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I have asked my good friend Taylor Hill, a retired Presbyterian preacher, if I may use something he wrote to me recently. The subject of our e-mail conversation was “preaching.”

“It is amazing how irrelevant preachers can be.  I am listening again to my favorite mentor of preaching, Fred Craddock, who quotes Dr. Don Browning, Professor Emeritus of Chicago Divinity School.  Browning’s definition of a sermon, or preaching, is engaging the congregation in a conversation with the text.  He sees preaching as a three way conversation:  that between the preacher and the congregation (getting to know them, weddings, baptisms, funerals, and just listening), a conversation between the preacher and the text, which takes many hours of study, and finally, during the sermon itself, enabling the congregation to have a conversation with the text.  It is a lot of hard work but it keeps us honest and I believe that is what we are called to do as preachers.”
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