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Sermon Style

Introduction

The black sermon has been observed to be stated in the vernacular with such a musical timing and inflection that people have frequently compared its style with improvised jazz. Most of the sermon is spontaneous around a matrix which is both profane and sacred. The style is consistent enough that anyone who would enter virtually any Methodist, Baptist or Pentecostal church and hear the similar form of sermon. This is assured by the congregation who answers at every opportunity the preacher verbally and coming up with the call and response pattern that sometimes come to a very frightening intensity.

Discussion

The best part of black preaching is that content; form and dialect do not change all through the United States. Even if they do change, the change is usually very minor. There a number of reasons for this and the most important is that since the black people migrated east, North West, they went on to take their religion with them. Another major reason is that the preachers of new generation are taught through the oral tradition of direct contact with their own pastors and the oral tradition of radio evangelism. Influence of outside has not much worked on this style.

Although the term 'Preacher' is a very general term, but we can specifically define the differences that are there between pastors, preachers, healers and evangelists. Pastors are the one who run the local churches and supervise the administrative and organizational matters. But the preachers do not really run churches although it is possible that they may be a member of a church and they can preach anywhere they want. Evangelists are those Itinerant preachers who either assist in gaining members of the different pastors by travelling from church to church or they tend to travel with their own tent and get advanced publicity either through their cooperation with other local churches who frequently share in the offering as well as the tent ministry, or through their own nationally broadcasted radio programs.

The black sermon is said to be formulaic but it is heavily dependant on the improvisations that usually the congregation inspires to fill out the formula of sermon. The most insightful categorization and the definition of the sermon is provided to us by Gerald Davis who says that a sermon is a narrative system in which principles and rationalized sets of conventions are incorporated to support the articulation of belief, existence and cosmological considerations the African American people experience in their lives. Davis has defined a set of 5 formulaic boundaries that are present in the sermon and each of these is supposed to be performed in a predefined order. These boundaries include the text that the preacher indicates under the divine inspiration, the identification of the theme of the sermon after which a proper quotation from the bible follows, interprets which are first given literally and then broadly the bible passage is quoted, theme related or independent formulas, retarding or developing a secular or a ...