Preaching with a movie director’s sensibility

LOUISVILLE — “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 Synod of the Covenant webinar last week to consider using a filmmaker’s techniques and sensibilities when crafting and delivering their sermons.

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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.”

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 on Wednesday.

“I’m not in this for the filmmaking industry,” Hannan added. “I’m in it for the gospel.”

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.’” Filmmakers and preachers alike “use techniques that can be traditional and/or unconventional.” Both work interactively and collaboratively. Both crafts require “a balance of perspiration and inspiration,” what Chandler calls “the mundane and the magical.”

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” or “I am taking the point of view of Peter.”

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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 church-goers were impacted by a sermon and could share their experience beyond ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it.’”

One participant said in previous churches he’s served, he and his wife, who’s also a pastor, did a series on theology at the movies. “What we were sharing with them is, can you use this as a vehicle for talking about faith? I saw this movie and I think it’s trying to tie in with how I think God’s telling us how to love one another,” this pastor said. “It wasn’t necessarily to get people to remember what they heard in the sermon. It was to get people to share what they felt about a film — which they had no problem doing — as an opening to conversations about matters of faith.”

“We’re harnessing where impact is already happening for our congregation members,” Hannan replied. “We’re saying, ‘Can you bring that excitement here? What do I need to do as a preacher for you to bring that?’ The thing I learned from filmmakers is they are always thinking about the impact on the audience. They’re not afraid of talking about emotion … I want preachers to be as intentional about their sermons and their potential impact as filmmakers are.”

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.”

“If you see the scene first, you will help us see it,” she said. “You’re doing it with your own words. It’s still an oral/aural practice, but you’re thinking like a filmmaker and setting the scene.”

“You are in the writers’ room. You have to decide, how are we going to start this thing? Talk through it,” Hannan advised. “It’s Bible study. When it comes time to proclaim the message, it’s going to lock into the memory and have an impact on your hearers as well.”

“Our Scripture is scandalous. Something is at stake for you and for me,” Hannan said. Filmmakers, and preachers too, “want to create something that makes the audience react.”

“We want something to happen to the hearers,” she said. “While rarely does a single sermon move mountains, it can move us to feel something and maybe even to do something.”

The Rev. Dr. Raj Nadella, who teaches New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, will lead the next workshop for frequent preachers, offered by the Synod of the Covenant at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, March 5. His topic is “Preaching in the Face of Scandalous Wealth.” Learn more and register here.