FROM THE JEREMIADS OF THE Puritan divines to the mountain-striding rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr., Americans have been a people awash in a sea of sermons. Every Sunday more than 400,000 Christian ...

What makes a sermon good? That has been a notoriously difficult question to answer. There are really only four kinds of sermons: biblically shallow and contextually irrelevant; biblically substantive ...

Good preaching requires mastery of rhetoric, in particular the tools of repetition and organization. “Otherwise, they’re not gonna remember,” says John Baldovin, S.J. “This is a no-brainer, but ...

Martin Copenhaver’s insightful “Handshake ritual” catches the preacher’s attention. The more I am in this business the more ambivalent I feel about the traditional ritual of greeting worshipers after ...

United Church of Christ minister F. Russell Mitman transfigures the pulpit with his conviction that preaching is more than a seated activity within the walls of the local church. Because “there is one ...

I have been thinking about the best preacher I ever heard. Not about the single best homily or sermon, but about the best and most consistent preaching I have encountered. When it comes to preaching, ...

In the past, people were often baptized, married and buried in their local church, but today about half of Americans at some point in their lives have looked for a new congregation, either in their ...

Is preaching in America in a particularly bad state? Several commentators have recently raised the question, yet it has a long history. "It has become an impertinent Vein among People of all Sorts," ...

We all need to be good preachers. By good I mean persuasive but also conscientious, promoting good ideas, not bad ones. The last thing we want is a world full of persuasive preachers preaching bad ...