Word: churches
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Charles L. Allen, folksy pulpit patriarch of Houston's First United Methodist Church, thinks that seminarians' lack of interest in preaching was largely due to the emphasis on social impact encouraged by Martin Luther King Jr. The irony is that King, "one of the greatest pulpit men of all time," moved his countrymen as much with words as with deeds. "A lot of younger preachers at the time didn't see that," says Allen...
...urgent need for biblical teaching. Seminary instruction in homiletics (the techniques of sermon preparation) is generally good. But to conservative critics this work is often undermined by Bible faculties. "Seminarians are not sure God is speaking in the Bible," says James Boice of Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church. "The professors think of the Bible as a collection of human documents. Centuries ago, even the heretics believed the Bible was the Word of God; they were just wrong in the way they interpreted...
...insect" held over a fire. When Edwards preached, all New England shook in its boots. But the so-called Golden Age of Preaching did not come until the 19th century, with stemwinders like Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn and Phillips Brooks of Boston. Clyde Fant of the First Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas, a former homiletics teacher, notes that even then folks found fault with the state of the pulpit. "Where are the good preachers?" asks Fant. "Right where they've always been -few and far between." By most accounts, the 20th century giant was Harry Emerson Fosdick...
...deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this moment he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening including himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and not told them, but who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them...
David H.C. Read, 69, Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church of New York. "The worst sin is dullness," says Read, a transplanted Scotsman and British army chaplain who is never dull. Still, he disapproves of the whole idea of "princes of the pulpit," and he deplores the fact that people go to church to hear a celebrated preacher rather than to worship. But if there is any one prince of the Protestant pulpit these days, it is Read...