From Classroom to Pulpit: Interviews with Fred Craddock & Walter Brueggemann
On the other hand, I think there's going to be more exegetical work done in the pulpit. Some people will call it expository work. You can see the beginnings of it now in some ministers just opening the Bible, read some verses and talk about it, read some verses and talk about it. There is a going to that extreme in what I think is a healthy shift, that is to the content of the sermon, but that's going so far as to neglect what constitutes good communication. But I appreciate the fact that they feel here's a hunger, an appetite, an emptiness that needs to be filled, so let's just read scripture and talk about it. That becomes sort of walking through the woods and notching every tree, and the minister does not provide enough discernment between major importance and lesser importance in a text.
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I think, I hope in the future there will be an increase in the dealing with biblical content in the sermon. Some people will find that antiquated or quaint, but the fact of the matter is we live out of the reservoir or the well of the scripture. You can't get people talking about it if they don't know what it says. I think there will be an increase in the preacher teaching texts he preaches on, she preaches on. I try to do that here, and have for the last few years. If I'm invited to a church to preach, I ask, "Can I have the adult classes together during the Sunday School hour?" and I teach the text that I'm going to preach, on the assumption that if they get familiar enough with it they'll start thinking about it, they won't be intimidated by it, they won't feel put down because they didn't know it. They'll be partners in the preaching process.
I think we're going to have more of the minister as a teaching preacher in the future. All of that is saying what I said earlier, which is an accent on the content. I hope that's true.
Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann has written extensively on preaching. As the William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, he has written or contributed to more than 60 books, including Cadences of Home: Preaching Among Exiles and Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation. Recently he presented the William Self Lectures on Preaching at Mercer University's School of Theology; it was during that lecture series that Preaching editor Michael Duduit visited with him.
Preaching: In this evening's lecture you mentioned your theory of preaching. How would you describe that theory?
Brueggemann: I am trying to think about a way of preaching that is not coercive; because I don't think that coercive preaching does any good. What I propose is that the preacher's task is to provide materials of metaphor and image and narrative and figure that will be material through which the congregation can imagine its world differently, if it wants to do so.