If you’ve ever heard a sermon entitled “A Plethora of Pentateuch Principles for Preventing Pre-Teen Promiscuity and Potent Punishments for the Perverted Participants” chances are it was in a fundamentalist church.
(I’m out of town traveling on business this week so updates are likely to be a little sparse.)
Man, you’re good.
Alliteration:
1. is highly overrated
2. too often exaggerated
3. usually tolerated
4. but needs to be obliterated
😉
Alliterated messages should be no longer than three points. Same with rhyming points or in fact, any clever little points. Keep them short and sweet. If you are using alliteration so people can remember the points, then keep the message short and to the point and they may remember that too!
One of the best examples I’ve seen is a church website where all 16 navigation items are alliterated. That has to be some kind of record. Wanna see the link?
yes, please, jj
I was once speaking with a well-known evangelist in the movement and was astonished to hear that even when he had no time to prepare an answer to my question beforehand, the answer was three points alliterated. This was completely off-the-cuff, as if he instinctively went for three alliterated points without trying. There are novelists and poets who would kill to be able to do that…
Closely tied to this is the practice of using each letter of a word for the next point in the outline. At MBBC, I once heard the founder preach a message where he used “Maranatha” as his outline — all 9 letters.
All in agreement to abolish aliteration, say Aye, Alright, and Amen. I absolutely abhor aliteration!! Amen?
How about a sermon titled “The assinity of alliteration”?
whoa. That’ll preach.
Oh oh OH I love this post! One of my former pastors (fundy church of course) had an aliterated outline, helpfully inserted into the bulletin, EVERY week.
In all fairness, that man, while he WAS a fundy-church pastor, he was one of the least fundy people I met in that world! and COULD preach/teach a good sermon..unless my memory is failing me or I thought they were better at the time than they actually were. Both are possible. 😉