People have given me credit for starting a trend. I think it was really the time in this country to rethink the lines of authority: By what authority do you say these things? Where do you locate the Word of God in the conversation between the pulpit and the community? Is the minister an enabler? Is he over here with scripture talking to the congregation, or is he a member of the congregation listening to the scripture? Where am I located?

That question arose in a fresh new way, and opened the door to just a range of new books in the area of method. How do we do it? Many of them were good books; some of them not good books. I was struggling just to teach preaching; my field was New Testament exegesis. I went to Germany thinking that would help; I enjoyed it but it didn't help in that matter, except I did get acquainted with the writing of Soren Kierkegaard.

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Well, out of all of that, in various ways of putting it together — the increase in narrative; the rise of the use of story or narrative in the field of theology moved over into preaching; the whole idea in biblical studies of the introduction of literary criticism, what is the form and shape of the text — caused the preachers to say, "Hey, that's an important feature, too." So out of it came just a world of things like story telling and narrative preaching, inductive preaching and all of this. I think "New Homiletic" came to be a term that covered everything from the turn from Broadus and Witherspoon to where we are today.

I think where we are now is to take a break from "How we do it?" and ask ourselves, "What are we saying?" I think in every field you have a cycle of change of method over content, then you move to content, or you accent content and then realize nobody's listening, and you say, "We've got to think of a way to do this."

We are, in my judgment, now at a point of needing to give more attention to what are we saying. What's the size and shape of the sermon? How much memory does the sermon have? Are we being true to the continuity of the Christian faith, or am I just sitting with my Bible and forgetting 2,000 years in between?

I said when I started began preaching for this church that I would never talk about what was not important. Because that's where I was; I felt that however you say it, it should be important. So the question I ask myself, is "So what? What difference does it make?" I think now the size and content of the sermon should be the area of the best minds in homiletics going to work. This is not to toss out the gains that have been made in method.

I hold seminars and workshops in preaching. I've noticed that with more recent graduates, their teachers apparently assume that the preacher has a grasp of Bible, theology and church history, and what the homiletics class should do is how to shape this into a sermon. The fact of the matter is that this cannot be assumed and even if they did have a grasp of Bible, theology and church history, that needs to be stressed as what we're about.