Author: Frank A. Thomas Publisher: The Pilgrim Press ISBN: 0829819894 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
Through the unique lens of African American preaching, Frank Thomas explores the theology, dynamics, and guidelines for celebrative preaching. "They Like to Never Quit Praisin' God: The Role of Celebration in Preaching" provides the steps that are essential to understand and experience the Gospel through celebration and praise. This revised edition is updated with two new sermon illustrations and a sermon preparation worksheet.
Author: Frank A. Thomas Publisher: Abingdon Press ISBN: 1501818953 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
The Introduction to African American Preaching is an important, groundbreaking book. This book acknowledges African American preaching as an academic discipline, and invites all students and preachers into a scholarly, dynamic, and useful exploration of the topic. Author Frank Thomas opens with a “bus tour” study of African American preaching. He shows how African American preaching has gradually moved from an almost exclusively oral to an oral/written tradition. Readers will gain insight into the history of the study of the African American preaching tradition, and catch the author’s enthusiasm for it. Next Thomas traces the relationship between homiletics and rhetoric in Western preaching, demonstrating how African American preaching is inherently theological and rhetorical. He then explores the question, “what is black preaching?” Thomas introduces the reader to methods of “close reading” and “ideological criticism.” And then demonstrates how to use these methods, using a sermon by Gardner Calvin Taylor as his example. The next chapter considers the question, “what is excellence in black preaching?” The next chapter seeks to create bridges and dialogue within the field of homiletics, and in particular, the Euro-American homiletic tradition. The goal of this chapter is to clearly demonstrate connections between the African American preaching tradition and the field of homiletics. Thomas next turns to questions about the relevancy of the church to the Millennial generation. Specifically, how will the African American church remain relevant to this generation, which is so deeply concerned with social justice?
Author: David Schnasa Jacobsen Publisher: Fortress Press ISBN: 1451406207 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 194
Book Description
Although lectionary and worship allow us to deepen our appreciation for the Bible and the themes and emphases of the Christian calendar, they sometimes fail to allow preachers to speak the gospel directly to the situations that occupy their congregations. This book is designed to help pastors and seminarians discover resources they already have to unpack situations and understand them theologically in light of their task of preaching the gospel.
Author: Frank A. Thomas Publisher: Abingdon Press ISBN: 1501896555 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 187
Book Description
Preachers increasingly see the need for to deliver sermons that are "dangerous" in a variety of ways, the way they challenge hearers' comfort levels and challenge established powers and hierachies. Thomas helps readers understand those dangers—especially the forces of power and hierarchy that are so intrinsic in our everyday lives and in society as a whole. He teaches how to anticipate and navigate those forces, to open opportunities for dangerous preaching, and to mitigate negative impact on congregants, the preacher, and the preacher-congregation relationships. Surviving a Dangerous Sermon is a logical follow-up to Thomas's previous book, How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon.It equips preachers to say what must be said, in a way that it is heard, so that the sermon has a chance to do its work on human hearts, without negative consequences.
Author: Elaine McCollins Flake Publisher: ISBN: 9780817015060 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Author and pastor Flake offers a theological paradigm to help preachers understand and fulfill their responsibility to preach liberation and empowerment to marginalized and hurting black women.
Author: Martha Simmons Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 039305831X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 989
Book Description
One hundred sermons that display the victorious, although sometimes painful, historical and spiritual pilgrimage of black people in America. A groundbreaking anthology, Preaching with Sacred Fire is a unique and powerful work. It captures the stunning diversity of the cultural and historical legacy of African American preaching more than three hundred years in the making. Each sermon, as editors Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas reveal, is a work of art and a lesson in unmatched rhetoric. The journey through this anthology—which includes selections from Jarena Lee, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Gardner C. Taylor, Vashti McKenzie, and many others—offers a rare view of the unheralded role of the African American preacher in American history. The collection provides new insights into the underpinnings of the black fight for emancipation and the rise and growth of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Sermons from the first decade of the twenty-first century point toward the future of African American preaching. Biographies of the preachers put their work in the cultural and homiletic context of their periods. The preachers of these sermons are men and women from a range of faiths, ancestries, and educational backgrounds. They draw on a vast and luminous landscape of poetic language, using metaphor, rhythm, and imagery to communicate with their congregations. What they all have in common is hope, resilience, and sacred fire. “Even during the most difficult and oppressive times,” Simmons and Thomas write in the preface, “the delivery, creativity, charisma, expressivity, fervor, forcefulness, passion, persuasiveness, poise, power, rhetoric, spirit, style, and vision of black preaching gave and gives hope to a community under siege.” This magnificent work beautifully renders the complexity, spiritual richness, and strength of African American life.
Author: Frank A. Thomas Publisher: Abingdon Press ISBN: 1791020232 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 132
Book Description
Learn to engage with a dangerous God, to preach the sermons your community needs today. Every sermon has a theology, and a god of that theology behind it. Preaching is more effective, and has more integrity when preachers understand the god behind their theology. Specifically, whether the god is a universal God, like the one expressed by Christ and the Christian faith, or a tribal god, which is sometimes dressed up to resemble Christianity but is something else entirely. Frank A. Thomas culminates his exploration of the Dangerous Sermon with this book, which leads readers through the process of identifying and understanding the gods behind theology, and their connection to preaching. The reader is equipped to discern the metaphors, symbols, and rhetorical indicators which point to the god a preacher is serving and calling others to serve. Praise for The God of the Dangerous Sermon Enlightening, vibrant, and memorable. A vital resource for anyone who seeks to preach substantive sermons. –Donyelle McCray, Associate Professor of Homiletics, Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT With dexterous and definitive argument, Thomas compels preachers to be accountable for the God behind their rhetoric. –Karoline M. Lewis, Marbury E. Anderson Chair of Biblical Preaching, Professor of Biblical Preaching, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN The God of the Dangerous Sermon and its two companion books will raise up the next wave of preachers who simultaneously nurture faith communities and bear witness to the God of justice we know in the face of Jesus Christ. –Gregory V. Palmer, Resident Bishop of the Ohio West Episcopal Area, United Methodist Church Warning to all preachers: Do not open this book by Frank Thomas unless you are ready to be changed. No one else lays out the promise and perils of preaching with such clarity and compassion. I know I do not live up to the call of the God of the Dangerous sermon every single Sunday, but Frank Thomas sure makes me want to. Great teachers and preachers will do that. –Lillian Daniel, senior pastor of First Congregational Church in Dubuque, IA; author of Tired of Apologizing for a Church I Don’t Belong To In God of the Dangerous Sermon, Frank Thomas refines his theoretical vision of celebration in African American preaching and demonstrates how and why theological content is at the heart of his project. For Thomas, celebration is rhetorical theology made possible because of the actions and character of a God whose divine performance consists of healing the brokenhearted, liberating the oppressed, and refusing to be tribal. A legend in his time, this is Thomas at the height of his native genius and creative powers. –Kenyatta R. Gilbert, professor of homiletics, Howard University School of Divinity, Washington, DC; author of Exodus Preaching: Crafting Sermons about Justice and Hope from Abingdon Press
Author: Frank A. Thomas Publisher: Abingdon Press ISBN: 1501856847 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 175
Book Description
Learn to use four characteristics of "preaching with moral imagination" to proclaim freedom for all. The author describes the four characteristics using examples like Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,Prathia Hall, and the Moral Monday Movement, along with musicians and other artists of today. Moral imagination helps the hearer to see what they cannot see, to hear what they cannot hear--to inhabit the lives of others, so that they can embody Christ and true freedom for those others. This book equips and empowers preachers to transcend their basic skills and techniques, so that their proclamation of the Word causes actual turnaround in the hearts and lives of their hearers, and in their communities. "Frank Thomas has written a passionate summons: amid the current destructive chaos of our society there is an urgent need for moral imagination. Such imagination is the antithesis of “diabolic” and “idolatrous” imagination that is all to the fore in our public discourse and practice. Thomas fleshes out “moral imagination” with close reflection on the practice of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Before he finishes Thomas shows how the urgency of “moral imagination” belongs peculiarly to the work of the preacher. This book is a welcome call for gospel-grounded courage and truth about the neighbor issued in a way that refuses the self-serving fakery that dominates our public life." --Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary "Timely and prophetic, How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon presents a homiletic essential for our churches today. Thomas insists that it is up to the preacher to recapture and reclaim the moral imagination of our nation so that the Gospel’s message of freedom is true for all people. With attention to specific figures whose witness models the qualities and characteristics of moral imagination, Thomas inspires the preacher toward powerful proclamation that both challenges and critiques any speech that subjugates or subordinates. How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon is must read for preachers to recover and reimagine the leadership role of the church for the sake of justice for all." --Karoline M. Lewis, Associate Professor of Biblical Preaching and the Marbury E. Anderson Chair of Biblical Preaching, Luther Seminary; author of She: Five Keys to Unlock the Power of Women in Ministry. "In this lucid and compelling book, Frank Thomas plumbs the depths of American moral rhetoric for insights that will help preachers. How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon provides new and dramatic ways in which the moral imagination in a democratic society can be nurtured by visionary, empathic, wise, and artistic preachers."--John S. McClure, Charles G. Finney Professor of Preaching and Worship, Vanderbilt Divinity School "Warning: Preachers, if you are comfortable with the status quo of white privilege, patriarchy, hetero-normativity, and classism, do not read this book. If you are comfortable with sermon series that reduce the gospel to self-help acronyms, don’t read this book. But if you have the courage to look honestly at our landscape and bring the moral imagination of the Christian tradition to bear on it, open these pages and your sermons may never be the same again. But then again neither will the church--or the world--be the same anymore, if enough of us follow Thomas’s advice." --O. Wesley Allen, Jr., Lois Craddock Perkins Professor of Homiletics, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University
Author: Frank A. Thomas
Author: Frank A. Thomas
Author: Frank Anthony Thomas
Author: David Schnasa Jacobsen
Author: Susan Karen Hedahl
Author: Frank A. Thomas
Author: Elaine McCollins Flake
Author: Martha Simmons
Author: Frank A. Thomas
Author: Frank A. Thomas