Tuesday, January 15, 2008

A Theology of Preaching

When I decided to spend my life pursuing preaching ministry, I became very curious about the enterprise. When Harding University added the preaching degree, I added it as a 2nd major along with my standard Bible major in the College of Bible & Religion. I searched out & read books that were dubbed seminal on the subject of preaching. I studied many of the different well-known preaching methods & forms. And still, despite my pursuit, what I found lacking was the amount of material written about the idea of what exactly we're doing when we're preaching. Not how someone thinks I should do it, or multiple ways to do it. Or how some other guy did it. But what preaching accomplishes & should intend to accomplish at each preaching moment as well as throughout a lifetime of preaching ministry.

My pursuit led me to write a research paper on the Theology of Preaching. I dug it up last night & made it into a PDF document that you guys can access. Geocities, the host for this document, does have a bandwidth limit. I have no idea what that limit is. So if for some wild reason the document is inaccessible, give it an hour & come back later to download it.

It's one of the things I spent time doing in academia that meant something to me. The Turabian may be shoddy. Some of the points stand to be expanded upon & fleshed out more fully. But I'm pretty proud of it, and it still helps inform & guide what I do to this day. If you've at all struggled with the issue(s) of what is we are exactly attempting to do when we preach, I commend to you my paper. Hope it helps.

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