Transforming Preaching: Transformations series - Softcover

Hooke, Ruthanna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0898696461 ISBN 13: 9780898696462

Verlag: Church Publishing, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

At once “travel guide” and vision for the future, the Transformation series is good news for the Episcopal Church at a time of fast and furious demographic and social change. Series contributors - recognized experts in their fields - analyze our present plight, point to the seeds of change already at work transforming the church, and outline a positive new way forward. What kinds of churches are most ready for transformation? What are the essential tools? What will give us strength, direction, and purpose to the journey?

Each volume of the series will:

• Explain why a changed vision is essential
• Give robust theological and biblical foundations
• Offer a guide to best practices and positive trends in churches large and small.
• Describe the necessary tools for change
• Imagine how transformation will look

Preaching is one of the more “transformable” aspects of the church’s life. Performance teacher Ruthanna Hooke, writing for both clergy and lay leaders, delivers the good and bad news about Episcopalians and preaching. She explains why preaching is more difficult than ever today, and provides essential models and spiritual practices in order to transform both the creators of preaching and its listeners as both participate in sermons.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Ruthanna B. Hooke is Professor of Homiletics and Program Director of “Preaching Congregations,” a Lilly Endowment-funded congregationally-based program of renewal and formation for preachers and listeners, at the Virginia Theological Seminary. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

James Lemler is priest-in-charge of historic Christ Episcopal Church in Greenwich, Connecticut and the former Director of Mission for the Episcopal Church. He has also served the church as a leading pastor and preacher, former dean of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and a consultant in the area of philanthropy, stewardship, and congregational development. He resides in Greenwich, Connecticut.

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Transforming Preaching

By RUTHANNA B. HOOKE

Church Publishing

Copyright © 2010 Ruthanna B. Hooke
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89869-646-2

Contents

Series Preface..............................................viiAcknowledgments.............................................ix1. Why Is It Frightening to Preach?.........................12. "Is There a Word from the Lord?".........................223. Profiles of Preachers....................................464. Engaging the Body in Preaching...........................965. The Adventure of the Word Made Flesh.....................127A Guide for Discussion......................................139Resources...................................................146Notes and Sources...........................................149

Chapter One

Why Is It Frightening to Preach?

Then I said, "Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy." But the LORD said to me, "Do not say, `I am only a boy'; for you shall go to all to whom I send you.... I have put my words in your mouth." (Jeremiah 1:6–9)

At the beginning of every semester I ask my students to choose a single word to describe how they feel to be in a preaching class. Some will choose the word "excited," but most pick words along the lines of "nervous," "terrified," or "petrified." Why are they afraid, and what are they afraid of? What is it about the act of preaching that makes it so terrifying? What makes preaching such a daunting task, so difficult to do well? Most of my students view preaching as a central part of their ministry, and they desperately want to do it well, which is one reason they find the task frightening. But why is it crucial that preaching be done well, and what would "doing it well" look like? What are the criteria of successful or effective or faithful (even the right adjective is hard to find) preaching?

The series of which this book is a part considers the ways that various practices of the church—stewardship, evangelism, reading the Bible—need to be transformed in order for the church to continue to be vital in the twenty-first century. These books respond to a sense of crisis in the church today, a crisis that challenges the church's life and practices in ways that it has not been challenged before. I am mindful of this crisis and these challenges too, yet in my experience the most serious difficulties that preachers face in undertaking the task of preaching are perennial ones. The task of preaching may be more demanding today for various reasons, and I will consider them in the course of this book; yet I believe the most daunting aspects of the preaching task are ones that have been with preachers, in one form or another, for centuries. The title of a recent book in the field of homiletics, What's the Matter with Preaching Today?, is a quotation from a Harry Emerson Fosdick essay of the same name written in 1928, which itself is commenting on a nineteenth-century diatribe about the sorry state of preaching at that time. This sequence suggests that there is always a sense that something is wrong with preaching; it is never being done as well as it should be.

We will see why the challenges of the preaching task are perennial ones if we examine the fear of preaching more closely. What makes preaching so terrifying? For one thing, preaching is a form of public speaking, itself something that intimidates many people. The phenomenon of stage fright is so consuming that it can drive even the most experienced actors away from the stage—even Lawrence Olivier is said to have suffered terribly from it later in his career. Many an actor or public speaker reports having a recurring nightmare of getting up to speak to others and losing the manuscript, having no clothes on, forgetting how to form words, speaking in a foreign language. Another variant on this nightmare involves getting lost on the way to the speaking engagement and never arriving at all. Clearly, there is much carryover between the fear of public speaking in general and the fear of preaching. However, I am always interested to note that the students who come to me with experience in other forms of public speaking usually find preaching just as frightening as those who have none. Former trial lawyers, salespeople, business men or women, and musicians will occasionally begin the preaching class claiming a greater confidence, but usually that self-assurance dissipates once they begin the practice of preaching. So what is it about preaching that makes it even more frightening than other forms of public speaking?

Another interesting fact about the fear of preaching is that it does not go away with practice, but rather tends to increase, or at least to hold steady, for a long time into one's preaching ministry. I have been preaching for over ten years, and the experience of my heart pounding and my legs locking as I get up to preach is still with me. It is similar to beginning to learn rock climbing, when I stood at the top of a cliff, attached to a rope, and had to launch myself over the side, trusting in the rope and in my climbing partners to hold me up over the abyss. The mind and body absolutely rebel against taking this step over the side into what feels like certain annihilation. The moment before I speak the first word of my sermon feels like this—like a launching over the abyss, into pure terror, while every fiber resists. This sense of risk is captured in preacher Barbara Brown Taylor's description of this same moment:

Watching a preacher climb into the pulpit is a lot like watching a tightrope walker climb onto the platform as the drum roll begins. The first clears her throat and spreads out her notes; the second loosens his shoulders and stretches out one rosin-soled foot to test the taut rope. Then both step out into the air, trusting everything they have done to prepare for this moment as they surrender themselves to it, counting now on something beyond themselves to help them do what they love and fear and most want to do. If they reach the other side without falling, it is skill but it is also grace—a benevolent God's decision to let these daredevils tread the high places where ordinary mortals have the good sense not to go.

Frederick Buechner also evokes memorably the momentous silence just before the sermon begins, when he describes how the preacher "pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher." The sense of risk and danger, the awareness of the momentousness of the occasion, the sense of high stakes and of the need to trust and surrender—all these are aspects of the fear of preaching, and as both these preachers seem to acknowledge, such fear does not necessarily go away with more experience. I am sorry to have to tell my students this, and yet, as I also tell them, I believe there is something necessary about the fear that accompanies preaching. I believe it is not meant to go away; rather, the challenge is to understand why preaching has to be scary, and also to understand how to work with the fear in a creative way, so that our preaching can be what it needs to be.

* * *

the challenge of proclamation

There are many reasons why preaching is a daunting and frightening undertaking. Let's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Church Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0898696461
• ISBN 13: 9780898696462
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 168
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland