Pulpit play
Discovering a Sermon: Personal Pastoral Preaching.
By Robert C. Dykstra. Chalice
Press, 154 pp., $18.99 paperback.
Whether you are a preacher of sermons or a listener to them, you know how much rides on that 15 or 20 minutes in the pulpit. Hungry people are waiting to be fed. A holy God is waiting to be proclaimed. The word is waiting to be made flesh again, and the preacher's body is at least one of the vehicles available for the working of that miracle most Sunday mornings.
Sometimes it happens and sometimes it does not. When it does not, Robert Dykstra suggests, it is often because the preacher has surrendered curiosity for correctness, and has lost all appetite for playing with fire.
Dykstra, who teaches pastoral theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, approaches preaching from an unusual angle. His mentors are not Fred Craddock or David Buttrick but British psychoanalyst W. D. Winnicott and Winnicott's disciple Adam Phillips. People listen to sermons for the same reason that they seek pastoral counseling, Dykstra says: out of a deep and often unspoken desire for transformation. If they instead find themselves bored by what they hear, then something has gone grievously wrong.
