Preaching in a New Key charts a pathway for expository preaching in today’s culture.
This is an introductory course on expository preaching for new preachers. And for seasoned preachers it’s an opportunity to recalibrate, as you seek to connect with contemporary listeners. If you have a preaching team, you can engage the course together!
People’s experience of faith today is often complex. Instead of listening for answers from scripture, many people bring questions about scripture. This makes expository preaching a creative challenge.
That’s where this course...
Preaching in a New Key charts a pathway for expository preaching in today’s culture.
This is an introductory course on expository preaching for new preachers. And for seasoned preachers it’s an opportunity to recalibrate, as you seek to connect with contemporary listeners. If you have a preaching team, you can engage the course together!
People’s experience of faith today is often complex. Instead of listening for answers from scripture, many people bring questions about scripture. This makes expository preaching a creative challenge.
That’s where this course comes in. We cover practical strategies for moving from the text to the sermon. We also talk about beauty and creativity, the inner life of the preacher, preaching the violent texts, preaching to form the church as the beloved community, and more. This course goes hand in hand with Mark’s book, Preaching in a New Key: Crafting Expository Sermons in Post-Christian Communities.
Sessions
Composing
The nuts and bolts of preparing a sermon.
This session explores the nuts and bolts of preparing a sermon. We trace a preparation process that follows the structure of the text itself. We also explore an intuitive approach sermon preparation that emphasises into creativity and conversations. We engage in eight practices for sermon preparation, and eight “licks” (as in musical licks) to include in every sermon.
Duration | 57 min
Deeper Context
Understanding how people experience faith today.
To preach effectively, we need to understand the complexity of faith experiences today: people often experience faith mixed with doubt. This session unpacks concrete strategies for preaching effectively to nourish faith in today’s context, the core of which is an approach we refer to as “reversing the flow.”
Duration | 34 min
Deeper Church
Scripture isn't so much about addressing us as individuals, but shaping us as the beloved community.
Preaching is a communication that is designed to shape communities of God’s people as they improvise on the biblical tradition in a particular place. As preachers, we are following the pattern of the Bible: each book of the Bible was written to nourish an ancient community of God’s people as a contrastive community. Like the biblical authors, we preach to nourish the shared life of our church, bearing witness together in life, word, and deed. We unpack practical strategies for how to do this.
Duration | 35 min
Deeper Interpretation
We examine biblical interpretation, which is our foundation for preaching. We shift some of the deep structures, and we offer a pathway for preaching the violent texts.
Session four examines biblical interpretation, which is our foundation for preaching. We shift some of the deep structures for biblical interpretation, and we offer a pathway for preaching the violent texts. Biblical interpretation in much of Western evangelical preaching abandons the narrative, the justice, the beauty, the humanity, the tenderness in Scripture—these are the very aspects of Scripture are what bring preaching alive! We will excavate the foundation of our preaching by examining four themes: the biblical story, biblical ethics, the gospel, and witness.
Duration | 47 min
Creativity & Heart
We explore the importance of creativity, and we show how preaching is heart to heart communication.
Session five explores the importance of beauty and creativity in preaching. Because beauty is a glimpse of God, our preaching practice should be aesthetically compelling and creatively attuned. This session offers practical steps to appeal to our listener’s creative intuition. Session five also unpacks how preaching is heart to heart communication. We see how we preachers can soften our hearts to see the world as Jesus sees the world, in its brokenness, its injustice, its beauty, and its potential.
Duration | 37 min
Deeper Self
The inner life of a preacher - our spiritual, social, emotional, physical, sexual world - deeply shapes our preaching. We explore ways to peach from a place of holistic health.
The pursuit of holistic health could not be more important for preachers. The inner life of a preacher—our spiritual, social, emotional, physical, sexual world—deeply shapes our preaching. This session offers a distinction between preaching from our deeper self and from our defended self. It offers strategies for recognizing the signs of health and illness in our preaching. It walks through a holistic-health check-in for preachers.
Duration | 35 min
Instructor
Rev. Dr. Mark Glanville, Ph.D.
Mark Glanville works as the Director of the Centre for Missional Leadership at St. Andrews Hall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
He is an Old Testament scholar, and has written five books, including Improvising Church: Scripture as the Source of Harmony, Rhythm, and Soul, and Preaching in a New Key: Crafting Expository Sermons in Post-Christian Neighbourhoods.