Simplicity in Preaching: Hint #2 – Lose the Big Words!

I’m sharing a summary of  J.C. Ryle’s  book, Simplicity in Preaching and this post focuses on his second hint for obtaining simplicity, “Try to use in all your sermons, as far as you can, simple words.”

By simple words Ryle isn’t suggesting a “See Jane run” kind of preaching. Rather, his emphasis here is that we use language that is common in everyday use. Remember, your goal is to be understood and useful to your congregation, not to impress them and wring compliments from them. Ryle urges preachers to avoid what “the poor shrewdly call ‘dictionary’ words.’” In Ryle’s day the rates of illiteracy were much higher than our own and being able to communicate with those whose language skills were limited was a real challenge. So Ryle suggests staying away from words that are:

• Abstract
• Scientific
• Pedantic
• Complicated
• Indefinite
• Very long

He states:

“They (the words above) may seem very fine, and sound very grand, but they are rarely of any use. The most powerful and forcible words, as a rule, are very short.”

It is interesting to read Ryle go on at length a bit about the superiority of strong pure Saxon words over French and Latin. The writing certainly reflects the day he lived in! He quotes a Dr. Gee from his work entitled “Our Sermons” in which the author speaks to this issue of complicated words:

“Talk of happiness rather than felicity, talk of almighty rather than omnipotent, lessen rather than diminish, forbidden rather than proscribed, hateful rather than noxious… call out and draw forth rathe than evoke and educe, dude instead of homo sapiens…”

Okay, I made that last one up.

Come to think of it, our problem with a lot of our post-modern, conversational preaching may not be that we use words that are to complicated. Still, for those of us who want to demonstrate the breadth of our vocabulary, the pulpit is not the place to do it.