Summer 2009 | Volume 67, No. 4

Calvin Pearson: The Preacher's Style

by Benjamin Hawkins

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According to Southwestern Seminary professor Calvin Pearson, preachers are much like actors.

“An actor communicates the meaning of a text to his audience,” said Pearson, who serves as the associate professor of preaching and sits in the E. Hermon Westmoreland Chair of Preaching at Southwestern. “He trains his body and his voice to accurately interpret a play.

“Well, what are we (preachers) doing? We are not presenting a play. We are presenting God’s Word, and we are using the same tools: our bodies, our voices.”

This comparison comes naturally for Pearson. At age 15, he surrendered to God’s call to the ministry. During high school, he enrolled in speech and debate classes in order to prepare for this call to preach. The high school drama teacher taught Pearson’s speech class and convinced him to perform in school plays. As a result, he developed a passion for acting and pursued a bachelor’s degree in theater at Houston Baptist University. During this period, he also performed with the AD Players in Houston, an acting company on a mission to present morally uplifting productions.

This interest in theater never overcame Pearson’s desire to preach. After college, he pursued theological degrees at Southwestern Seminary, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Gordon-Conwell Seminary, and he served in several pastorates for nearly 20 years. He noted, however, that his earlier training as an actor proved beneficial because it improved his skills necessary for communicating God’s Word.

According to Pearson, great preachers throughout history have recognized the benefit of such training. For example, the great revival preacher George Whitefield was well known as an actor, and Charles Spurgeon encouraged preachers to study acting to improve their craft.

Pearson also sees value in the art of rhetoric, that is, the art of persuasion, and he has studied it at the University of Texas at Arlington. Some Christians discourage the use of rhetoric in preaching because they see in the apostle Paul a preacher who presents “Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2, NKJV) without refinement of speech. According to Pearson, however, Paul used rhetoric all the time, and instead of opposing refined presentations of the Gospel, he warned people not to put their trust in presentation style but rather in the content of the Gospel.

“We must always remember it is God working through His Word that brings about change,” Pearson added. “We are his tools, and we must strive to be as sharp as possible.”

At Southwestern, Pearson teaches an advanced elective course in voice and speech improvement to seminary students. He also passes along the skills he has gained from the study of acting and rhetoric through introductory preaching courses.

“My goal in the introduction to preaching class,” he said, “is that each student would experience preaching,” and not merely learn rules and concepts of preaching.

When Pearson attended the seminary in the 1970s, he was never required to preach during introductory preaching classes. When he began teaching at the seminary in 2002, he insisted that all of his students gain preaching experience during class. Today all preaching professors at Southwestern require this from their students.

“I love to see students understand that their job is to announce what God has already said,” Pearson added. The preacher’s duty is not to say what he thinks about God and the Bible but to declare what God has already said in Scripture.

In the fall 2008 Expository Preaching Workshop, Pearson noted that it is the truth of Scripture that separates the preacher from the post-modern rhetorician. The post-modern speaker has rhetoric, but never arrives at truth. As a result, they place their emphasis on rhetoric, and their arguments never end. The preacher, however, should never forget that he finds absolute truth in God’s Word. Rhetoric and style should only serve to declare this truth.

“Now, what I want to do this morning is to give you some ideas of argumentation theory so you can use all of those things … to help people see what God’s Word is saying, all the while standing next to the cross of Christ,” Pearson told his audience. “I want to use everything I can think of to communicate God’s Word.”

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