New Options in Preaching: Overviews

A good place to begin is with several studies that summarize the "new homiletic" over the past 30 years. In A New Hearing: Living Options in Homiletic Method, Richard Eslinger thoroughly reviews the turn to narrative preaching in the work of Charles Rice, Henry Mitchell, Eugene Lowry, and Fred Craddock and in the phenomenological approach of David Buttrick. He evaluates the theory of each of these teachers, then concludes each chapter with one of their own sermons. Eslinger has updated his review of the current state of homiletics in The Web of Preaching: New Options in Homiletic Method. This work builds upon the previous but takes a closer look at the categories of narrative and imagination as they continue to influence contemporary preaching.

Lucy Rose’s Sharing the Word offers a different sort of overview. Rather than focusing upon select figures in recent preaching, she identifies three distinctive emphases that developed throughout twentieth-century preaching. She categorizes preaching as traditional persuasion, kerygmatic event, and transformational encounter. While her categories might strike some as too narrow, her typology highlights crucial distinctions in purpose, content, and method that many preachers will find useful. Rose’s own proposal, preaching as "communal conversation," puts preaching in dialogue with feminist and postmodern theologians, and it opens up new ground to consider preaching as a collaborative event between preacher and congregation.

In Creative Styles of Preaching, Mark Elliott sketches nine different styles of preaching and then couples two sample sermons with each style. He draws some of the sermons from well-known preachers who have written about the particular approach. For example, he links Fred Craddock with narrative preaching, Samuel Proctor with African American Preaching, and Barbara Brown Taylor with imaginative preaching. The book provides a snapshot of many of the major emphases in preaching today.

As with all surveys, the brevity of the presentation does not allow for satisfactory exploration. Elliott gives a scant one page to Fred Craddock’s inductive approach to preaching. This is inadequate unless the reader has some prior understanding of inductive method. This might be a good book to read first, but it should be followed by one of the other studies mentioned and then by the original works themselves.

Finally, John McClure collects a group of suggestions for preachers in his edited volume Best Advice for Preaching. McClure summons to the discussion table a diverse group of preachers and teachers around topics ranging from the calling of the preacher and getting a message to polishing the sermon and coordinating with the rest of the service. The advisors include John Claypool, Joanna Adams, Walter Burghardt, James Harris, Barbara Lundblad, Thomas Troeger, Henry Mitchell, and others. A final chapter on essential resources for preaching is markedly practical. This smorgasbord of best advice, along with the theoretical overviews already mentioned, adds up to an appetizing first course for those who wish to dine at the homiletics table today. From here on, the fare thickens and deepens.