Determining the Form: Structures for Preaching

This fifth title in the Elements of Preaching series offers preaching students and clergy an overview of some of the most common sermonic forms and provides insights for determining which forms are most - and least - amenable to the claim that they want to make in their sermon. Many, if not most, sermons wind up being somewhat formless and thus less effective than they might be in communicating the gospel. Rather than training students in a single rhetorical form, this volume will demonstrate a variety of options without advocating for any particular form.

Accomplished preachers can think of rhetorical strategy in a nuanced manner, but beginning preachers are well-served by having a knapsack of simple sermonic forms they can turn to when building a sermon out of a sermonic claim. This book will offer preachers a strong foundation in considering sermonic form and a handful of basic, reliable rhetorical structures to use in the pulpit.

O. Wesley Allen Jr. is associate professor of homiletics and worship at Lexington Theological Seminary. He is author of numerous books, including Determining the Form (2008), in the Elements of Preaching series, which he also edited, and editor of The Renewed Homiletic (2010).