The cringe preacher
There is a particular kind of embarrassment that comes from watching someone try very hard to appear effortless. We have all seen it.
Someone adopts a manner of speaking that is obviously not his own. He throws in words and phrases he would never use in ordinary conversation. He exaggerates gestures, performs little dramatic pauses, attempts jokes that need too much explanation, wanders away from the lectern as though giving a TED Talk, and occasionally quotes or imitates celebrities, movie characters, teenagers, or whatever happens to be culturally fashionable at the moment.
In the hands of someone with genuine theatrical ability, some of this may work. Unfortunately, most priests are not actors. Neither are most bishops. And this is not an insult. They are not supposed to be.
One of the most useful lessons that could be taught in any homiletics course is remarkably simple: Stop trying to be “cool.” The congregation can tell.
The problem is not humor. There is nothing wrong with humor in a homily. There is nothing wrong with storytelling, movement, informality, personality, warmth, or even occasional theatricality.1 Some preachers are gifted storytellers. Others possess a natural sense of comic timing. Some can walk through a church while preaching and somehow make the entire congregation feel that they are having a conversation. Some can imitate voices wonderfully.
If you possess any of those gifts, use them wisely.
But a gift—or, in Christian language, a charisma—cannot be manufactured merely by deciding that Sunday morning needs more “energy.” That is where things begin to go wrong.
The priest who is naturally quiet suddenly becomes a motivational speaker. The bishop who ordinarily speaks in careful ecclesiastical prose suddenly starts using teenage slang. Someone quotes a meme six months after everyone else stopped using it. Another preacher decides that the Gospel would be more memorable if accompanied by exaggerated facial expressions or a reenactment in which he plays all twelve apostles.
At some point, the congregation stops hearing the Gospel and begins worrying about the preacher. That is not engagement. That is secondhand embarrassment.
People recognize performance. Human beings are remarkably good at detecting affectation. A congregation may not be able to explain what is wrong with a homily, but they know when the man speaking to them has ceased to sound like himself.2
His voice changes. He screams. His vocabulary changes. His gestures become larger. His reactions become theatrical. His jokes announce themselves before they arrive. Even his facial expressions begin asking the congregation for approval: Wasn’t that funny? Aren’t I relatable? See, I’m not one of those boring priests.
And once a preacher begins asking for approval, however unconsciously, something important has changed. The homily becomes less about communicating the Gospel—or even about communicating anything at all—and more about performing.
This is particularly dangerous for clergy because the pulpit already gives a man an artificial advantage. People are sitting quietly. They are looking at him. They generally will not interrupt. Most will remain polite even when the homily is dreadful. That silence can easily be mistaken for success.
A comedian discovers very quickly whether a joke works. A priest can spend twenty-five years telling bad jokes and never receive reliable data.
The desire to be relatable. Behind much of this behavior is usually a good intention. The preacher wants to connect. He does not want to sound “clerical” or distant. He has been warned against being academic, abstract, inaccessible, or dry. Perhaps the homiletics professor in the seminary told him that preaching must be “dynamic.” Perhaps he has watched charismatic speakers online and noticed the apparent intimacy they create with an audience, the laughter, and the applause. He has also been told that young people are leaving the Church. So he tries.
The problem is that relatability cannot be achieved by imitation. A sixty-year-old bishop does not become relatable to twenty-year-olds by talking like a twenty-year-old. A priest does not become accessible by inserting movie, literary, and cultural references into every homily. A preacher does not become authentic by repeatedly telling a congregation that “this is going to blow your mind.” It does not, in fact, blow anyone’s mind.
People are not asking the priest to become one of them. They are asking him to speak to them. Those are very different things.3
You are not an actor. One of the cruelest things about acting is that bad acting becomes more obvious as the actor tries harder. The same principle applies to preaching.
If you cannot do accents, do not do accents. If you cannot imitate people convincingly, do not imitate people. If you have no comic timing, do not construct the homily around punch lines. If dramatic pauses feel unnatural, stop manufacturing dramatic pauses. If walking around makes you lose your train of thought, remain at the ambo. If your voice does not naturally rise into a passionate crescendo, do not manufacture one—or start shouting—simply because you saw another preacher do it successfully.
There is tremendous freedom in discovering what you cannot do. A homiletics professor should be willing to tell a seminarian, kindly but unmistakably: That is not you.
Not every preacher needs the same style. The quiet priest may become an excellent quiet preacher. The scholarly priest may learn to make scholarship accessible without pretending not to be scholarly. The naturally funny priest can use humor without turning Mass into stand-up comedy.
The awkward priest may even discover that his awkwardness becomes strangely endearing once he stops trying to conceal it. Authenticity is far more attractive than versatility badly performed.
The bishop problem. Bishops face a particular temptation. They spend much of their lives in formal environments: ordinations, confirmations, ceremonies, meetings, conferences, institutional dinners, pastoral visits, official photographs. Understandably, some want to demonstrate that underneath the mitre there is an ordinary human being. Good. There is.
But nothing makes a person appear less ordinary than conspicuously attempting to demonstrate how ordinary he is. The painfully current sociopolitical slang, the TikTok vocabulary, the exaggerated enthusiasm for whatever young people supposedly enjoy, the staged joke with the seminarians, the carefully engineered moment of spontaneity—these things can become the ecclesiastical equivalent of a father walking into his teenager’s bedroom during a sleepover and announcing, “What’s up, fellow kids?”
There is nothing wrong with dignity. There is nothing wrong with age. There is nothing wrong with behaving like a bishop when you are, in fact, a bishop.
A seventy-year-old man who speaks naturally as a seventy-year-old man can be tremendously compelling. He has lived seventy years. He has buried people. He has watched families break apart and come together. He has seen faith survive suffering. He has presumably accumulated some wisdom. Why throw all that away in order to sound twenty-three?
The best preachers are not always the most entertaining. This is perhaps the deeper confusion. We increasingly assume that communication must be entertaining in order to be effective. But some of the most powerful things one human being ever says to another are not entertaining at all:
“Your mother has died.”
“I was wrong.”
“I love you.”
“I forgive you.”
“Do not be afraid.”
“You need to stop.”
Words acquire power not merely through performance but through the credibility of the person speaking them, the circumstance, and the truth.4
The Gospel already contains extraordinary material: betrayal, greed, cowardice, illness, hunger, forgiveness, violence, hypocrisy, mercy, injustice, death, resurrection, hope, judgment, love. If a preacher believes he must improve this material by becoming an amateur actor, something has gone badly wrong.
The task is not to make the Gospel interesting. The Gospel is interesting. The task is to prevent ourselves from getting in its way.5
Speak like a human being. Perhaps that should be the first instruction in homiletics. Not like a theological textbook. Not like a motivational speaker. Not like a social-media influencer. Not like what you imagine a young person sounds like.
Speak in your own voice. Then work on that voice.
Remove unnecessary words. Learn where sentences should end. Learn to tell a story without taking seven minutes to establish the background. Learn that three examples are usually worse than one good example. Learn when a joke helps and when it breaks the emotional weight of what you have just said. Learn the difference between silence and a dramatic pause. Learn the difference between warmth and ingratiation. Learn the difference between emphasis and shouting.6
Most of all, learn that the congregation does not need to admire you in order to hear you. Learn how long ten minutes actually feels from the pew.
The homily is not about you. This may be the hardest lesson. A good homily can reveal something of the preacher. Inevitably it will. His intelligence, experience, temperament, humor, grief, faith, doubts, and peculiarities will find their way into his preaching. But self-revelation is different from self-display.
The preacher should never become the most interesting character in every Gospel passage.
If every story returns to him, every joke showcases him, every emotional moment centers on him, and every conclusion depends upon the congregation recognizing how clever, compassionate, unconventional, funny, or relatable he is, then the homily has quietly changed its subject.
The congregation came to hear the Word proclaimed.7 They did not come to watch Father audition.
There is an old-fashioned virtue that deserves rehabilitation in preaching: self-possession.
Know who you are. Know what you can do. Know what you cannot do. Do not panic because another priest is funnier. Do not imitate the bishop who can tell stories beautifully. Do not copy the preacher with three million YouTube views. Do not become a second-rate version of somebody else.
Become a better version of the preacher you actually are. Because there is something far worse than being boring for ten minutes: spending those ten minutes desperately trying to prove that you are not.
Some things are better left unsung. And, finally, please do not sing simply because you have a microphone and a captive congregation. Some priests seem to imagine that randomly breaking into song while preaching or singing above the congregation will reveal a hidden talent and leave the faithful thinking, Good heavens, Father missed his calling!
But more often, the congregation is thinking something quite different while staring heroically at the hymn book. There is no sacramental grace by which tone deafness becomes musical ability, and possession of an alb does not confer the charism of Broadway or Nashville. If you genuinely have a beautiful voice, fine. If you do not, the people in the pews already know it—usually several notes before you do.
1. Jana Childers, Performing the Word: Preaching as Theatre (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 47–56.
2. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 17–76.
3. Lucy Atkinson Rose, Sharing the Word: Preaching in the Roundtable Church (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 90, 98.
4. Aristotle, Aristotle’s “Art of Rhetoric”, trans. Robert C. Bartlett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 1.2, 1356a2–13.
5. Read the whole preface in Richard Lischer, A Theology of Preaching: The Dynamics of the Gospel, rev. ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001).
6. Fred B. Craddock, Preaching, 25th anniversary ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010), 210–22.
7. Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching, 3rd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), 114–16.