A Review of Telling People What to Think: A Concise Homiletics for Lutheran Parish Pastors by Heath Curtis

Is the sermon really just the absolution? Should a sermon always be structured as Law-Gospel-Response or Goal-Malady-Means? Is the sermon a performative word from God or an informative word about God? And what about things like sermon length? Veteran LCMS pastor, author, and teacher Heath Curtis tackles these topics and many more in his new book Telling People What to Think: A Concise Homiletics for Lutheran Parish Pastors.[i] The book contains much-needed practical advice about preaching in the parish and offers a common-sense summary of the ongoing conversations about preaching within confessional Lutheranism.[ii] What I found especially helpful throughout the book is the down-to-earth approach to preaching that Curtis develops—in all its everyday concreteness. He reminds the reader that preaching is a craft that takes work, and that the people in the pews are real people, living real lives in real places—with a real pastor who really must have something to say to them each week.

Situating the Sermon: Liturgy, Lectionary, and Context

After a short chapter explaining the origins of the title (it came from a cocktail party where he thought of an intriguing way to describe his work as a pastor by saying “I get paid to tell people what to think.”), Curtis shows how the sermon does not exist in a vacuum, but fits into the larger tapestry of liturgical worship. “The pastor’s preaching is contextualized by the liturgy,” Curtis explains.

The sermon is not a time-out from worship and reverence. It is not a poor excuse for a stand-up comedy routine. It is not merely a lecture, a podcast, or a TED Talk. The sermon is holy ground. It is commanded by the Lord. It bears his promise. It occurs within the drama of Christ bringing us His body and blood.[iii]

Curtis’s argument that the sermon doesn’t stand alone provides an answer of sorts to the homiletical shifts driven by radical Lutheranism which portrayed the sermon as only a performative Word of God, only as an announcement of the Gospel, only as an exercise of absolution or the office of the keys. Curtis argues that this approach has captured an important element of preaching (yes, preaching is an existential encounter between God and man), but has overlooked the surrounding context of the sermon which contains an actual rite of confession and absolution and other proclamations of God’s free grace in Christ.[iv] Curtis’s point is that the sermon is not simply a redundant absolution, but rather serves a variety of functions depending on the text.

And when it comes to the text, Curtis sees the wisdom of the lectionary. The lectionary helps hold pastors accountable to preaching the whole council of God and not just their hobby-horses. Regarding the debates over the one-year versus three-year lectionary, he offers a short but fair and balanced analysis of some of their pros and cons.[v] The main thing Curtis wants is for the preacher to approach his task purposefully in light of the text and in consideration of his people. He writes,

Preaching exists to deliver the Word of God to a concrete people in a concrete place. The Word of God needs to be applied specifically. The ebb and flow—the low points and the high points—of the people’s life should be identified and addressed by the preacher of the Word. The yearly lectionary should already have us in the habit of thinking about preaching over the course of a year. We should not be lurching from week to week, but rather thinking about how all the pieces fit together.[vi]

That preaching should manifest such specificity and concreteness is something he harps on throughout the book, and it is a vital point to grasp. He writes, “our faith is not a philosophy in a book, it is a real encounter between the real God and real people in real time. You are not just a pastor, you are a specific man called to serve not just any people, but the individuals of your parish in all their complexity and idiosyncrasy.”[vii]

Structuring the Sermon: Methods, Outlines, and Content

After situating the sermon within its liturgical context, Curtis offers a battle-tested perspective on what constitutes a sermon, methods for sermon preparation, possible sermon structures, and more. I found this section especially helpful. Curtis defines a Lutheran sermon as such: “the Lutheran sermon rightly divides Law and Gospel while being textual, kerygmatic and proclamatory, catechetical and doctrinal, admonishing and exhorting.”[viii] This is a wide-ranging definition, but that is part of Curtis’s point. We don’t need to pit proclamatory preaching against doctrinal preaching, and so on. The sermon can be all these things; but most importantly it must be driven by what the text actually says, not by a form or structure into which we try and shoehorn the text.

Curtis helps cut through much of the either-or debates about preaching in the past few generations, gleaning what he can from a variety of approaches and acknowledging their limitations as well. Regarding Law-Gospel preaching, he writes,

This distinction between Law and Gospel is an especially clear light for elucidating the article on justification. It is a touchstone against which you can test a statement about salvation. It is a filter through which to pass your preaching to make sure what you say about justification is correct. It is a norm and rule to measure by; it is a set of guardrails to keep you on track; it is a censor to strike out false statements. But the distinction between Law and Gospel is not a homiletic method or the one-and-only sermon outline and it was never meant to be so.[ix]

 He offers a similar balanced approach regarding Gerhard Forde and the Erlangen school.

Our theology is for the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins and we should never tire of proclaiming this good news. The liturgy never tires of presenting it to us week in and week out. But just as turning the Law and Gospel distinction into a homiletic method impoverishes our preaching and makes it sub-Biblical, so also does elevating the catchphrase ‘theology is for proclamation’ to being the be all and end all of our preaching. Proclaiming the Gospel is simply not the only thing that St. Paul does in his epistles. It’s not the only thing Jesus does in His sermons. As Biblical preachers, our preaching needs to hand on everything that the Bible communicates.[x]

And he is also charitable towards twentieth-century homiletics professor Richard Caemmerer, whose Goal-Malady-Means triad was, as Caemmerer lamented in his retirement, distorted into simplistic “sermon outlines.”[xi] Curtis explains,

Long before Forde, Caemmerer was lamenting dry, doctrinaire preaching about the Gospel instead of sermons that proclaimed the Gospel. His thoughts in Preaching for the Church, including the conceptual framework of Goal-Malady-Means, were meant to help pastors preach the living and active Word of God. But Caemmerer never intended that Lutheran preachers should avoid explicit teaching and encouragement to godly living. . . . Caemmerer attempted to make our preaching more vital, more kerygmatic, and less like a classroom lecture. He was aiming at a more lively preaching that would be able to more easily apply to their real lives in a changing world. For this he should be commended. And in the end, he did at least see the problem of Law-Gospel reductionism in the preaching of his students.[xii]

All of this makes Curtis’s volume a welcome addition to the ongoing historical discussion of what has happened to Lutheran preaching in recent decades.

Shaping the Preacher

Curtis also has something to say about forming the preacher himself, not just his sermons. He offers good practical tips regarding personal prayer and devotional life, habits that can foster better sermon preparation. He also reminds pastors that with all their soul-work, they must not neglect their body and its fitness. This is an important reminder as well.

Throughout, Curtis is generous in offering his own tools and tricks of the trade. And he employs frequently the helpful image of preaching as a trade or craft. Thinking about preaching in this way helps us remember that it is a craft to be honed and developed. It is something that you can get better at with practice, just like other trades. The preacher is a craftsman.

Curtis fleshes out this concept even further when discussing the preacher as generalist. A preacher should be able to carry on a conversation in the parlor or in the shop; with a lawyer or a lumberjack, with a pediatrician or a plumber. He should be able to turn a wrench and craft a poem. This is one of the things that can help his sermons connect to his people. Curtis paints the picture well:

How many neurosurgeons or corporate lawyers have time or energy to read philosophy, foreign politics, theology, economics, and poetry? Everyone else has to scrape through the rat race, then take the kids to practice, then cook supper, then clean up supper, before finally having an hour to themselves after the kids are in bed for which they have no more energy than to fall asleep watching Netflix. You are different. You are set aside to be something else. You are marked out to be a generalist. You have the task of telling people what to think. . . . The purpose of this arrangement is certainly not so that we can sit around as men of leisure, but rather that our leisure might make us men. We have time to be well-informed. . . . In a very real sense, you are paid to be the most well-rounded, educated man in your parish.[xiii]

Of course, this is not to say the pastor is some sort of super-human Renaissance man, or that it is his personal charisma or impressive resumé that makes his sermons compelling or his ministry a success. St. Paul reminds us that it was in much fear and trembling that he proclaimed the foolishness of the Gospel by means of the foolishness of preaching and that such a message delivered in such ways is the power of God unto salvation (1 Cor 1-2). Yet this is the same St. Paul who disciplined his body (1 Cor 9:27) and crafted tents (Acts 18:3). He could carry on a conversation with Jew or Gentile, Pharisee or Pagan; he could hold his own at the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-34) or in front of Agrippa (Acts 26:1-32).

May it be so for the preachers of our day and in the years to come, and may Curtis’ book be a catalyst in that direction.

[i] Heath Curtis, Telling People What to Think: A Concise Homiletics for Lutheran Parish Pastors (Reredos and Ambo, 2024).

[ii] For a sampling of the discussion, see recent Concordia Theological Quarterly articles, including Benjamin T. G. Mayes, “The Useful Applications of Scripture in Lutheran Orthodoxy: An Aid to Contemporary Preaching and Exegesis”; Adam C. Koontz, “Speak as the Oracles of God: Reinhold Pieper’s Classical Lutheran Homiletic”; Adam Koontz, “From Reinhold Pieper to Caemmerer: How Our Preaching Changed”; and Isaac R. W. Johnson, “Reinhold Pieper’s Strictly Textual Preaching: Proclaiming Law and Gospel in Accordance with Scripture.”

[iii] 11.

[iv] 11-12.

[v] 16-18.

[vi] 21.

[vii] 23.

[viii] 29.

[ix] 30, emphasis in the original.

[x] 33.

[xi] 63.

[xii] 63.

[xiii] 51.

Joshua Pauling is a classical educator, furnituremaker, and contributing writer at Salvo Magazine and Modern Reformation. He has written for FORMA, Classical Lutheran Education Journal, Front Porch Republic, LOGIA: A Journal of Lutheran Theology, Mere Orthodoxy, Merion West, Public Discourse, Quillette, The Lutheran Witness, Touchstone, among others. He studied at Messiah University, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Winthrop University. He is currently vicar at All Saints Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Charlotte, NC and is completing additional studies through Concordia Theological Seminary towards ordination. He and his wife Kristi have two children.