Mission Yearbook: Preaching with a movie director’s sensibility

“Lights! Camera! Sermon!”

Those who gather for worship in PC(USA) faith communities aren’t likely to hear those words spoken from the pulpit anytime soon. But the Rev. Dr. Shauna Hannan, Professor of Homiletics at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary (of California Lutheran University), urged those attending a recent Synod of the Covenant webinar to consider using a filmmaker’s techniques and sensibilities when crafting and delivering their sermons.

Along with filmmaker Gael Chandler, Hannan wrote “Scripting a Sermon: Using the Wisdom of Filmmaking for Impactful Preaching,” published in November by Westminster John Knox Press. Watch her 88-minute webinar hosted by the Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick, Synod of the Covenant’s executive, here.

The extent to which we are wired to our screens, big and small, “makes it worth a preacher’s time to become adept at the language of film,” Hannan said. “It’s what our congregation knows. It’s what we know. Increasingly, people are becoming literate in the contemporary language of cinema … likely at a rate faster than our biblical and theological history.”

The Rev. Dr. Shauna Hannan

For many people, Hannan said, “visual images — whether still images or moving images — have replaced text as the central tool of communication.”

For years, Hannan has been pondering “might screen and cinematic literacy be today’s printing press of sorts — the way to get the word out, the way to get the conversation started?” In the book and in the presentations, she makes, Hannan tries to both boost preachers’ cinematic literacy and “seek convergences between filmmaking and homiletics for the purposes of enlivening the preached word, communicating the gospel and impacting hearers and their world, and our world,” she told the preachers gathered online.

Participants pointed out some of the many differences between making a film and developing a sermon. Among them was the former can take years, and the latter must be repeated weekly.

Hannan pointed out a number of similarities. Both “seek to impact others and/or the world.” Both “do so by paying attention to the reactions and subsequent actions of the ‘audience.’”

Hannan encourages her seminary students to study the first three minutes of a film they admire. “Try to identify the impact. What’s it doing to you? How is it doing that?” she tells them. “How does it make me sit on the edge of my seat?”

“What’s the learning for us as preachers? Do we engage a similar variety in the way we open our sermons?” Hannan said. “Could you add to your homiletical repertoire multiple ways of opening a sermon?”

Those in worship have the capacity for only “five or six major moves” during a sermon, Hannan said. Fortunately for preachers, “the Spirit shows up and does things. We have more available to us than we’re using.”

Her students write “here’s what I’m doing and why” in the margins of their sermons, Hannan said. “They’re giving me the director’s cut. … I’m opening here because this is what I want to happen” or “I’m doing a closeup on the Samaritan woman.”

Then Hannan asked webinar participants: Have you ever wondered why so many people share the impact a film has made on them? “Most worshipers rarely talk with one another about their worship experience, especially the sermon,” she said. “Imagine if churchgoers were impacted by a sermon and could share their experience beyond ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it.’”

Hannan quoted filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, who once noted, “One doesn’t set the camera at a certain angle just because the camera [operator] happens to be enthusiastic about that shot. The only thing that matters is whether the installation of the camera at a given angle is going to give the scene its maximum impact.”

We do this in our sermons as well, Hannan said. “Wherever the camera is and whatever it’s looking at is where [preachers] are putting our hearers into the story,” she said. Preachers who are stuck with where to go next in their sermon preparation can think of using a wide shot, a medium shot or a closeup.

“Be the cinematographer. Be the director,” Hannan said. “Before you launch into the sermon crafting, hang out with the biblical story.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS story)

Let us join in prayer for:

• Hyo Jin Kang, Senior Administrative Assistant, Asian & Korean Intercultural Congregational Support Offices, Interim Unified Agency
• Shawn Kang,  Associate, Central & West Regions, 1001 New Worshiping Communities, Interim Unified Agency 

Let us pray:

Creator God, thank you for those you have called to serve in ministry. Bless the work that is done in your name. Amen.