Book Reviewed: Robert Stephen Reid, The Four Voices of Preaching: Communicating Faith in a Connected World, rev. ed. (Pasco, WA: Integratio Press, 2024).
Journal of Christian Teaching Practice, Volume 12, 2025 (January – December)
Reviewed By: Rob O’Lynn, D.Min.
Reviewer Affiliation: Kentucky Christian University
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 978-1-959685-17-3
I first came across the work of Robert Stephen Reid early in my ministry career. I was a seminary student and serving a small, rural congregation in northwest Arkansas as a weekend preacher. Wanting to effectively balance the demands of graduate study and preaching two original sermons on Sunday (morning and evening services), I committed to series preaching, a practice that I continue to this day as I now preach for a small, rural congregation in eastern Kentucky. For the morning sermons, I decided to preach from the Gospel of Mark, as it has been my favorite gospel for as long as I can remember. I gathered my resources, which included Preaching Mark by Robert Stephen Reid. At the time, this more rhetorical approach to biblical interpretation and preaching was a bit overwhelming for the young preacher that I was. However, being exposed to Reid’s work would plant a seed that is still producing fruit today.
The next significant time that I crossed paths with Reid’s work was in the summer of 2011, when I began my doctoral work and was hired to teach full-time at my current institution. One of my first courses was an introductory course in preaching for undergraduate ministry students. I knew I wanted something that would address the preacher as a person and would complement the methodological text that I had chosen. I asked my professor for some suggestions, and without hesitation he recommended the first edition of The Four Voices of Preaching by Robert Stephen Reid. Recognizing the name, I ordered a copy and devoured it. Since my seminary days, I have known that good preaching needed to be a blend of competent exegesis and communicative skills with the personality of the one delivering the sermon. However, despite all my reading in the field of homiletics, I had yet to find a paradigm for understanding this concept. Now, armed with Reid’s original edition of The Four Voices of Preaching, this young instructor had something to work with.
However, I found the original edition to be a difficult mountain climb conceptually. I did the best that I could, however my students asked me to reconsider the text before teaching the course again. Going back over my notes, I was confident this was more of “user error” than the material itself. Thankfully, I had some time before I would teach the course again. In the interim period my professor asked me to participate in a panel review of Reid’s next book—a co-authored book with fellow rhetorically-based homiletician Lucy Lind Hogan entitled The Six Deadly Sins of Preaching, a discussion about homiletical ethics. As a young instructor still working on his doctorate, I was nervous to critique the work of two established scholars. I feared that Reid would put me in my place, but what happened instead was something that has shaped my teaching practice, research agenda, and personal development.
First, I found Reid to be an extremely gracious person who was more than happy to talk about The Four Voices of Preaching. He affirmed my critique of the book—that it presented a thoughtful yet complicated paradigm that required some significant operationalization before itoined the ranks of Thomas Long’s The Witness of Preaching, Paul Scott Wilson’s The Four Pages of the Sermon, or Fred Craddock’s Preaching as a central text on homiletics. He had been working on this, studying how various preachers lined up with his “voices” and sourcing sample sermons. He has graciously shared numerous versions of these documents with me over the years, demonstrating to me what it means to commit to something.
This leads to the second outcome of that panel review: without meaning to, I found a mentor in Reid, a relationship that I continue to be blessed by. Aside from providing materials that have helped make teaching his “four voices” paradigm easier (especially after the first edition went out of print), Reid has become one of the biggest supporters of my development as a teacher and scholar. He agreed to serve as a content expert on my dissertation, which focused on homiletic pedagogy. His feedback was significant and still impacts me today. Professionally, it was Reid’s influence that steered me back to the study of rhetoric and toward virtue ethics—now two core elements of my pedagogy. Personally, Reid is a warm and hospitable person who generously offers his expertise to others for their growth and benefit. Recently, a colleague at another institution was complimenting me on some assistance that I had given them and added that I was “an irenic spirit, you know, kind of like Bob Reid.”
I say all this so that you will know why I was so honored to endorse and now review this newly updated version of The Four Voices of the Sermon by Robert Stephen Reid, my friend and mentor. While what has come before may seem superfluous, it is quite the opposite. The journey that I have laid before you thus far should demonstrate why this book not only needed to be updated but also is still so needed in homiletic and pastoral pedagogy. In spending time with Reid over the years, I have found my sermonic, pedagogical and scholarly voice. I preach in the Encouraging Voice (and occasionally in the Sage Voice), I see teaching as a form of mentoring and discipleship, and I live in the world of preaching and technology because Bob encouraged me to do so since I was “the guy to do it.” Not only have I benefitted deeply from Reid’s work, my students have grown and flourished in finding how they best preach. One is now a colleague and one of my favorite preachers to listen to.
Reid’s answer is an unequivocal affirmative—hat the Christian faith matters and that preaching still matters as the Christian faith’s source of guidance. And this time, Reid has brought the receipts, as Gen Z would say. The basic concept of the first edition is that preaching is most effective when preachers blend their purpose for preaching with their “voice” into an authentic expression of faithful proclamation. Beyond that, however, the conversation has been completely updated and revised for the current cultural milieu that we find ourselves in. The book opens with the obvious question—does preaching still matter. In answering this question, Reid begins to address the underlying question of whether Christianity still matters by focusing on the authenticity communicated by a preacher who not only knows their content but embodies their faith in their lived experience. The second chapter is a complete reworking of the first edition’s opening chapter where Reid outlines his overall theory. Now, following his matrix approach, the visual articulation of his “four voices” is easier to comprehend, as the reader is better able to understand both the progressive aspect of the theory (i.e., one can move from Teaching Voice to Sage Voice) and integrative aspect of the theory (i.e., one may regularly preach in a Testifying Voice but may need to preach in a Teaching Voice at this time). This immediatelyReid’s framework on a superior level to other frameworks that dismiss some approaches in favor of singular models. As is commonly accepted in homiletics, there is no one correct way to preach.
In chapters 3-6, Reid revisits his four voices, reimagining them for a less receptive cultural context by providing those receipts that I mentioned above—discussion on numerous other homiletical models that connect with his model as well as sample sermons for each voice. To borrow another Gen Z phrase, Reid has “understood the assignment” of crafting a second edition of a paradigm-shifting book. Similar to the first edition, the book ends with a chapter that issues a call to authenticity in preaching and personal discipleship. This leads to two new appendices, one that addresses more clearly the concern of religious disestablishment in Western culture and the other that invites future scholars to continue this work—an invitation that I plan to accept.
Reid’s contributions to preaching and rhetorical communication are numerous and our disciplines are stronger because of these contributions. The Four Voices of Preaching has been his masterpiece. With this heavily updated second edition, he accomplishes what only a handful of scholars have been able to do—demonstrate the applicability of his theory to multiple generations.