Meet some stars of Christian preaching you won’t see on television

From The New York Times: 

Quick: Name a famous American preacher.

Chances are you came up with an television evangelist. The names come easily: Billy Graham, Robert H. Schuller and Oral Roberts; Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker; Joel Osteen and T. D. Jakes. Since World War II, American preaching has been synonymous with high-tech, media-savvy soul-winning, usually with a conservative, evangelical theology.

But while these evangelicals have sizable audiences and book sales, they appeal primarily to like-minded Christian conservatives. For those in the more liberal wings of the Congregational, Episcopal, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches, there is a parallel world of preaching stars.

Last month, Minneapolis was the center of that sphere.

About 1,750 Christians, mostly pastors and seminary students, gathered here from May 19 to 23 for the annual Festival of Homiletics (the word refers to the art of preaching) to pray, sing and hear 18 sermons and 17 lectures on preaching. The big names included Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar; William Willimon, a Duke professor; and Barbara Brown Taylor, who teaches at Piedmont College in Georgia and is admired around the English-speaking world for her preaching on the Bible.

In between sermons, the attendees renewed relationships, made new friends and asked their favorite preachers to sign copies of their books and CDs. They also came for inspiration on how to keep preaching relevant in their churches, where congregants are not looking for the charismatic, come-to-Jesus style that stirs people in many evangelical churches.

The Rev. David Howell, who founded the festival in Williamsburg, Va., in 1993, said the audiences he described as mainline have needs and expectations that differ from those of evangelical congregations.

“They are both grounded for the most part in the Bible,” said Mr. Howell, a Presbyterian minister who also founded the journal Lectionary Homiletics. “The takeoff point is the biblical text. But mainliners probably talk more about social issues and community issues. Evangelicals talk more — and this is a generalization — more about personal salvation, or a personal relationship with Jesus.”

Sermons differ in style, too. “You might find, in mainline preaching, a little more tendency for narrative preaching, crafting the sermon as a continuous story,” Mr. Howell said.

…The conference fosters conversations about trends in preaching, ones that carry on over years. Lauren Winner, an Episcopal priest and Duke professor, who gave a sermon on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, talked about making preaching “more democratic.”

“You have seen this metaphor for 20 years, in homiletics, that the sermon is a ‘conversation,’ not just a clergy monologue,” Dr. Winner said. “But what does this mean? Does it mean have a Wednesday afternoon Bible study, so that your Sunday sermon can engage the congregation’s concerns about the passage? Or it might mean emailing out a passage beforehand, and saying, ‘What do you want to know about it?’ ”

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