Word: week
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Word became flesh," says John's Gospel of the incarnate Christ of Bethlehem. In Christmas sermons before some 75 million Americans this week, words about Christ will become flesh in the person of the preacher. Through their strange and marvelous craft, Christianity has been transmitted and reshaped for every age since Christ himself went "preaching the Gospel of the kingdom...
...tempted to think that American preaching is a dying art is George Plagenz of the Cleveland Press, who writes an oft acerbic "review" of a local church service each week, complete with restaurant-type ratings. Instead of cuisine or ambience, he rates worship service, music, sermon and friendliness, granting up to three stars in each category. In nearly two years Plagenz, who listened to many pulpit greats a generation ago, has found only two preachers worth three stars...
...common sense. The following seven stars of the pulpit selected by TIME'S editors and correspondents across the country are at the very least proof that many splendid practitioners of the ancient art of preaching are still at large in the U.S. Only preachers who nurture a congregation week by week, year after year, were considered, thus ruling out famous evangelists like Billy Graham and TV personalities. Those chosen had to convey, along with solid content and skillful delivery, the sense of over whelming conviction that is one of the golden keys to great preaching...
...question of potential impact. In his intriguing little book on preaching, Telling the Truth, Novelist and sometime Preacher Frederick Buechner describes the magic moment when the minister steps into the pulpit. In the pews sit a college student there against his will, a banker who twice contemplated suicide that week, a contractor on the take, a pregnant girl who feels life stir within her, a teacher hiding his homosexuality. "The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from...
Pollard delivers three sermons a week, teaches a Bible class for some 500 prominent laymen every Tuesday, and prepares both a TV and a radio program weekly. "But if ser mons are not drawn directly from the Bible," he says firmly, they're "just speechmaking." With all the competing forms of commercial art and entertainment today, Pollard figures, the continuing demand for preaching "can't be explained in any other terms than that God is using...