Preaching with Passion

So I'm reading this great book for my Preaching class. It's called, The Liberating Pulpit. One of the signature classes at Seabury is Gospel Mission. Though facilitated by two faculty members, all the faculty come in to teach it over the course of two quarters. The major theme of this class (at least as far as I could tell) is "mission in a postmodern world." If we're not going out to convert the heathen, then what is mission? Last year Gospel Mission was my crucible class. I never felt like I understood what was going on because it was looking at everything from a systemic, analytical point of view, and I'm only just beginning to learn to think that way. What is encouraging to me about this book for preaching is that it seems to be a culmination of Gospel Mission, only it gives clear, concrete examples about how to interpret the Bible in a liberating way. It doesn't just theorize but also gives some practical application.

We read all of Acts for the Plunge class last week, and what I noticed again and again was how the people in Acts had a message they believed in so strongly that they couldn't STOP preaching it. Even in prison. Even when tortured. Even when killed. It reminds of an Indigo Girls song, Holy City. Until tonight I had only ever heard the song but never seen the lyrics. When I looked them up, I learned that I'd been hearing them wrong, so I'm going to adapt them for my purposes. The actual lyrics are "I want to be where the people are pretty just because they're feeling it deep down inside." What I have always heard was "I want to be where the people are PREACHING just because they're feeling it deep down inside." I weary of boring sermons that sound more like term papers than good news. When our class did 1-2 minute extemporaneous speeches on something we felt passionately about, I could hear people preaching what they were feeling deep down inside. I hope this class is going to help us to do that even more.