Saturday, June 09, 2007

Wholeness, humility ought to mark Anglican/Episcopal preaching, Troeger says

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79901_86691_ENG_HTM.htm

[Episcopal Life Online] 9 June 2007--The keynote preacher for the Episcopal Preaching Foundation's annual Preaching Excellence Program (PEP) -- meeting June 3-8 at Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania -- told conference participants that they ought to develop a way of preaching that ends the division between religion and spirituality.

Thomas Troeger, the J. Edward and Ruth Cox Lantz professor of Christian Communication at Yale Divinity School, told the group of just-graduated Episcopal seminarians and rising seniors that the world is filled with religious violence and spiritual hunger. Preachers must help mend the break between religion and spirituality, he said. To do so, Troeger said, preachers cannot have only methods for preaching or a theology of preaching; they must have both.

He outlined an Anglican/Episcopal understanding of scripture and the role of the preacher to help mend the break, using two poems from The Temple, written by George Herbert who became an Anglican priest at age 40 in 1630 and spent the remaining three years of his life as rector of a parish.

In "The Holy Scriptures", Troeger found the first quality of what he called an "Anglican homiletic." Troeger noted that the poem's placement in the collection suggests that "Anglican homiletics doesn't start with the preacher; its starts with the word of God."

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