Introducing Kent Anderson's new book from Zondervan

Synopsis:
With the landscape of ministry changing, preachers need a variety of tools to effectively communicate God's truth to today's listeners. Beginning with a strong call to keep preaching, this practical book presents and describes five different models for doing so, also relating each style to well-known contemporary preachers.

Description:
Today, traditional forms of preaching are being scrutinized and challenged. The biblical sermon is not immune to the pressure to evolve or even fall by the wayside, leaving pastors and seminary students confused over how best to communicate to today's listeners.

Choosing to Preach now available
in Spanish, Korean, and Amazon's
Kindle format.

In this forward-looking textbook, Kenton Anderson delivers a strong call to current and future ministers to indeed choose to preach biblical sermons, despite the obstacles to doing so. While preaching itself is non-negotiable, the exact form it takes can be much more flexible, allowing people to hear from God as they hear his Word preached.

Rather than presenting one model or process for preparing a sermon, Anderson explains several available options. As you discern your message from the Bible, will you begin with the text (deductive) or with the listener (inductive)? Will you focus on the idea (cognitive) or the image (affective)?

The choices you make lead to five possible sermon structures:

DECLARATIVE -- make an argument

PRAGMATIC -- solve a mystery

NARRATIVE -- tell a story

VISIONARY -- paint a picture

INTEGRATIVE -- sing a song

Each model is described in detail and related to well-known contemporary preachers, including John MacArthur, Rick Warren, Eugene Lowry, and Rob Bell. This book equips you with a variety of tools for your preaching tool kit. A CD-ROM with additional helpful resources is included, as well as discussion questions and practical exercises.

Excerpt:
I sometimes wonder whether preaching is worth the effort. I don't know whether it is any harder to get up a sermon today than it used to be, but it sure feels like it. In the old days, preachers didn't have so much competition. I suppose I'm not ancient enough to have experienced "the old days" but I imagine it to be the case. Surely there was a time when preachers didn't have to compete with the luminaries of preaching on the radio. Surely there was a time when people felt obligated to come to church and listen whether the sermon was any good or not. There must have been a time when preaching was less complicated -- when there was one way to prepare a sermon and everybody knew what it was.

If that day existed, it is no longer. Preachers today, if they must preach, are expected to be as deep as St. Augustine, as practical as Billy Graham, and as entertaining as Jay Leno. If not, the listener can find another preacher who is, if not down the street, then certainly on the television or on the internet. Or they might choose not to listen to preaching any more at all.

Preaching today is at a crossroads. Changes in church and culture have undone the prior consensus about the importance of biblical exposition as a staple of church life. Currently local church leaders are hearing from an array of influencers, some of whom would abandon the sermon, others who would retain the traditional sermon, and others yet who would preserve the sermon but with a much different form.

These different forms are many. There are numerous paths a sermon could take, each leading to different regions of the human heart and soul. Some sermons appeal to the head and others to the heart. Some emphasize the text of Scripture and others focus on the text of life. Most are somewhere in between, herking and jerking about the homiletic territory, enticing certain listeners and aggravating others. Unfortunately, the territory is not well mapped and many a preacher feels lost along the way. Many have given up the journey altogether. The truth is, there has been change in every age and the changes that are to come are likely beyond anything we have so far been able to imagine.

In the meantime Sunday is coming and the sermon insists itself. Whatever am I going to do? Is preaching really worth the effort? Is there not another choice that I could make? Okay, that is how I feel on Tuesday morning when I return to the office and face the challenge of getting yet another sermon together for the same people who heard me last week and the week before and the ones before that. Generally, the feeling passes. Sometimes it is the Bible itself that jump-starts my homiletic engine. Other times it is the people.

People who listen to preaching are special people. The pessimism described above is probably more theoretical than what is actually warranted. I often ask students at the beginning of one of my classes in preaching for the names of the preachers that have had a profound influence on them. I used to expect to hear the names of famous preachers, the ones on the radio or the ones with the largest number of hits on their websites. I expect they are going to tell me about preachers I have heard of, but such is not the case. My students tell me about their home church preachers, the ones they grew up listening to -- the preachers without much reputation beyond their local neighborhood. They tell me about preachers who might not be flashy but who are consistent -- preachers who might never get invited to bring the keynote sermon at the denominational convention, but who seldom fail to touch the mind or the heart of the few and the faithful that rely on them. I find this encouraging.