Lumpers and Stretchers

My good friend and outstanding gospel preacher Ralph Walker once asked me if I was a lumper or a stretcher. I did not know what he meant until he explained that all preachers are either lumpers or stretchers. A lumper would preach the “seven sayings of the cross” as one lesson, and a stretcher would preach the same as a seven part series. Based on this definition, I qualify as a stretcher (actually, a lumpy stretcher!).

Medieval monk Bernard of Clairvaux has to win the award for all time greatest stretcher. He wrote 86 sermons on the Song of Solomon! How he managed to wrangle 86 sermons out of a book of eight small chapters is beyond me. Either he possessed deep insight, or a fertile imagination, or a little of both.

There are strengths and weaknesses to each approach. A lumper may cover much more material, but in a shallow manner. A stetcher may be more exhaustive, but he may bore his audience by tedious attention to detail. And stretchers always have to guard against stretching the text to the breaking point by finding far more in the text than really exists.

As a younger preacher I was definitely a lumper. When I look back at old outlines, I see about 25-30 points, each accompanied by a proof-text. Now I tend to camp out in one paragraph of Scripture and draw just three or four main points. One old lumper lesson on denominationalism I recently stretched into a four part series. Did I improve the lesson? I hope-but I may have just made “homiletical meatloaf” - a little meat with a lot of filler!

I am not going to ague the case for the superiority of one method over another. As long as the man of God is true to the word, that is all that matters. And in reality, it takes all kinds of preachers to reach all kinds of people. We need lumpers and stretchers, those who holler and those who never raise their voice, those who laugh and cry and those who are reserved.

I imagine that based on the disparaging way the Pharisees described John the Baptist and Jesus that they must have been very different stylistically. They accused John of being an ascetic (“John came neither eating or drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’”) and Jesus of being profligate (“The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard’”). But however they differed, their message was the same: “Repent.” And that is what ultimately mattered most.

Timothy and Titus apparently were of very different temperaments. Paul warned the Corinthians not to give Timothy a reason to be fearful (1 Corinthians 16:10), perhaps indicative of a milder spirit (this may also explain references like 2 Timothy 1:7 and 1 Timothy 5:23). Titus, on the other hand, was the messenger Paul uses to deliver his stinging rebukes to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 7:6-8), and worked in the wild country of Crete.

The points is that God can use all kinds of men and styles, and as long as we are true to the word, God will accomplish much through us. That being the case, I would suggest that those of us who preach spend more time appreciating the different talents and abilities of our colleagues and less time criticizing them. There is room in the kingdom for all of us, and plenty of work to do, whether as a lumper or stretcher.