5. Ensuring that preaching connects with culture and everyday life<\/p>\n
The death-knell for preaching is to place it in a self-contained world of the spiritual or the \u2018Christian\u2019 detached from everyday life. It is a theological imperative to make it engage with and draw from the day to day world of its listeners and speakers. This is why humour matters, and why I almost always begin my sermons with a practical question. (Doesn\u2019t all preaching, all theology, actually start from a presenting question? Jesus is the answer\u2026). This raises questions about our worship (does it connect with life?) but also about the preacher\u2019s own life. Does it connect with the experiences of the congregation from day to day?<\/p>\n
4. Preaching \u2018as one without authority\u2019, inviting testing and questioning<\/p>\n
Bill Hybels argues that we need to build in an experiential apologetic to our use of Scripture, showing that it offers insights that make a difference in everyday life, and the same is true of our preaching. We need to be willing to invite questioning, and have a robust but flexible sense of the authority of what God is saying\u2026too much of our authority is brittle….<\/p>\n