This document discusses various aspects of contemporary homiletics and preaching. It addresses personal communication and consistency in preaching, as well as the importance of personal consecration, conviction, and holiness. The document also examines performance in preaching, inductive versus deductive styles, contextualization, postmodern influences, urban and "black" preaching, issues of power, and women's preaching. It provides perspectives on using notes versus more improvisational approaches.

1. Contemporary Homiletics
Contextual Preaching

3. Personal Communication
• “Preaching is the bringing of truth through
personality… It must come through the
preacher’s character, his affections, his whole
intellectual and moral being.”
Phillips Brooks
1835-1893

4. Personal Consistency
• “So many other activities central to our society,
from mathematics to plumbing to flower
arranging, May be done without essential
regards to the ethical or religious makeup of the
practitioner. It can never be so with preaching,
for a congregation will invariably discern where
there is a mismatch between the character fo
the preacher and the truth of what is being
preached.”
Geoffrey Stevenson

5. Personal Consecration
• David Day – “Embodying the Word”
• Stephen Olford – “Consecration”
• Robert Murray McCheyne – “The greatest need of the
congregation is my personal holiness.”
• John Piper – “All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling
of desperation.”
• John Oliver ”[a friend, priest, and youth work trainer] –
“Some sort of consistent Christian lifestyle”

6. Personal Conviction
• “Proclamation is human speech in and by which God
himself speaks like a king through the mouth of his
herald, and which is meant to be heard and accepted as
speech in and by which God himself speaks.”
• “It is a decisive part of the insight of all true prophecy
that man as such has no possibility of uttering the Word
of God.”
• “What acknowledgement of God’s Word in our
experience is not unmasked and convicted by the Word
of God even as it takes place, convicted not of its
imperfection and inadequacy but of its total corruption
and futility.”
Karl Barth

7. Performance
• Cornel West
• Performance artist – poet
• Jana Childers
• Performing the text
• Authenticity?
• Theatricality?
• Spoken Word

9. The ‘New Homiletic’
• Fred Craddock
• Heidegger
• Language
• Evocative
• Non-propositional
• Re-presentational
• As one without authority
• Inductive rather than deductive

10. Inductive Preaching
General Truth
Particular application
Particulars of experience
General truth or conclusion
Deductive
Preaching
Inductive
Preaching

11. Contextualisation
• Contextualisation
– Paul Hiebert
• Non-contextualisation
• Minimal contextualisation
• Uncritical contextualisation
• Radical contextualisation
• Critical contextualisation
• Paul
– Jews - Law
– Gentiles - Creation
• Theological Bridge?

12. Postmodernity
• Metanarratives
• No truth
• No absolutes
• Sceptical of authority
• Fluid identity
• Relativism
• Pluralism
• Media
• Internet
• Oral-Aural
• Relational
• Right brain
• Storytelling
• Metaphor
• Spirituality
• Participation
• Dialogue
• Environment
• Listening
• Cool-Hot

13. Urban Preaching
• Geography
• What do you see out of the window in the morning?
• Urban - Rural
• “Without the primary emphasis on social transformation
through prophetic preaching, we will not see strong
communities in our urban areas.”
Roger Sainsbury
• “In this age of secularism and relativism, or urbanisation
and ghettoization in an ironic way, the future of God is in
the hands of preachers.”
Olin Moyd

14. ‘Black’ Preaching
• Black Preaching
– Call & Response
– Emotion & Passion
– Story & Testimony
– Hope & Liberation
– America, Africa, Caribbean, Europe, Asia
• Stereotypes & Essentialism
• Pluralism & Multiculturalism
• Variety & Hybridity
• TV & Media

15. The Power Game
• Who can speak?
• Who controls access?
• Who determines the norms?
• Education, Class
• Race, Gender
• Clericalism
• Professionalisation
• Roundtable Preaching
– John McClure
– Lucy Atkinson Rose

16. Women’s Preaching
• Feminist Critique
– Indecent Theology
– Entering into forbidden space
• Unconscious
– Narrative
– Vulnerability
• Conscious
– Voicing marginalisation
– Seeing the Bible differently
– Self-disclosure
– Relationality
• Danger
– Accepting space allowed by men
– Non-liberals – Evangelical/Pentecostal

17. Notes – with or without?
“Preaching is public address before it is anything
else, and if one expects one’s sermon to be
interesting, even compelling or captivating, then
one’s preaching must follow the basic rule of all
effective public speaking – the ironclad rule of
every Speech 101 class – is that one cannot
read a manuscript to one’s audience.”
Joseph M. Webb

18. Improv
• Memorised
• Extempore
• Improvisational
• Improv stand-up comedy
• Maximise connectedness
• Maximise participation
• Reflect authentic witness
• Intimacy
• Spontaneity
• Energy
• Dialogue