/4 min
Expository, Topical, Narrative: Pick One on Purpose
Most sermons drift between three angles because the minister never chose one. The choice is the work.
A sermon usually has three plausible angles for any given passage. There is an expository angle that traces the structure of the passage as the author wrote it. There is a topical angle that lifts a single doctrine out of the passage and brings the rest of Scripture's witness to bear on it. There is a narrative angle that follows the human shape of the passage — the people, the tension, the resolution — and lets the congregation feel its way to the claim.
Most weak sermons drift between all three. The minister starts expository, finds a topic interesting, branches into a doctrinal aside, remembers a story from chapter four, comes back, and lands somewhere none of the three angles would have landed. The congregation senses the drift even when they cannot name it. The sermon is competent and forgettable.
The fix is to pick one on purpose.
Choosing the angle
The angle is chosen by what your congregation needs to hear from this passage this week, not by what is easiest to assemble. That is a pastoral judgment, not a craft judgment. It depends on knowing the room.
Some passages resist one of the three angles. A psalm of lament resists a tightly expository sermon — the structure is real but secondary to the emotional movement. A polemic from Paul resists a narrative sermon — there is no story, there is an argument. A long genealogy resists topical lift unless you are deliberately doing thematic work. Notice the resistance and let it inform you.
Some passages will accept any of the three, and the angle is genuinely a choice. Choose by what the room needs, not by your habit. Most preachers have a default angle — usually expository or narrative — that they reach for unconsciously. The discipline is to notice the default and override it when the congregation needs something else.
Once chosen, stay disciplined
After the angle is chosen, edit out the moves that belong to the other two. The expository sermon does not need a five-minute story that turns into a narrative aside; the narrative sermon does not need a doctrinal mini-lecture in the middle. The discipline of removing those is what produces a sermon with a single shape.
This does not mean the other angles are wrong. They are not. The expository sermon you preached this week could be the narrative sermon you preach in eighteen months when the same passage comes around again, with the same congregation in a different season. Pick one this week. Keep the other two for later.
A small test
Before you write paragraphs, write your angle in one line at the top of the page: "Expository read of the chiasm at the center of the passage." "Topical sermon on covenant fidelity, drawing the passage as a primary witness." "Narrative reading following the woman in the courtyard."
Re-read the line every twenty minutes while you write. Anything in the manuscript that does not serve that line is a candidate for cutting. Most of what you cut will improve the sermon. Some of what you cut will improve a different sermon, six months from now. Save those bits in a file and let them ripen.
Picking the angle is not an early step in sermon writing. It is the hinge on which the rest of the work turns. Pick it on purpose.