Preaching From Memory To Hope

In this compelling and hard-hitting book, respected preacher and teacher Thomas Long identifies and responds to what he sees as the most substantive theological forces and challenges facing preaching today. The issues, he says, are fourfold: the decline in the quality of narrative preaching and the need for its reinvigoration; the tendency of preachers to ignore God's action and presence in our midst; the return of the church's old nemesis, gnosticism--albeit in a milder form--evidenced in today's new "spirituality"; and the absence of eschatology in the pulpit. Long once again has his finger on the pulse of American preaching, demonstrated by his creative responses to these challenges. Whether he is calling for theologically smarter and more ethically discerning preaching, providing a method of interpretation that will allow pastors to recover the emphasis on God in our midst, or encouraging a kind of "interfaith dialogue" with gnosticism, he demonstrates why he has long been considered one of the most thoughtful and intelligent preachers in America today.

This is a newly revised edition of one of the standard introductory preaching textbooks on the market today. Beginning with a solid theological basis, veteran preacher and best-selling author Thomas G. Long offers a practical, step-by-step guide to writing a sermon. Long centers his approach around the biblical concept of witness. To be a preacher, Long posits, is to be a witness to God's work in the worldone who sees before speaking, one whose task is to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about what is seen." This updated edition freshens up language and anecdotes, contains an extensive new analysis of the use of multimedia and its impact on preaching, and adds a completely new chapter on plagiarism in preaching. Included for the first time are four complete sermons, with Long's commentary and analysis. The sermons were written and originally preached by Barbara Brown Taylor, Cleophus J. LaRue. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli, and Edmund Steimle. With this third edition, The Witness of Preaching reaffirms itself as the essential resource for seminary students as well as new and experienced preachers.

"Can preaching recover a Blues sensibility and dare speak with authority in the midst of tragedy? America is living stormy Monday, but the pulpit is preaching happy Sunday. The world is experiencing the Blues, and pulpiteers are dispensing excessive doses of non-prescribed prosaic sermons with severe ecclesiastical and theological side effects." â€"from chapter 1 Uniquely gifted preacher Otis Moss III helps preachers effectively communicate hope in a desperate and difficult world in this new work based on his 2014 Yale Lyman Beecher Lectures. Moss challenges preachers to preach with a "Blue Note sensibility," which speaks directly to the tragedies faced by their congregants without falling into despair. He then offers four powerful sermons that illustrate his Blue Note preaching style. In them, Moss beautifully and passionately brings to life biblical characters that speak to today's pressing issues, including race discrimination and police brutality, while maintaining a strong message of hope. Moss shows how preachers can teach their congregations to resist letting the darkness find its way into them and, instead, learn to dance in the dark.

The leading Old Testament theologian reflects on the meaning of the gospel in today's world.These studies on a variety of biblical texts focus deftly on reading, listening to, and proclaiming the gospel in a broken, fragmented, and "post-Christendom" world. Brueggemann explores how these traditions have the potential to continually resonate in our contemporary communities and individual lives.

We know of the preacher’s roles as both teacher and proclaimer, but Jeffrey Arthurs adds another assignment: the Lord’s remembrancer. With decades of preaching experience, he explains how to stir the memory of Christ-followers, fanning the flames of faith through vivid language, story, delivery, and ceremony. When knowledge fades and conviction cools, the church needs to be reminded of the great truths of the faith.

Even though the postmodern return of religion is dramatically shaping the future of twenty-first-century theology, its riches for preaching are rarely mined. Preaching After God highlights the trajectories of the postmodern return of religion by introducing readers to the positive theological themes stirring in the work of influential philosophers like Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, and Slavoj Žižek. Phil Snider shows how engaging their thought provides possibilities for preaching that highly resonate with postmodern listeners. Preachers familiar with the postmodern return of religion will appreciate its homiletical appropriation, while those introduced to it for the first time will discover just how much it is helpful for the preaching task. Six lectionary-based sermons are included as examples.

Written by a pastor and father who has walked a painful road, Hope When Life Unravels explores the encouraging, upside-down truths of the book of Job, and other key Bible passages, to remind us of the ways God is present in our pain. Why does God allow suffering? And why does God seem to go silent when we're in pain? In Hope When Life Unravels, Dr. Adam Dooley, pastor and host of the daily radio broadcast A Better Way, searches for answers to our biggest questions about suffering as he shares his son Carson's story of battling leukemia. Adam speaks openly about the gut-wrenching struggle his family endured for three years of life-threatening illness and how God met them in their hours of need--even when it wasn't in the ways they wanted. And, along with his own story, Adam takes readers through the story of Job, unpacking insights about God's character, his love, and how we can stay connected to him even during seasons of pain. Both inspiring and comforting, Hope When Life Unravels invites us to draw closer to a God who is often active in our lives in times when we have trouble seeing him the most.

Written in conversational style, The Senses of Preaching is a thought-provoking book using anecdotes to take a careful look at the relationship between preachers and congregations. Thomas Long provides insight into faith and life as well as preaching and homiletics. He offers preachers a better understanding of the whole concept of their craft and complements it with sermon-starter ideas. This compact volume shows preachers how to develop and implement a preaching experience that encourages the hearing of the gospel.

Pastor and preaching coach, Dr. Yancey Arrington offers a new paradigm for message preparation - one that focuses on seeing sermons emotionally, where preachers will be trained on discovering a message's emotional center, charting sermon bandwidth, and leveraging one's God-given personality in the preaching event. This innovative approach to preaching can produce more effective seasons in the pulpit where congregants are carried `down the mountain' of messages in such a way they can't wait to do it again!

For years Christians have been asking, "If you died tonight, do you know where you would go?" It turns out that many believers have been giving the wrong answer. It is not heaven. Award-winning author N. T. Wright outlines the present confusion about a Christian's future hope and shows how it is deeply intertwined with how we live today. Wright, who is one of today's premier Bible scholars, asserts that Christianity's most distinctive idea is bodily resurrection. He provides a magisterial defense for a literal resurrection of Jesus and shows how this became the cornerstone for the Christian community's hope in the bodily resurrection of all people at the end of the age. Wright then explores our expectation of "new heavens and a new earth," revealing what happens to the dead until then and what will happen with the "second coming" of Jesus. For many, including many Christians, all this will come as a great surprise. Wright convincingly argues that what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death. For if God intends to renew the whole creation—and if this has already begun in Jesus's resurrection—the church cannot stop at "saving souls" but must anticipate the eventual renewal by working for God's kingdom in the wider world, bringing healing and hope in the present life. Lively and accessible, this book will surprise and excite all who are interested in the meaning of life, not only after death but before it.