12 articles from nine issues, 2000 to 2019
What clergy wear in worship has changed in his lifetime, and Taylor isn't quite sure all the changes are improvements. Working from Lorimer's nineteenth-century painting of a Scottish Kirk ordination, he reflects on the theology of vestments and what gets lost when the gown disappears.
Lectionary preaching protects congregations from their preacher's pet agendas. Lectio continua, preaching consecutively through books of the Bible, was the Reformed alternative recovered from the Fathers. Old answers the practical questions raised by anyone trying to do it now: where to start, how long to spend, what to do with hard texts.
Earl Palmer has been called the best expository preacher in America of his generation. Burnett interviews him at age eighty-five about how he came to faith at Cal Berkeley, what shaped his approach to the text, and what he wants the next generation of preachers to keep alive.
Death blows the empty clichés out of pastoral ministry like an umbrella in a hurricane. McSween focuses on the funeral service and sermon as the place where a Reformed pastor has a unique Word to proclaim, and where the gospel is most acutely needed and most easily mishandled.
The proclaimed Word is the load-bearing wall of Reformed worship. Gwinn watches Presbyterians shave minutes off the sermon for committee updates and musical responses, and asks what we are giving away when we treat preaching as a part of worship rather than as worship itself.
Does the preaching model of Luther, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Bullinger, and Calvin still speak to a generation shaped by smart phones, Hulu, and Instagram? Gibbons argues that the Reformers' way of preaching is not a museum piece but a working practice, and shows how it travels into the digital age.
Pelikan called the Reformation a tragic necessity, and Gatewood holds the two halves of that phrase together. The piece reads as both celebration of the Word's work in the Reformers' generation and lament over the divisions their work left for us to inherit.
Forty years into preaching, Johnson offers ten convictions about what it actually takes to do the work well. Romans 10 frames the piece: how shall they call on him in whom they have not believed, and how shall they believe in him whom they have not heard?
What makes a gathering of Christians a true church? Jerry Andrews follows Paul’s letter to Corinth through the parishes of Zwingli, Calvin and Knox to show the three Reformation marks: the Word preached and heard, the sacraments rightly administered, and discipline.
What does a church actually believe: its documents, or what is said from its pulpits? Philip Turner listens to the working theology of the Episcopal Church and finds radical inclusion standing where the cross, the resurrection and a call to repentance used to stand.
Were the first Presbyterians people of revival? Keith Beebe traces a line of spiritual awakening from Knox’s Scotland through Ulster and the American colonies, and argues that fervent preaching and communion seasons belong to the Presbyterian inheritance from the start.
What marks the preaching God uses in times of awakening? Philip Keevil surveys sermons from Chrysostom and the Puritans to Whitefield, Finney and Spurgeon, and concludes that the common thread is the unction of the Spirit rather than any technique.
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