Since Rick Lischer and I have an article coming out soon in The Christian Century about preaching Holy Week this year, we wanted also to do another webinar, much like our Preaching Advent 2020, to converse further about it and, we hope, answer any pressing questions you may have.
This webinar is free over Zoom. Once you register here, you’ll receive the link to be able to participate. It will also be streamed to my Facebook page and posted after the fact on my YouTube Channel.
If you have any questions in advance that you’d like us to address, feel free to leave a comment here, and we’ll try to get to them.
Graham Tomlin, Mike Lloyd, and Jane Williams, the kindly and thoughtful British theologians of the GodPod, had me on to talk preaching, particularly with reference to my recent book Preachers Dare. We talk about what an odd thing it is that God insists on having preachers speak in God’s behalf and about some of the possible pitfalls inherent in thinking you’re speaking God (maybe it’s best if you don’t and just trust that God will say through you what God need to say).
New Zealander Michael Reddell who blogs at Among Traditions posted a review of my new book Preachers Dare. He concludes:
How many preachers call their people back to the Scriptures, back to the works of God, the plans of God, and the call to live as distinctly different disciples of Christ? God has plans and purposes, But are our preachers proclaiming them, calling us to them? Or are they content to manage the social club, the social work, accommodating their people to the age, as one generation succeeds another and the decline of the gospel in New Zealand continues?
For anyone at all interested, I commend Willimon’s book to you. For evangelical readers, not everything he says in passing on specific points at issue in the church will be to your taste (or mine) but don’t let that detract from the challenge of this bishop, writer, and professor who seeks to live the conviction that God speaks, and that He wills to speak through faithful preachers today too.
Friend of the podcast and all around Gandalf to the gang, the irascible Will Willimon returns to talk about meeting the Risen Jesus, fighting in church, Karl Barth, preaching, and the new edition of his first book, The Gospel for the Person Who has Everything.
Grace Presbyterian Church in Calgary, Alberta hosted me on Zoom to talk about what it means be saved and sent by Jesus Christ whose strange and unexpected methods and intentions are always surprising us. You can now watch it on YouTube.
My talk for Matthews UMC on the lynching of Willie Earle has been published on their YouTube Channel.
I wrote about the lynching, Hawley Lynn’s sermon afterwards, and what all that has to do with preaching against racism today in my book Who Lynched Willie Earle?
Who Lynched Willie Earle? Preaching to Confront Racism
Effective 21st century preaching demands a more perceptive understanding of both race and Christian faith.
How do pastors of white, mainline Protestant churches preach effectively in situations of racial violence and dis-ease? Even though you long to address contemporary social crises, how do you know where to begin when it’s simply not possible to relate to black pain? Who Lynched Willie Earle? uses the true story of pastor Hawley Lynn’s 1947 sermon, a response to the last lynching in Greenville, South Carolina, to help pastors preach on race and violence in America, inviting and challenging the church to respond.
I’ve been hearing from clergy across the country about my new book, Leading with the Sermon. I’ve also met with a number of clergy groups who have used the book in their professional growth in ministry. My former student and friend, Wade Powell, who leads a congregation in Texas, has now done a study guide on the book for individuals or groups of preachers. You are welcome to use Wade’s guide individually or in your clergy group.
In this addition to the new Working Preacher Books series, prolific author William H. Willimon makes the compelling case that two key pastoral tasks–preaching and leadership–complement, correct, strengthen, and inform one another. Preaching is the distinctive function of pastoral leaders. Leadership of the church, particularly during a challenging time of transition in mainline Protestantism, has become a pressing concern for pastors.
This book shows how the practices, skills, and intentions of Christian preaching can be helpful to the leadership of a congregation. It will also show how leadership is an appropriate expectation for sermons. In preaching, pastoral leaders can help a congregation face its problems and coordinate its God-given resources to address those problems. Sermons can be an opportunity to articulate, motivate, and orchestrate God’s people in doing God’s work in the church and in the world.
Leading with the Sermon includes chapters on why pastors must be leaders, why preaching is such an essential task in telling the truth about the gospel, how preaching makes better leaders, and how better leaders make better preachers.
I’ll be doing a free webinar with Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church of Houston, TX on Wednesday, February 10 at 8pm EST, talking to their rector Neil Willard. We’ll be focused on my book Aging: Growing Old in Church and where I think hope can be found during this pandemic.
Matthews UMC has invited me to do a talk on the lynching of Willie Earle. This event will be February 16 at 7pm on the Matthews UMC YouTube Channel.
I wrote about the lynching, Hawley Lynn’s sermon afterwards, and what all that has to do with preaching against racism today in my book Who Lynched Willie Earle?
Who Lynched Willie Earle? Preaching to Confront Racism
Effective 21st century preaching demands a more perceptive understanding of both race and Christian faith.
How do pastors of white, mainline Protestant churches preach effectively in situations of racial violence and dis-ease? Even though you long to address contemporary social crises, how do you know where to begin when it’s simply not possible to relate to black pain? Who Lynched Willie Earle? uses the true story of pastor Hawley Lynn’s 1947 sermon, a response to the last lynching in Greenville, South Carolina, to help pastors preach on race and violence in America, inviting and challenging the church to respond.
I talked recently with John Stephens and Matt Russell of Chapelwood UMC in Houston, Texas for their Pod Have Mercy podcast. We talked about the politics of church (such as was presented in Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and me), honing in on what it means today that the church’s politics ought to be being the church God has called us to be and what the difference is in the pulpit between being political and being partisan. I also shared some thoughts about the future of the UMC.
