The Practices of Christian Preaching

Essentials for Effective Proclamation

Alcántara, Jared E.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781493419760
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

Leading homiletician Jared Alcántara offers a practice-centered, collaborative, technologically innovative, next-generation introductory preaching textbook. The book breaks new ground by adopting a practice-based approach to teaching preaching and by using innovative technological delivery to enhance the educational experience of learners. Alcántara introduces the basics of Christian preaching and emphasizes the skills preachers must cultivate throughout their lives. He shows that preachers can learn effective preaching by paying keen attention to five key competencies: conviction, context, clarity, concreteness, and creativity. Featuring the perspectives of a diverse team of collaborators, The Practices of Christian Preaching is designed to prepare effective communicators for the church's multicultural future. Call-outs in the book direct readers to a companion website for further information or practice. The online resources include audio and video sermons, video responses from the author, and contributions from collaborators, enabling Alcántara to coach students by showing them instead of just telling them. A Spanish language edition is also available.

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Preach Christian Sermons

Church X has the sterile feel of an operating theater. . . . The sermon—on justice to one’s fellows—has so squeezed out any mention of God or Jesus, maybe to sound modern, there’s no sense of history. The pastor asks for peace and gives thanks for plenty, but the homily might come from Reader’s Digest.

—Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir

A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed—what gospel is that?

—Oscar Romero, The Violence of Love

About nine miles from where I grew up in New Jersey, a beautiful colonial town called Hopewell greets you like a lost time capsule that has just been discovered. The town, established by colonists in 1691, has curved roads, rolling hills, classic homes, and a historic downtown that seem like they belong in a fairy tale rather than real life. Drive north on Broad Street, the historic main road, and you will see an old colonial cemetery on your right. Directly adjacent to the cemetery stands a regal, red-brick building. Its location and architecture suggest that it probably used to be a church. You park your car, get out, and notice a little white sign by the door that reads “Hopewell Old School Baptist Meeting House.” It turns out that people used to meet here—to worship here. You head home that night determined to learn more about the beautiful red-brick church on Broad Street, so you decide to conduct some research in local libraries. You also enlist the help of Google, your trusty research assistant.

Figures 1.1. and 1.2. Exterior Views of Hopewell Church [Jared Alcántara]

You discover that the church opened its doors for the first time in 1715 with fifteen charter members. Then, in 1727, it established the first Baptist school in the colonies for “the education of youths for the ministry.”1 By 1747 the congregation had grown to sixty-five. Several revivals swept through the Northeast during the next few decades and in a twelve-month span in 1764 the church added 123 converts to its growing congregation. It added 105 more in 1775–76. A new pastor came in 1796, and by the time he finished his term ten years later, he had baptized 151 more people. By all accounts, it seemed like the people who worshiped there lived like Great-Commission Christians. It looked as though nothing could go wrong for the Hopewell Old School Baptist Meeting House. What happened next took place not overnight but over time. It did not hinge on one particular decision.

In the early 1800s, the church’s leaders embraced some of the latest doctrinal teachings, which in this case were heterodox rather than orthodox. They also lost their passion for people to know and be found by Christ by ignoring the mandate to make disciples, to be God’s witnesses in the world. Experts might use the phrase “mission drift” to describe what took place at the red-brick church in Hopewell.2 In 1835, the church split from the Baptist Conference of New Jersey because it (and other churches) decided to embrace a false teaching called antinomianism. Decades later, in 1904, when just a handful of laypeople remained in attendance on Sunday mornings, Thomas Sharp Griffiths, a Baptist historian, wrote these words in his History of Baptists in New Jersey: “It is the prayer of Baptists that the venerable First Hopewell Church will return to her ‘first love’ again. . . . A glorious past, is to her a robe of white, except as it has been soiled by associations and which darkens her future. When again, she incorporates the last commission of our Lord into her activities, we will rejoice together in her ‘walking with God.’”3

Not long after Griffiths made these comments, the church held its final worship service and shuttered its doors. Today the building serves as a historic landmark and is designated for civic purposes. Local leaders open it once a year for a flag ceremony.

Stories like this one sadden us as ministers, as well they should. They also remind us of how easy it is for churches to lose their way. Again, it does not happen overnight but over time. A church can drift without standing in clear opposition to the gospel. Presumably, the writer of Hebrews warned his readers not to “drift away” because they were faithful believers, not because they had wandered far from the faith (Heb. 2:1). As preachers, if we are not careful, we will also drift not because we are swimming against the tide but because we are swimming with it. Anyone who has gone swimming in an ocean with a strong current knows how easy it is to look over at the beach and notice that you are fifty to one hundred feet north or south from where you entered the water. Often without even realizing it we lose touch with the gospel as our fixed point of reference and thereby neglect our responsibility to proclaim it.

In this chapter, we consider why it is so important to preach Christian sermons. As I stated previously, if we miss the call to preach Christianly, then we miss out on our primary task as gospel witnesses. The Five Cs hinge on the basic conviction that preaching Christianly is at the center of everything we do. I have placed the word “Christian” at the center of the accompanying figure in order to communicate that everything else we do grows out of preaching Christianly.

First, we will define and describe the gospel that we preach. Then we will discuss the pseudo-gospels that we are (sometimes) tempted to preach. Then, in the final section, we will consider various proposals concerning our call to preach Christian sermons.

The Practices of Christian Preaching

Figure 1.3. The Five Cs: Christian

The Gospel That We Preach

Preachers without the gospel are like reservoirs without water. They do not serve their intended purpose. We claim to have a grasp of the gospel, and we believe the gospel. But for various reasons we forget to preach it. Our problem is not a new one. According to Emil Brunner, “At every period in the history of the Church, the greatest sin of the church, and the one which causes the greatest distress, is that she withholds the Gospel from the world and herself.”4 Perhaps if Brunner had mentioned only the world and not the church, then that would make more sense to us. But what if he is right? What if the world does not hear a compelling vision of the gospel outside the church’s walls because we do not preach a compelling version of it inside the church’s walls?

Before proceeding any further, perhaps we should ask a few basic questions: What is the gospel? What language should we use to describe it? Why is it good news? Even if we tried to posit in-depth responses to these questions, we would only skim the surface. For the purposes of this chapter, I will provide a basic definition of the gospel, and I will highlight five distinguishing marks that add depth and texture to that definition.

Defining the Gospel

Succinct definitions of the gospel abound. Gardner C. Taylor defines the gospel as follows: “God is out to get back what belongs to him.”5 Notice that God is the one who does the seeking. David James Randolph defines the gospel this way: “Love which is desirable for life is available in Jesus Christ.”6 In this definition, spiritual life and vitality find their source in Jesus Christ. In Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth emphasizes a Christocentric announcement: “Jesus Christ, very God and very man, has come as its [the world’s] Savior and will come again. This is the announcement of the kingdom of God. This is the Gospel.”7 Here the focus is on Christ’s work, his promises, and the kingdom he brings.8 Back in 2017, I heard Thomas G. Long present a paper on the preaching of Jesus at a homiletics symposium in which he summarized Jesus’s message of good news as, “You don’t have to live this way anymore.”9

In defining the gospel, Christians often appeal to well-known texts of Scripture. Some like to quote John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Others appeal to Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Some highlight Christ as a sin offering on our behalf by quoting from 2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Still others appeal to lesser-known texts like 2 Timothy 2:8: “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel.” Each of these passages of Scripture and many other well-known texts focus the attention on the person and work of Jesus Christ, a theme we will return to in a moment.

I define the gospel as an announcement and a call from God through Jesus Christ that welcomes us into covenant relationship. It is an announcement of the good news that the triune God is reconciling the world to himself through Christ—his life, death, and resurrection—instead of counting our sins against us (2 Cor. 5:16–21; Col. 1:19–20); and i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Preach Christian Sermons
• 2. Preach Convictionally
• 3. Preach Contextually
• 4. Preach Clearly
• 5. Preach Concretely
• 6. Preach Creatively
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover