Book Review: Resurrected to Eternal Life: On Dying and Rising by Jürgen Moltmann

Abstract

is a technique advertisers use to enhance the effectiveness of the AIDA process. Storytelling enables listeners to embed themselves in the story and identify with the characters and the plot. “The more experientially engaged persons are with the story and its message, the more motivated they are to continue to process information” (87). At the end of this chapter, Allen and La Ferle offer an engaging example of a single-story sermon (98ff.). The problem they do not acknowledge is that creating a single-story sermon is extremely difficult and time consuming for preachers in the trenches of ministry. The final chapter is entitled, “Advertising Campaigns and Cumulative Preaching.” Advertisers use campaigns to market their products over a period of months and sometimes years. Allen and La Ferle apply this technique to the task of preaching. Seldom does one sermon change lives or the character of a congregation. It is the cumulative effect of preaching over months and years that initiates change. Cumulative preaching is about “effective frequency” (127). Still, the writers caution, repetition is important but too much repetition and the congregation can feel beat up. The homiletic strategies described in this book continue to build on some of the basic principles established by the New Homiletic movement of the 1970s and 1980s but in a fresh and “recalibrated” way. The book emphasizes the importance of experience, emotion, narrative, dissonance, listeners as co-creators, and a focus on action that is God’s action. Sermons are offered along the way (toward the end of chapters 3, 4, and 5) that effectively and creatively demonstrate principles discussed. All through the book, examples of specific commercials are shared to demonstrate a particular principle or strategy at work. The examples are titillating and engaging, taking the reader behind the scenes of the inner working of a commercial. Serendipitously, the examples have caused me to watch commercials more critically with an eye toward spotting the techniques used. My initial reaction to seeing the title of this book was anything but positive. I viewed it as another way of compromising the Christian message to make it more palatable. However, in the opening chapter, the authors reasonably address my concerns about interfacing a most secular discipline that is completely devoted to seeking the attention of consumers with the countercultural message of Christianity. Allen and La Ferle take the best practices in advertising and adapt them to enhancing the best practices in preaching.