Check your last few sermon titles and see which of the following you created:
- Market-driven title (like Fear Factor, which plays off the TV show)
- Content-driven title (The Damaging Affects of Fear)
- Application-driven title (How Christ Conquers Our Fears)
Most of us tend to gravitate toward one form of title. Over the last several years I’ve noticed an increase in the number of sermon titles designed to gain attention. You can maximize the impact of your title by creating them with an applicational element. Considering that the sermon title is often read before the sermon begins, an application-driven title can help you communicate before you begin preaching. Before the sermon begins, anyone who reads the title begins to process what your preaching portion is intended to do.
Thanks Randy. I’ve never given much thought to sermon titles. In seminary, the only guidance I remember on sermon titles was to keep it at five words or less. It strikes me that an applicational sermon title will compel us to be applicational in our sermon. And that would be a good thing!
Chris, I’d be curious to know which category your titles usually fall under. The trend towards marketing titles seems to be cross-denominational.
REP
Here are my last 17 sermon titles, starting from the most recent:
The Fruit of Friendship
Friends Lay Down Their Lives
I Have Called You Friends
The Measure of Discipleship
Jesus Welcomes the Children
Key Bible Words: Sanctification
Key Bible Words: Justification
Witness to the Resurrrection
Resurrection: The Best Explanation
He Enters Into Our Suffering
More Lessons on Prayer
Live By Faith
A Lesson on Prayer
When You Don’t Understand
From Bad To Worse
From Complaining to Rejoicing
Key Bible Words: Lord
I guess these would be described as content-driven. I confess to investing little time on sermon titles. And since the secretary needs my text and title often before I am clear on the direction of my message, the title is non-committal. While I’m confessing, it’s not unusual for me to tell the congregation at the beginning of the message to ignore the title because the message went in a direction quite different than expected. This could be avoided I suppose if I planned my sermons more in advance. But I’ve never been able to pull that off. I’ll plan a series ahead of time, but the particular sermon gets planned the week of.
Chris, thanks for sharing the titles. It was interesting to see three of them (#’s 2, 12, and 16) are applicational titles I was referring to in the earlier post. Thank you for confessing your homiletical sins. Keep up the good work of faith.
I don’t bother giving my sermons a title because the only place it would appear is in the bulletin and I don’t know how much of an impact that would have on a bulletin reader. None of my sermons appear anywhere in print. I try to make sure my topic, purpose of the sermon is included in the introduction. Time better spent elsewhere than on titles.
Thanks for adding to the discussion. I couldn’t agree with you more that we can take too much time creating “catchy” titles. However, you did mention that you put the title in the bulletin. My thoughts are that if congregants read the sermon title before the sermon time, I want the title to begin the process of application. So, if they read your title, they already get a glimpse of the response God is after in your preaching portion. I trust you are well. Folks speak well of you in our faith-family.