The primary problem with contemporary preaching is its silence in regard to the moral dimension of the "Christian gospel. We believe it is the single most neglected dimension of the Christian message as proclaimed from our nation's pulpits.

We are not saying that the moral dimension is completely absent. The preaching literature reveals some attention to moral character, the way of life of the community of faith, and less frequent forays into contemporary moral issues. Likewise, some preachers and homileticians have much greater sensitivity to such issues than others do. But on the whole, the contrast between the moral witness of the Scriptures and the moral proclamation from the pulpit is striking. It is a deafening and profoundly troubling silence.

This silence takes various forms and manifests itself in various ways. Most broadly there is an absence of moral vision in today's preaching. It appears that all too few of those who occupy our pulpits do so with any conscious hope of, or plan for, communicating a moral vision grounded in the Scriptures and applicable to contemporary life. Preachers usually have an evangelistic vision, and / or a pastoral vision, and / or a doctrinal vision, perhaps even an aesthetic vision. But few seem to have a well-developed moral vision. This is the one aspect of the gospel message to which few pulpiteers or homileticians pay much sustained attention.

Second, there is the noticeable development of a canon within the canon that systematically excludes some of the most morally significant material in Scripture. Ministers working in non-lectionary traditions are especially susceptible to the proclamation of a truncated canon due to their freedom to choose their own texts week by week. In these traditions we observe that the most frequently omitted blocks of Scripture are the Prophets and the moral teachings both of Jesus and the writers of the Epistles.

Speaking of the significance of the Prophets in preaching, Frederick Buechner says:

"Nobody before or since has ever used words to express more powerfully than they our injustice and unrighteousness, our hardness of heart, our pride, our complacency, our hypocrisy, our idolatry.... These particular truths that the prophets speak were crucial for their own times and are crucial also for ours, and any preacher who does not speak them in his own right, naming names including his own name ... runs the risk of being irrelevant, sentimental, a bag of wind."1

The exclusion of the Prophets and other morally focused biblical materials leaves a shredded Scripture and an incomplete proclamation of the gospel. It is not coincidental that the preaching literature emerging out of the morally stronger preaching of the black church constantly emphasizes the centrality of the Prophets and the preaching of Jesus. Indeed, some of that literature essentially identifies the role of the preacher with the role of the biblical prophet.2 While this identification may be questioned, its intent is welcome, especially in light of an overall pulpit landscape in which prophetic and other morally demanding texts are largely ignored.