# Would this be beneficial?



## Notthemama1984 (Sep 21, 2010)

So continuing my thoughts on preaching......

I had the privilege of taking some music composition courses at a junior college years ago. My prof told me that the biggest mistake with young composers is trying to do too much at once. Because of this, my first semester was devoted to composing a set of children's pieces for toy piano all of which were in simple menuet form. The forced me to stay in two octaves (that is all a toy piano has), around 25 measures, and have a simple ABA' form. If I could not write something as simple as this, then I had no business writing a larger piece of work. 

In my second semester I chose a piece that I enjoyed, broke it down and used it as a guide in composing my own piece. So if the original piece had a four measure phrase, then I would have a four measure phrase. When the original modulated, I would modulate. This again provided barriers for me to work in. It was my melody, my motif, and the overall feel of the piece was mine, but deep down I had reigns that would keep me focused.

So thinking about all of that, would something along those lines be advantageous for someone new to preaching. Maybe taking a good sermon, dissecting it, and constructing one's own sermon based upon the overall structure of the original sermon (I would not use a sermon based on the same passage. That would make it too easy to copy. I would maybe construct a sermon on John 1:1 based upon an Edwards sermon on Ephesians 2 or something like that.)? It seems that the theology of a sermon would be taken care of through one's studying, but the art of organizing a sermon tends to be lacking in alot of preaching (as Gordon pointed out). After using another sermon as a guideline numerous times, one would theoretically begin to develop their own voice and recognize how they prefer to organize their thoughts (or so this was the theory in my music comp class).



I will end my thoughts for now. I really need to get back to studying my Greek vocabulary.


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## JennyG (Sep 22, 2010)

I know it wasn't the main point, but I'm fascinated by your account of the composition class. It's more or less exactly the method by which I learned, though not formally.
[attempts to wrench the topic back on course..] I think the same approach would work with a lot of other things too. C S Lewis says somewhere that it's almost always a big mistake to aim for originality. Following and imitating a master will teach you far more, and if you have anything of your own to say, it will inevitably appear once you've mastered the form in that way. If that's true in the arts, how much more in the higher pursuit?
May all your preaching be blessed!


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