Our Preaching

I believe that one of the biggest challenges facing the preacher today is the growing amount of secularism or worldliness in the pews and pulpits. There was a time in the African-American Church where the preachers’ voice commanded unity, collective concern, and communal responsibility. However, persons are now motivated by messages which speak of issues relevant to the circumstance of the individual rather than to the individual despite the circumstance.
Our preaching and teaching must seek to liberate the masses; it should respond to hard questions with relevant truths; it should expose corruption and encourage commitment. It should convict rather than condone. It should recover from disastrous living rather than reemphasize present condition. Preaching should provide direction to truths, not diversions or distractions through entertaining messages. Preachers are messengers of God, in that we are commanded of God to tell the story.
African-Americans are a storytelling people. Many of our stories, however, are not happy ones. Some of our stories even tell of our own failures. Preaching is the telling of the divine story in various contexts with conviction. The preacher acts as God’s agent through observation and participation in everyday life; at home, throughout the congregation, and all the other life experiences that feed into the sermon. The preacher must ascertain not only the text; the preacher must seek to discover his or her own voice through the text. I believe that God meets the preacher in the developmental stages of the sermon, the preparation. God does not appear suddenly on Sunday morning during the presentation of the message.
I think that for our preaching to regain its effectiveness, in the African-American Community, it must once again come to reflect the African-American tradition and universality of liberating messages; messages that empowers all, including the preacher, through the realizations of one of the basic truths of Jesus Christ, that we can achieve, with Jesus, in this present time, a life more abundantly.