Knowing the Context: Frames, Tools, and Signs for Preaching

by James R. Nieman

Publisher:

Fortress Press

, 2008

Overview

While everyone might affirm that preaching needs to engage its listeners deeply, the initial move for novice preachers is to think this can be attained by livelier content and delivery of the sermon. All too quickly, however, one learns that there are many factors beyond what a preacher says and how she or he may say it that affect whether proclamation can actually be heard. Effective preaching requires the complex work of knowing the context in which preaching occurs, while avoiding the twin dangers of pandering to a situation's particulars or generalizing them into stereotypes. Knowing the Context reveals how to engage contexts for preaching, especially ways to examine contexts more responsibly, so that the sermon might more amply bring the word of Scripture to bear on the worlds and lives of listeners.

In this volume, James Nieman shows how preaching is oriented to specific locales, cultural situations, audiences, and occasions. Unlike other books that tell preachers how to preach to specific audiences, Knowing the Context helps readers analyze the situations in which they find themselves and shows how text and context are in a continuing dialogue and how to tailor sermons to their context.

Key Features

• Reveals how to engage contexts for preaching to make sermons relevant to the audiance
• Helps readers analyze the situations in which they find themselves and shows how text and context are in a continuing dialogue and how to tailor sermons to their context
• Completely interactive with your Logos library
• All Scripture references appear on mouse-over

Contents

Top Highlights

“Fourth, preaching is cultural. We have just observed that preaching happens personally through human groups.” (Page 11)

“Therefore, preaching can attend to context because it is a symbolic word.” (Page 12)

“First, studying a context should happen for a reason, a motivation that the researcher has somewhere in mind. Second, studying a context involves a discipline, an orderly path instead of a chaotic melee. Third, studying a context calls for thinking ahead, planning in advance of any fieldwork.” (Page 20)

“Extensive contextual study is pointless for the ministry of proclamation if preaching cannot do anything with or about context.” (Pages 8–9)

“Therefore, preaching can attend to context because it is a grounded word. This is not how we usually think. We have somehow come to believe that the more universally or generically we speak, the more widely we will reach, when in fact such talk actually stands apart from lived reality and therefore appeals only superficially. By contrast, grounded preaching narrates something particular and concrete.” (Page 10)

Product Details

• Title: Knowing the Context: Frames, Tools, and Signs for Preaching
• Author: James R. Nieman
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Publication Date: 2008
• Pages: 102

About James R. Nieman

Three books stand out as important markers along my scholarly journey. One was published shortly after I began serving a congregation of Iñupiaq Lutherans in Anchorage, Alaska. These marvelous people lived out a complex faith, blending traditional native beliefs and Protestant commitments in a fashion that often baffled me. Constructing Local Theologies by Robert Schreiter helped me appreciate more deeply what was going on and kindled my interest in contextual theologies. Several years later, another text gave me a vantage point on the rapidly changing scene in theology. Were there common points of interest in the otherwise dizzying diversity of emerging political and liberation theologies? Faith in History and Society by Johannes Metz offered a credible answer in both theology and method, and became my introduction to practical theology as well. The final book perhaps sounds most offbeat of all, but for me it was far from arcane. Like any teacher of preaching, I knew the underrated world-shaping force our words can bear. Even so, The New Rhetoric by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca completely reshaped my thinking in this area, driving me beyond the classical patterns I knew and into a contemporary way of naming the social impact of language. In sum, each of these books gave me new ways to think at key moments when the way ahead was anything but clear.