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Most of us have been taught to believe that preachers who “perform” their sermons are mistaking their task for some kind of acting in the pulpit. I tended to share that view, at least until I heard a presentation by Ruthanna Hooke, author of Transforming Preaching, who helped me realize that the word “perform” and even the word “act” should not be disrespected by preachers who aspire to something more than hypothetics.

In other words, the best preachers don’t just suggest themes for consideration at some more convenient time. The best preachers enact the themes of Scripture, often in the very act of preaching itself.

When a doctor “performs surgery” the patient is deeply and dramatically affected. To “act” on a lawyer’s advice, is to actually make a substantive change that could, in fact, keep one out of jail. To “perform” the Scriptures in preaching, is not simply to state, describe, or recommend the truths found therein, but to act-ually put them into practice. Hooke says, “to perform the text – to learn it by heart, interpret it, and embody it – is to lose this easy familiarity and discover anew its strangeness and unexpectedness (p. 111).”

In my own writing and teaching, I have described the importance of “assimilating” the message and the sermon before preaching it. This is, I have come to see, an act of performance. Hooke says that it is “helpful to “perform” the texts of Scripture on which you will be preaching, which means to take several steps beyond reciting it or reading it out loud.”

This is, she says, “to learn the passage by heart, and then to act out the text as one would act out the script of a play, or to retell it as one would tell a story. To perform a passage of Scripture means to take on the voice of the characters, to stage the action, to decide what the scene looks like (110).”

This has a lot to commend it as a way of thinking about our preparation for preaching. But even more, it speaks to the importance we need to place in our own appropriation of the themes we are preaching. Preaching ought never to be hypothetical. We all must allow the sermon to perform its work upon our own hearts. That will prepare us well to act upon the things that we hear from the Word and then, to “make it so” for our listeners also, through our preaching.

Hooke, Ruthanna B. Transforming Preaching. “Transformations” Series edited by James Lemler. The Episcopal Church of the 21st Century. New York: Church Publishing, 2010.