Legacy of Preaching: Charles Simeon, Rodney "Gipsy" Smith
John Jasper, John Albert Broadus
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! ! !Charles Simeon's preaching career lasted fifty-four years, mostly at the
Trinity Church in Cambridge, England. !Simeon Saw a need for homiletics
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for the church, so he began documenting and keeping notes for how he
prepared for and developed skills to prepare for preaching. The structural
diagram skill, from McDill's text, is the one that most closely associated
with one of Simeon's methods for sermon preparation. He would build an
outline or "skeleton" from which Simeon would build his sermon and
preach from that. !Working from the skeleton, Simeon would determine
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the scope and meaning of the text, how the passage should be divided
and discussed, and then would work to an application. !One can see other
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shades of McDill's skills within Simeon's approach to sermon preparation,
but the skeleton was the backbone of his perparations for his sermons.
Much like the structural diagram, this would assist Simeon in properly
showing how a text could be treated naturally in its proper context.4
! ! !Rodny "Gipsy" Smith had a seventy year evangelistic career that
spanned five continents. !Rodney was raised in a British Romanichal
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Gypsy culture, which relied heavily on orality and oral traditions. !He was a
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self-taught preacher who initially only utilized the Bible, an English
dictionary, and a Bible dictionary for his education. !In most of his
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methodology and practice in preaching, Smith did not use any of McDill's
first six skills when preparing for sermons. Smith admittedly had
somewhat of a disdain for sermon notes and did not see any value in
enumeration, which was common in his day. !Smith relied on his charisma,
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his oratory skill and had an undaunting reliance on the Holy Spirit and the
