Subscribers have the opportunity to participate in discussion forums, post sermons and offer helpful critique to others. Archived feature articles will also be available to subscribers.
A six-month free subscription is available through a key that can be found on the CD bundled with Kent Anderson's Choosing to Preach. >>
This is an unusual book. Capon offers some interesting ideas about sermon preparation and form, but the strength of the book is in the first half where he discusses the relationship of the preacher to the message and the purpose of preaching itself. Capon believes that if the preacher will be honest about his or her own deficiencies and learns to offer grace, the sermon will be of much greater help to grace-dependant listeners. Preachers that want to engage the problem will need to pursue this kind of grace. Some excerpts…
“I think good preachers should be like bad kids. They ought to be naughty enough to tiptoe up on dozing congregations, steal their bottles of religion pills, spirituality pills, and morality pills, and flush them all down the drain. The church, by and large, has drugged itself into thinking that proper human behavior is the key to its relationship with God. What preachers need to do is force it to go cold turkey with nothing by the word of the cross – and then be brave enough to stick around while it goes through the inevitable withdrawal symptoms. But preachers can’t be naughty or brave unless they’re free of their own need for the dope of acceptance. And they won’t be free of their need until they can trust the God who has already accepted them, in advance and deead as doornails, in Jesus. (14)”
“Unless we who speak the Word are willing to be utterly nothing – unless we’re willing to admit we’re sinners, and welcome the annihilation of our glittering images of moral success and clerical reputability – our words will be nothing more than the words of fakers, and we’ll never come within a million miles of that astonishment at grace which alone can make those words come alive. (20)”
“The church is not in the world to teach sinners to straighten up and fly right. That’s the world’s business; and on the whole it does a fairly competent – even a gleefully aggressive – job of it. The church is supposed to be in the forgiveness business. Its job in filling pulpits is to find derelict nobodies who are willing to admit that they’re sinners and mean it. (24)”
“But mostly, I’ve made them (observations from Scripture) in the hope of moving you, if possible, into the freedom – into the larking around you’ll enjoy if you preach out of nothing but the grace of the cross. (51)”