Review: Practicing The Preaching Life
Practicing the Preaching Life. By David B. Ward. Nashville: Abingdon, 2019. 978-1-5018-5494-1, 178 pp., $29.99 (paperback).
This review was first published in the Journal of the Evangelical Homiletics Society
Who among us has not heard (or preached!) sermons that were exegetically accurate, homiletically correct, thoughtfully applied and adequately delivered, yet which still seemed to fall flat? All the essential pieces are in place, yet there is a sense that some intangible quality (Authenticity? Credibility? Wisdom?) is missing. David Ward, Professor of Homiletics and Practical Theology at Indiana Wesleyan University, addresses this problem with the principled assertion that “preaching is more about life than it is about skills” (ii).
In Practicing the Preaching Life, Ward offers a philosophy and practice founded on the assumption that preaching’s proper aim is not merely a good sermon, but “living well as a worshipping community for the sake of the world” (2). His philosophy consists essentially of four preaching functions (healing, teaching, saving, freeing) that shape a preacher’s doing, and four “contextual virtues” (centered humility, compassionate empathy, participatory wisdom, courageous justice) that shape a preacher’s being. He urges preachers to pursue the “good life” above the “good sermon” (79) through Christian practices of devotion (spiritual disciplines) and practices of compassion (serving the needs of others). These practices he calls “means of grace,” helping the preacher to “practice the presence of God” and to enter a cycle of Christian formation: “The preaching life is embedded within a Christian life, a Christian life funds a rich preaching life, and a rich preaching life points the church to a comprehensively Christian life” (93).
In the final chapters, Ward gives practical tips for integrating these functions, virtues, and practices into a sermon process. He offers the practices of devotion and compassion as the context in which a “hermeneutic of tradition” and a “hermeneutic of suspicion” work together to lead to fresh insight. He proposes a “delay” between insight and sermon through a four-week preparation process to allow the time for the contextual virtues to shape the preacher’s perspective. He suggests a process of oral preparation that locates the sermon by “sounding it out,” affirming that, “for most preachers, the sooner orality is injected into the preaching process, the better” (124). He discusses three preaching voices (herald, witness, testimony) and develops each insightfully, including pitfalls to avoid. Finally, a chapter on sermon form explores a variety of possibilities ranging from inductive to deductive with an emphasis on a sermon logic that undergirds each.
Though Ward clearly writes from the perspective of his Wesleyan tradition, expressed through the New Homiletic, he makes efforts to converse meaningfully with a broader readership. He also exhibits a keen conviction that issues of racial and social justice should occupy a prominent place in today’s Christian pulpit. He emphasizes this theme by devoting an entire chapter to the virtue of “courageous justice,” covering the other three virtues in a single chapter. Readers who oppose the use of Critical Race Theory will likely find fault with some of his comments regarding the need to address systems of injustice, but his perspective is compelling and worth considering.
The book includes a “For Reflection” section at the end of each chapter with a series of exercises and questions to help process the chapter’s content, either with a class or as an individual. Five appendices also provide helpful handles for the reader through exercises, assessments, summaries, and diagrams. Though the insights of the book are of value for preachers of all levels, the fact that it does not address basic homiletical skills might preclude it from being the primary textbook for a beginning preaching course. It might serve best as a supplementary or secondary text, or perhaps as a primary text for a more advanced course. Preachers who have been at the task for a while will also find here an important perspective for deepening their preaching life and practice.
In this work, David Ward has taken an aspect of preaching that is universally recognized as crucial, but which is often neglected in books on preaching, and he has put it at center stage. He reminds us that preaching is not merely a skill to be mastered, but a life to be lived, that sermons flow best from a life lived faithfully before God and among his people.
