Sunday’s Sermon for Monday’s World: Preaching to Shape Daring Witness

by Sally Ann Brown

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2020

Overview

What can preachers do to help congregants navigate everyday life with the courage, imagination, and savvy it takes to testify in action and word to God’s mercy and justice?

Christianity’s witness depends on credible Christian lives carried out in ordinary settings of everyday life. Sunday’s Sermon for Monday’s World helps preachers design sermons that equip believers to act with improvisational, creative courage in the ordinary settings of their Monday-to-Saturday lives.

How can we who preach inspire the “ordinary prophets” of our time—those who, in Christ’s name, will act in great or small ways as agents of redemptive interruption? Sally A. Brown, with her extensive experience both in parish ministry and training others for ministry, shares preaching strategies that equip these ordinary prophets to take daring action.

Brown begins by reconsidering the power and limits of the missional model of Christian witness and argues that Christian witness today must be adaptive, and therefore imaginative and improvisational. She then turns to the connection between the sermons our listeners hear on Sunday and their capacity to timely, inventive action in everyday situations.

Sunday’s Sermon for Monday’s World will inspire both preachers and those who listen to them to move from sanctuary to street, week after week, eager to discern and participate in the ongoing, redemptive work of God already under way amid the ordinary scenes and settings of their Monday-to-Saturday lives.

Key Features

• Examines the power and limits of the missional model of Christian witness
• Shares preaching strategies that equip listeners to take daring action
• Considers the connection between the sermons people hear on Sunday and their capacity to timely, inventive action in everyday situations

Contents

• Being Christian in Public

Rethinking Everyday Christian Witness

• Public Witness in Everyday Life: Why the Testimony of Individual Christians in Everyday Spaces Still Matters
• The Everyday Witness of Ordinary Christian Lives as Faithful Improvisation

Preaching to Support the Everyday Witness of Ordinary Lives

• Preaching Promise-Grounded Hope: “Reading” Word and World through the Lens of Divine Promise
• Body Talk: Preaching about Life-Forming Christian Practices
• Story as Rehearsal Space: Preaching the Dynamics of Hope-Driven Action
• Sermons that Travel: How Metaphor Reveals Sightlines of Redemptive Hope

Product Details

• Title: Sunday’s Sermon for Monday’s World: Preaching to Shape Daring Witness
• Author: Sally A. Brown
• Series: The Gospel and Our Culture Series
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Publication Date: 2020
• Pages: 216
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Topic: Preaching Resources

About Sally Ann Brown

Sally A. Brown an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.., teaches preaching, hermeneutics, and homiletical theory at Princeton Seminary, where she also directs the annual Engle Institute of Preaching. She is 2019 President of the Academy of Homiletics. Previous books include Ways of the Word: Learning to Preach for Your Time and Place (with Luke A. Powery), Cross Talk: Preaching Redemption Here and Now, and Lament: Reclaiming Practices in Pulpit, Pew, and Public Square (co-edited with Patrick Miller).