Every preacher should read Book IV of St. Augustine’s classic De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Teaching). Its 40-odd pages basically constitute the first homiletics handbook. And it is not dry. The great father of the Church comes in hot, shooting straight fire from the get-go.
“A speaker who clarifies something that needs to be learnt is a blessing,” he writes, “but a speaker who labors things already learnt is a bore.”[1] Preach it, Augie!
“Learning has a lot in common with eating,” he says, “to cater for the dislikes of the majority even the nutrients essential to life must be made appetizing.”[2] Let Augustine cook!
And a word of caution, especially for folks like myself who can be tempted to put the rhetorical cart before the spiritual horse:
[The Christian orator] should be in no doubt that any ability he has and however much he has derives more from his devotion to prayer than his dedication to oratory; and so, by praying for himself and for those he is about to address, he must become a man of prayer before becoming a man of words. As the hour of his address approaches, before he opens his thrusting lips he should lift his thirsting soul to God so that he may utter what he has drunk in and pour out what has filled him.[3]
Let the one who has ears to hear, hear—or shall we say, let the one who has lips to speak, drink.