The Many Voices of Preaching Today

Finally, the postmodern stress upon social context, mutuality, and multiple sources of authority challenges preaching today.¹³ New interest clusters around Lucy Rose and John McClure’s images of preaching as conversation in a "roundtable pulpit" within a "roundtable church." How can preachers rethink a theology and practice of preaching that opens up the sermon as shared conversation without losing the ethical imperatives of gospel faithfulness?¹⁴

Preaching as conversation certainly builds upon the work of the new homiletic and so remains faithful to preaching tradition, but the model remains more a vague outline than a clear picture. We need more theological thoughtfulness and more practice of "sharing the word" to grasp its significance.

The conversation broadens within preaching. Numerous voices gather around the postmodern preaching table to help create a multilingual conversation. For example, Kathy Black’s A Healing Homiletic: Preaching and Disability calls us to think about how preaching includes or excludes persons with disabilities.

Women, whose speech has been muted by the church, are slowly finding their voices within the academy and parish. Other women have picked up Christine Smith’s early work on feminist-informed preaching (Weaving the Sermon). Mary Lin Hudson and Mary Donovan Turner’s Saved from Silence is an excellent study of the gifts that women bring to preaching and the challenges that women undergo to find their own voices within the pulpit. Jana Childers’ collection on women’s preaching, Birthing the Sermon, moves the discussion forward. Susan Bond’s Trouble with Jesus offers a cogent review of feminist theology’s struggle with Christology. She proposes a "Christology of salvage" that is uncannily relevant for post-September 11 preaching.

The genius of African American preaching now has numerous presenters who make this powerful preaching tradition more available to the church at large. One should certainly read Henry Mitchell’s Celebration and Experience in Preaching for a foundational statement about black preaching, but many other fine studies provide additional explanations of the tradition, including works by Cleophus LaRue, Evans Crawford, and Teresa L. Fry Bown. The broad African American preaching tradition is regularly explored in the quarterly journal The African American Pulpit.

The Western church is hearing insights from Asian Christianity that enriches our understanding of preaching. For example, Korean homiletician Eunjoo Kim’s Preaching the Presence of God explores the uniqueness of Asian congregational spirituality and then develops an approach to preaching that is commensurate with the cultural reality of the Asian congregation.

For those preachers who want to engage questions of cultural pluralism, two good studies are Joseph Webb’s Preaching and the Challenge of Pluralism and James Nieman and Thomas Rogers’s Preaching to Every Pew. These books honestly assess our cultural heterogeneity and offer suggestions for preaching when theological, ethnic, and social diversity is assumed.

13. See Ronald J. Allen, Barbara S. Blaisdell, and Scott B. Johnston. Theology for Preaching: Authority, Truth, and Knowledge of God in a Postmodern Ethos (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997) and David J. Lose, Confessing Jesus Christ: Preaching in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003).


14. See Charles L. Campbell, The Word Before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002).