The Four Main Types of Sermons: Expository, Topical, Textual, Narrative

# The Four Main Types of Sermons

Most preaching handbooks sort sermons into four families: expository, topical, textual and narrative. The categories are useful, but they describe tendencies rather than walls. Plenty of good sermons sit between two of them, and no serious preacher stays in one lane for a career.

What the categories are genuinely good for is diagnosis. When a sermon is not working, it is often because the preacher chose one shape and then tried to do the job of another. Knowing the four helps you name that.

What are the four main types of sermons?

In one sentence each:

Expository. The structure of the sermon comes from the structure of one passage. You explain the text in its own order and let its divisions become your points.

Topical. The structure comes from a subject: anxiety, generosity, marriage, suffering. Scripture is gathered from wherever it speaks to that subject.

Textual. The structure comes from a short text, often one or two verses, whose parts are unfolded and then developed with material from beyond that text. It sits between expository and topical.

Narrative. The structure follows a story arc rather than a list of points. Tension is raised and resolved, and the sermon lands where the story lands.

Two things are worth saying before the detail. First, these are not ranked. Each has produced sermons people remember for decades and sermons that wasted a Sunday. Second, the categories describe the shape of the sermon, not its faithfulness. A topical sermon can be rigorously biblical and an expository sermon can be a lazy verse-by-verse paraphrase.

The traditions differ on emphasis here, and that is a real difference rather than a misunderstanding. Lectionary traditions build the year around assigned texts, which favors expository and textual work. Many free-church traditions favor series planning, which produces more topical preaching. Both are trying to make sure the congregation hears the whole counsel of God rather than the preacher's favorite quarter of it.

What is expository preaching?

Expository preaching takes one passage and lets that passage set the agenda: what it says, in the order it says it, applied to the people in the room.

How it is built. You read the passage until you can state its main claim in a sentence. You find its natural divisions, and those become your points. Your job in the sermon is to make the passage's own argument, in your own words, to this congregation.

What it does well. It protects the congregation from you. Over a series, the text raises subjects you would not have chosen, including the ones you find uncomfortable. It also teaches people to read: they watch you handle a passage and slowly learn to handle passages themselves. And it makes preparation tractable, because the question "what am I preaching on?" is already answered.

Where it fails. The characteristic failure is the running commentary: a sermon that explains every clause, has no single claim, and applies nothing. Verse-by-verse is not automatically expository. If a listener cannot say afterward what the sermon was about, it was a lecture.

The other failure is pace. A verse a week through Romans is sixteen years, and the congregation you started with is not the congregation you finish with. Choose preaching units that a person can hold in mind.

Best for. Regular ministry to the same congregation over time. It is also the safest choice for a first sermon, because the text is doing most of the work.

What is topical preaching?

Topical preaching starts with a subject and gathers Scripture to it. It is what almost every preacher does at a funeral, a wedding, on Mother's Day, and the week after something terrible happens in town.

How it is built. You name the subject narrowly enough to be preachable. "Suffering" is a book; "why God does not always explain himself" is a sermon. Then you find the passages that genuinely address it, and you organize by the logic of the subject.

What it does well. It meets people where their questions are, which is why it is often the most immediately useful preaching a congregation hears. It handles subjects Scripture addresses across many books and no single passage covers well: money, forgiveness, the church's response to a crisis. And it is honest about occasions; a congregation on a national day of mourning is not asking for the next paragraph in your series.

Where it fails. Proof-texting. When the subject sets the agenda, verses get recruited to support a point they were not making. The discipline that saves a topical sermon is to read each passage you cite in its own context and ask whether the author would recognize the use you are putting it to.

The second failure is the preacher's hobbyhorse. A topical diet quietly becomes a diet of the preacher's own convictions, since only the preacher chooses the topics.

Best for. Occasions, crises, felt-need series, and subjects that no one passage covers. A common and healthy pattern is an expository backbone through the year with topical series in between.

What is textual preaching?

Textual preaching takes a short text, usually a verse or two, and derives the sermon's divisions from that text, then develops each division with material from elsewhere in Scripture and from life.

It is worth distinguishing from the other two, because it is the type people most often use without a name for it. An expository sermon on Philippians 4:4-9 works through the whole paragraph. A textual sermon on 1 Corinthians 14:8 takes "For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?" (KJV) and builds the whole sermon from the parts of that one image.

What it does well. It goes deep on a text people can carry home. It suits verses that are dense enough to sustain the weight: 2 Timothy 2:15, Psalm 23:1, Micah 6:8. It also produces memorable structure, because the divisions come from words the congregation just heard read.

Where it fails. The short text becomes a springboard the preacher jumps off and never returns to. If the sermon would be identical had you chosen a different verse, it was topical preaching with a text stapled to the front.

Best for. Rich single verses, and occasions where you want one sentence to stay with people all week.

What is narrative preaching?

Narrative preaching follows the shape of a story rather than a list of points. It may retell a biblical narrative, or it may structure the sermon itself as a movement from tension to resolution.

How it is built. Instead of three points, you have a problem raised early, complicated in the middle, and resolved at the end. The listener's question is not "what is point two?" but "how does this come out?"

What it does well. It fits the material. A third of the Bible is narrative, and chopping a story into three abstract propositions throws away the way the story actually works on a reader. It also holds attention across the middle of a sermon, where point-based structures sag, because unresolved tension pulls people forward.

Where it fails. Two ways. The retelling that adds nothing, where the preacher paraphrases the story with sound effects and never says what it means. And the tension that never resolves, which leaves a congregation feeling something without knowing what to do on Monday.

Best for. Gospel narratives, Old Testament stories, parables, and any congregation that has stopped hearing three-point sermons because they can predict them.

Which sermon type is best for beginners?

Expository, on a short passage. Three reasons.

The structure is given to you. For a new preacher, the hardest single task is deciding what shape the sermon takes. Expository preaching on a short text hands you that decision. The paragraph divides where it divides, and your points follow.

It limits the damage. The failure mode of topical preaching is saying something Scripture does not say. That is a much worse first-sermon outcome than being a little dull.

It builds the skill that everything else needs. Learning to read a passage closely is the base skill under all four types. A preacher who can do that can learn topical and narrative work later; a preacher who cannot will proof-text in every one of the four.

Concretely: pick eight to fifteen verses, state the passage's claim in a sentence, take two or three points from the text's own divisions, one illustration and one application per point. That is the process laid out step by step in how to write your first sermon, and the underlying anatomy of introduction, body and conclusion is in the seven steps to preparing a sermon.

Then, when you have preached ten, deliberately try a narrative sermon. The point of knowing four types is not to pick one and stay there.

Seeing the types side by side

The fastest way to feel the difference is to look at worked outlines on the same kind of material. Our sermon outlines library has passage-by-passage outlines you can read against each other: notice how a narrative passage divides by scene, a psalm by stanza, and an epistle by the turns of its argument. The structure is not imposed on those passages; it is found in them, which is the whole claim of expository preaching and the discipline that keeps the other three honest.