The Types of Preaching
 
TOPICAL PREACHING
 
WHAT IS PREACHING?
They race to seminars, gather in living rooms, glue their ear to radios, take mail-order courses, collect tapes, glut their bookshelves with multiple volumes, traipse across the country to encampments, and rivet their eyes to blow—dried television preachers. People hunger for a word from God. Even a near-sighted insensitive observer of American religious culture could hardly miss the hunger for a word from God on the part of Christian people. Pulpit committees scour the nation and then complain to the seminaries, “Where are the preachers?” What they mean as often as not is, “Where is someone who can relate the word of God to my life?” Markus Barth has gone so far as to call some contemporary preachers traitors to their task. What is the task of homiletic interpretation of scripture?
What is wrong with preaching? Every generation produces a covey of critics. In 1976 Middleton blamed the weakness of preaching on the debasement of language itself, the loss of rational thought in American culture, and the failure to relate preaching to the political needs of the times. He even blames the “musicalization” of American culture which constantly assaults people in restaurant, elevator, subway—there is no escape.
Yet in his entire study there is not a single mention of the loss of the Bible in contemporary preaching.
100 pages, an exam is included for completion for a Bachelor diploma from Life Catalyst Seminary. Email completed exam to 
lifecatalystseminary@gmail.com.