One question that has arrived in the Inbox as a result of yesterday's post on the difference between public figures and celebrities has interesting implications for preaching.  The question is about the legitimacy of self-reference in sermons.  The questioner gives the following reason for asking (names have been changed to avoid being sued):

"In this context I find Pastor X, for example, a real turn-off as a preacher because in order to hear him speak about Jesus for ten minutes, you have to put up with (at least) thirty minutes of shameless self-promotion, stories about himself and his personal history, and talk of his "beautiful wife and amazing kids".  Yawn.  He simply imitates, rather than challenges, his idolatrous, celeb-mad generation."

Reference to self in sermons is a difficult area.   We do live in a relational age that responds to narrative and also to knowing that what is being taught is meaningful to the one teaching.   There is nothing wrong with wanting to know that the preacher really believes what he is proclaiming nor with an attention to narrative form.  The Bible itself is mostly made up of narratives of one kind or another.   What we need to beware, however, is allowing this attention to narrative and this desire for `authenticity' (yuck) to become a means of drawing attention to the preacher, of becoming our equivalent of the chat show celebrity confessional, and of thus distracting from Christ.

A number of points seem apposite, gleaned from conversations with other colleagues about this very point:

If somebody spends more time in the pulpit talking about themselves than about the Bible and Christ, then they are preaching themselves and not Christ crucified.  If they talk about themselves for twenty minutes and expound the Bible for twenty minutes, that is a twenty minute sermon, not a forty minute one; and it feeds the cult of personality, not the body of Christ.

While Paul does on occasion refer to himself, it seems to be in two basic ways.  First, he will speak about his pre-conversion life as a means of magnifying the grace of God (eg. Acts 26, 1 Tim. 1).   Second, he will on occasion boast - but when he does this he is sarcastically adopting the strategy of his critics as a means of making their position look ridiculous, not as a means of making himself look big (2 Cor. 11; note especially the rationale he gives in 2 Cor. 11:30). Indeed, on the one occasion where he possibly does talk about a spectacular experience he has had, he uses the third person as a means of deflecting attention from himself (2 Cor. 12). The one thing he never does is give random tidbit insights into his private life for the purpose of making himself look like one of the guys, or somebody special etc. Preachers need to do the same, to avoid preaching themselves and to avoid preparing the ground for celebrification.

Never use an anecdote about your family which demeans or embarrasses them.

Think very, very carefully before you use names of those shown in a negative light when offering an example of sin or failure drawn from your own private world of friends and acquaintances.  

When you have finished preaching a sermon in which you referenced yourself in a favorable light, ask yourself if the reference was really necessary.  Did it serve to illustrate a biblical point or merely to draw attention to yourself?  Could you have made the point effectively without referencing yourself in the first person?

And if you are an elder in a church where a congregant asks why they have to sit through thirty minutes of the preacher talking about himself before he talks about the Bible or Christ, intervene and educate the man in the pulpit about what biblical preaching is.  If he will not listen, then take the obvious and necessary action, however big a crowd he manages to pull each week.