What's Happening with the Cultivating the Gift of Preaching Initiative?

We are entering our second month since the second annual Alma Preaching Conference and our participants are hard at work developing their preaching skills and reflecting on the preaching life.

Our new participants, those who just began the program this June, will spend August focusing on “The Role of Imagination in Preaching.” The gift of imagination is not about making things up, but rather, as Thomas Troeger and Leonora Tubbs Tisdale write in A Sermon Workbook: Exercises in the Art and Craft of Preaching (our primary textbook in CGPI), imagination “is connected with empathy, with our ability to sense what others might be feeling: ‘We imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Preachers frequently invoke imagination in their sermons, asking listeners to imagine a scene from the Bible or common life.

To understand God’s Word, in particular the command to love God and love our neighbors, we need to cultivate the gift of imagination and make connections not only between the ancient world of the Bible and contemporary life, but also between our own lives and those of our neighbors near and far. Troeger & Tisdale go on to write that “Cultivating [the gift of imagination] in a congregation is one of the major ways in which preachers help individuals find hope and empower congregations for mission and outreach. Christ says that he has come so that we might ‘have life, and have it abundantly’ John 10:10. Individuals who feel fragmented and lost need a vision of the abundant life that Christ offers, the wholeness and vitality of being that comes through faith.”

Our second year participants, who will be the first “class” to complete the program come November (!), will be focusing on preaching with conviction. As Luke Powery notes, “The hard work of preaching is actually the internal spiritual work. In fact, the most difficult sermon you may ever preach is the one you preach with your life.” Our CGPI participants will be reading from Jared Alcántara’s book, The Practices of Christian Preaching, wherein they will read about several exemplars of conviction in Scripture and in church history and practices that sustain, or hinder, conviction. These include prophets like Nathan, Elijah, and Amos, and New Testament figures like John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul. As well as well-known figures like John Chrysostom and Martin Luther King Jr., and lesser known figures like the Jarena Lee and Sarah Righter Major, regrettably neglected female preachers from 19^th Century America.

In such trying and polarized times, we all need to cultivate these gifts of imagination and conviction as we prayerfully consider how we are to faithfully serve the Triune God and proclaim the Kingdom of God.

Please pray for our emerging preachers, mentors, and CGPI staff as we strive to be faithful servants of Jesus and proclaim the Good News!

God bless you!

Matt Aragon Bruce, Ph.D.

Director, Cultivating the Gift of Preaching Initiative

matt@synodofthecovenant.org

609-712-4258