Voice lessons: Learning to preach
In my second year teaching at a seminary I was assigned to teach preaching. In the third week, I was offering a less than enthusiastic response to a sermon when the student suddenly broke into tears and ran out. The class glared at me.
That day I learned that homiletics is the most difficult discipline in the seminary curriculum to teach. Anybody can teach Sanskrit or medieval theology. But preaching? When I evaluated a liturgical history student's paper with, "You don't know much about sacramental theology," this was met with barely a shrug. Who cares? But the response to my modest, "I found your last point to be unrelated to the theme of your sermon," was "How dare you say something that heartless to a nice seminarian like me?"
It isn't just that so many Protestants exalt preaching above other pastoral arts. The challenge is preaching itself. Proclaiming the gospel demands an interplay of highly developed emotional-spiritual-physical-intellectual qualities. Walking naked down Main Street while playing a harmonica is nothing compared to the personal exposure required to talk about God for 20 minutes to a group of people who have been, all week long, avoiding even the barest mention of God.
