It's the same way when I started teaching New Testament. I could assume the majority of students in seminary grew up in the church — Sunday School and youth group — and came to the seminary, perhaps even through a church college, and knew what it was about, the core of the Christian faith. So my job was to disabuse them of superstitious views, to clean up their act, scrape the barnacles off. I don't know that it was ever true, but it certainly happened in the course of generations when I was teaching that I had students who didn't grow up in the church, had a call to ministry after they finished pharmacy school or something like that. They didn't know diddly about the church or Bible or theology. When they came into my preaching class it wasn't just a matter of refining the "how do you do it?" question but "what are you doing?" And I made some mistakes in that transition.

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Preaching: As you talk to pastors today, how do you encourage them to struggle with that content question?

Craddock: It is a tough assignment. Most of them found it more delightful to work on the "How do I do it?" It gives me a chance to be witty, or clever, or sometimes humorous. I don't mean to make light of it — I spend a lot of time on "How do you do it?" But to say "Now what are you talking about?" — it's almost like re-entering school. It's a substantive thing.

So the first thing I ask them to do is if you haven't sold them or thrown them away, re-read one basic textbook in theology, in ethics, biblical studies. Just re-read the textbooks you had to read to pass the exam a few years ago. You don't have to buy new books; those were good books — they are good books. Then write at the top of you page every time you start working on a sermon: "So what?" Answer that. Then if you'll just picture in your mind, picture your congregation hungry for something, and realize your job is not to be clever; it's to make a difference. If you have something you want them to hear, now you move to: how do I get them to hear it?

You've got to have some dough in the tray before you cut out biscuits. You don't just walk in and start cutting biscuits. You've got to have a lot of substance that doesn't appear in any one sermon, but is the stuff out of which all your sermons come. So in recent years I've urged pastors to take seminars or summer classes in theology or ethics or biblical studies and get refreshed. It's been neglected.

Preaching: For some preachers is it an issue of getting back to the text in a way they haven't dealt with it before?

Craddock: I think so. I think ministers, if they would get together and read scripture — we're not working on a sermon now, we're reading this text, listening to this text. What does it say? To be honest in a conversation, you've got to respect the other side of it. It's easy for me to go to the Bible and use it as an ink blot text; I see in it what I want to see. Or I talk and the Bible listens, instead of the Bible talking and I listen. So to develop the skill of just sitting before a text and listening to it. And once I hear it, then all the work I've done on how to prepare sermons will be ready and in place and useful.