too exhausting, and partly because he was afraid he was showing off.
GentlyFeral
