Review: Passion in the Pulpit

Passion in the Pulpit: Delivering Persuasive Sermons Without Being Manipulative

by Jerry Vines and Adam Dooley

Rhetoricians all agree effective persuasion must have, as Aristotle said, the logos, ethos, and pathos for effective communication. It's important what you say, it's important who says it, and it's important how it is said. This book deals with the pathos, an emotional side of persuasive communication. But how can you consider the pathos of a sermon, without being manipulative and deceiving? The key is to get in the Scripture, understand what it says until you feel the message yourself. By doing that, your emotion and delivery will match the original author’s emotion and pathos.

This book teaches that you need to read the passage and see the pathos and emotional flow of the original author, and the speaker must match that emotional delivery. If the text is sad, then the speaker must then communicate this sadness of the text through his delivery, illustrations, and mannerism. The text itself will set the bounds for our emotional delivery in the pulpit. In other words, screaming at the top of your lungs, "God loves you!" while banging your fists on the pulpit with an angry scowl probably doesn't communicate the emotional flow of the text. Giggling over the destruction of Jerusalem doesn’t convey the Weeping Prophet’s pathos.

The first section deals with how to determine the Scriptures own pathos in the text, and then moves to ways to incorporate that in the message through language and lastly through delivery. In other words, we exegete the Words of Scripture, we ought to also exegete the pathos of Scripture.

The book is co-authored, but it's clear who is writing what. Dooley writes the majority of the book and Vines has a section called In The Pulpit at the end of every chapter where he summarizes and illustrates the principles of that chapter. This book doesn’t give you whiplash like many co-authored books do when going back and forth between the author’.

Many good thoughts to consider.

Thanks to Netgalley.com for the review copy.