The Craft of Preaching
Resources to strengthen authentic biblical preaching
Currently in Preaching & Worship
With the advent of projection systems in worship settings the sermon can become a visual as well as an oral event.
Among available possibilities, (video, sermon outline, clip art, photography) I have been exploring art, (paintings, images of sculpture, and icons). Artists depicting biblical scenes offer commentary and interpretation of biblical stories that are often as insightful as written commentaries. Since the approach to the stories is visual it requires the engagement of intuitive right brain thinking, which is open to more imaginative approaches to familiar stories. That may immediately make many pastors trained in the historical/critical, "get it right according to the facts" way we have been trained, nervous. But the Holy Spirit has never been confined to half-brained or half-spirited work.
Columnist Profile
Tim Bauer
Pastor
Trinity Lutheran Church
Milaca, MN
In the first essay, I wrote about the task of preaching the theological content of a psalm, describing an approach to preaching in which one searches out the central theological witness of a psalm.
That approach focuses on what a psalm says. A second approach to cracking open a psalm is to focus on how a psalm says what it says.
The following are tips on preaching gathered from a variety of people around the church who have some sense of what does and does not work in sermons.
1. Did Jesus need to suffer and die for this sermon to be preached? If not, don't waste your time or ours with it. It's probably just clean mental health for religious people.
The third and final article based on the Process Preaching seminar that Pastor Larson has taught for the past five years in the Kairos Program at Luther Seminary.
When I began searching for a way to preach my sermons freely, I came across the suggestion that doing so would require a great deal of oral rehearsal. In the past I tried orally rehearsing my sermons by reading them with very little success. I could read them just about as well the first time through as the last time through. This led me to try a different kind of oral rehearsal that enabled me to move from reading my manuscripts to preaching them freely. In this column I will describe how these oral rehearsals or run-throughs, are done.