Drawn into worship with yearning for God’s continued presence in hearts and lives, Brad Froslee called Festival participants into their last service together at #Homiletics2019 with centering prayer and song repeating the refrain; Oh God, we call, from deep inside we yearn for you. Moving into a prayer of Remembrance for Rachel Held Evans, beloved author and…

On Thursday, surrounded by eager listeners in the Westminster sanctuary, Rev. Dr. Anna Carter Florence returned to her roots. This was the church where she was first ordained, where she preached in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, where she navigated despair from presiding over yet another lonely funeral of man who died in the…

Our amazing photographers Keith Spencer and Stephanie Luedtke have been working hard this week. See more #Homiletics2019 photos on SmugMug.

In Rev. Will Willimon’s estimation, self-righteousness is a major pitfall to preachers’ efforts to be prophetic. When religious leaders internalize expectations of saintly perfection, we can be too afraid of saying the wrong thing to risk saying anything meaningful at all. When the idea of “prophets” gets confused with “fortune-tellers,” we feel pressured to speak from a place of all-knowing certainty.…