Living in a context of widespread deconstruction, the preacher faces the fact that many deny there is any text at all. Meaning and authorial intent are gone. The very idea of history has collapsed and the classics are gone. The ego disease is pandemic and the quest for the authentic self has pretty well edged out any transcendent vertical. Is any coherent, stable linguistic meaning possible today? Preaching is under serious assault.

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The American "religion" is an amalgum of Emersonian gnosticism and its "self-reliance;" Harvard pragmatism; and American "manifest destiny." E. Brooks Holifield's classic A History of Pastoral Care in America has the subtitle, From Salvation to Self-Realization. A very clear paradigm shift has moved much preaching from text-centered, text-derived proclamation to audience-centered, need-driven, problem solving discourse. Many have succumbed.

New technologies like Powerpoint and the use of film clips seem to leave many preachers with high levels of frustration. Preachers stagger from one faddish program to another always under the gun of unfavorable comparison with neighbors and highly visible national pacesetters. Endless seminars on how to reach boomers, busters and millennials have only added to their consternation. Are we touching the more auditory, the more visual and the more kinesthetic? Besides, some are telling us that linear reasoning is done, induction has triumphed and narrative is all. Where has this left many highly motivated preachers who find themselves stunned and confused. Is it all up for grabs?

Worship wars continue to devastate many congregations. One able young preacher and his leadership were slow to include any newer sound and a large contingent of the younger folk decamped to a nearby media center. By the time the church began to seek a judicious blend, they found the older element was offended and they left the church or absented themselves from it. No winning for losing. Now with the advent of "hi-tech worship," in some cases the pastoral staff no longer decides on what will be preached. The technicians do because they have to get the images to be projected and that determines the preaching topic. The clash of culture wars continues.

But not only is there great pressure to adapt feel-good theology or "Christianity-lite," but some key evangelicals are bailing out from the high view of Scripture but also from the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement. Conversion is a process not an event some insist (isn't that a false dichotomy?). Voices are heard among us deriding absolute authority, absolute certainty and the centrality of Scripture. Rejection of propositional truth is urged as our exit from too servile a bondage to "modernism." "What I've experienced" is the be-all and end-all. And add to all of this and what appears to be the triumph of the therapeutic gospel is the fact constantly thrown at us, that the life of the mind is virtually extinct among evangelicals. So where are we?