Sermon Drop In

If you were to outline Sunday's sermon the outline would be: Introduction--12 most effective preachers, what about the twelve most effective listeners; the role of the sermon-listener is not to listen to the preacher but to listen for the word of God which the preacher may or may not assist the listener in doing. I. Sometimes the word of God does come through the sermon but this rarely happens A. It happened once in my life--8th grade; B. Churches that assume it happens regularly are vulnerable to manipulation and coercion.
II. Sometimes the sermon comes alongside the word of God. A. If the word of God is the rain; preachers are like weathercasters. They predict the weather, can tell where they think the rain is; but they cannot generate it nor can they force you to experience it; B. Scripture mediates the word of God so, going back to the analogy, study of scripture is standing in the rain. C. Personal and congregational transformation requires study of scripture.
III. Sometimes God's word comes against the sermon.

On Sunday morning, dropped in the following thoughts around point IIC.
I was a 25 year old youth ministry when the Baylor study was published in 1996. That's why I didn't make the list. I feel confident that if the study were done today, now that I have preached for over a decade . . . I still wouldn't make the list. But someone who did make the list is a Disciples of Christ preacher named Fred Craddock. If you've never heard Fred preach, you should. Fred is known as a winsome, folksy preacher who tells stories. In the homiletics world (that's the study of preaching) he's known as the catalyst of the New Homiletic movement. But, I think when it's all said and done, Fred's legacy will not be that he told folksy stories. I do not believe that it will be that he launched the New Homiletics. I do not really believe either of those was Fred's really big idea. Fred's really big ideas was this: to get congregations to read scripture; to get Christians to read scripture. His really big idea is that we learn to read scripture using the best tools we have available to us--tools of social and historical research, tools of language study, tools of literary analysis. But he has also encouraged us to read expected to hear a word from God--the word of God. In the end, that's Fred Craddock's legacy and why he really is not merely a model preacher for those of us who preach but a model participant in the church's mission of listening for God's Word.