Jamin Bradley

“Bombing so bad.” “Crickets.” “Why is no one laughing.”

I occasionally get these kinds of comments on my preaching clips on various social media outlets. Such comments are generally meaningless to me because they come from a genre disconnect. They see a fancy stage and assume I’m doing stand-up. The camera follows me around like it does a comedian. I’m smiling and trying to maintain a high energy to engage an audience. I’m cracking a joke here and there to keep people awake.

But these are not comedian clips—they are preaching clips that land in a church video genre. The stage is not a nightclub, but a modern church. There is often no audience mic used in such videos, causing congregational engagement to not be captured in the video. Add to this that comedy is hit or miss for preachers on any given Sunday. Sure, sometimes the preacher isn’t funny, but many pastors would comment on how some Sundays the congregation just won’t bite at anything for no reason in particular. Sometimes you’re a guest preacher and you’re still trying to earn people’s trust before they’re willing to laugh at you. Regardless of the response, the pastor must maintain energy, crack a joke here and there to keep them awake, and make their way through the sermon.

Everything gets messed up when you misunderstand genre: Your understanding of what is trying to be accomplished; your judgment as to whether the material is quality or not; your expectations of what the material should sound like; and, most importantly, what the content actually means to communicate. You mess up genre, and you might mess up everything.

We do this with the Bible all the time. When the creation story of Genesis is read as nonfiction instead of as an ancient creation myth, we are left arguing between science and theology. When we forget that Revelation is a letter to seven specific churches, we forget that 666 was a number that John’s modern audience understood, not something we’re supposed to read into today. When we don’t understand that ancient biographies played by entirely different rules than modern biographies, we find the gospels dishonest at best, and false at worst. When we forget that there are several different forms of prophecy among the prophets and that they wrote to many different audiences, we misread them in a million ways.

The Bible is a genre minefield, and how you read it from a literary perspective matters deeply. To widen your knowledge on this subject, I highly suggest Andrew Judd’s book, Modern Genre Theory.