By Chris Moon
Micah Odor’s grandfather preached for 50 years in Restoration Movement churches in Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. Preaching is in the family DNA.
Odor’s own preaching ministry, therefore, was marked by his grandmother’s prayers. She would call him the day before he walked up to the pulpit. “Preach the Word,” she would remind him. It was a simple admonition, and one Odor has never forgotten.
Now the executive director of the Christian Church Leadership Network, Odor said the call to preach the truth of the Bible remains “essential to ministers” in the Restoration Movement. It is a movement, after all, that isn’t bound together by an organization or authority structure. Instead, it is bound together by preaching.
“I think the Restoration Movement is a preaching movement, historically and today,” Odor told Christian Standard. And so, the Christian Church Leadership Network—a ministry of Central Christian College of the Bible in Moberly, Missouri—now is building a new preaching initiative with the help of a $1.21 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Odor said it will be called the Level Up Preaching Initiative. The aim, quite simply, is to help preachers to improve their craft. The primary method is to pair less-experienced preachers—by the dozens—with seasoned veterans. They will spend a year together working to improve.
It is a vision simultaneously held by three other Restoration Movement colleges that received almost identical grants through Lilly’s far-reaching Compelling Preaching Initiative. During the past two years, Lilly has supported preaching programs at churches, nonprofit organizations, denominations, and colleges across the country. The aim is to help preachers communicate the gospel to more people in more effective ways.
Now, Johnson University in Knoxville, Tennessee, will open the Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence. Milligan University near Johnson City, Tennessee, will launch the Milligan University Center for Preaching. And Point University in West Point, Georgia, will open its Center for Compelling Preaching.
The colleges have spent the winter and spring building their preaching programs—hiring staff, writing curriculum, and recruiting preaching mentors. The schools plan to create mentoring groups for less-experienced preachers. Each program has offshoots with different audiences and different emphases.
Point University wants to help pastors consider how technology and social media can become a venue for the task of preaching. Johnson University wants to honor the legacy of 1950 Johnson Bible College alumnus Fred Craddock, who pioneered a new style of preaching that continues to resonate today. Milligan University hopes to create networks of preachers who can encourage one another through the ups and downs of ministry, in hopes of keeping preachers in the ministry longer.
All of these programs are needed, university leaders say, because there’s nothing more important in the church than sound biblical preaching. Someone needs to take up the cause of training better preachers—in bulk. “If we don’t in our generation train the next generation, then the gospel is not going to be effectively spread to our context. It’s a first priority,” said Tommy Smith, president of Johnson University.
The Pressure for Better Preaching
Pastors face unique pressure today to improve their preaching, college leaders say. Ron Kastens, academic dean of Emmanuel Christian Seminary at Milligan, had a long preaching ministry before joining the university. He also watched his father’s decades-long preaching tenure in Restoration Movement churches.
Today’s preachers encounter a challenge neither he nor his father faced when they started out. “Now, a preacher gets compared to anybody and everybody who is out there on the internet,” Kastens said.
The COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated the phenomenon, he said. When churches closed, members were set free to search the web for new preachers. And many people found some great ones. Then, when the people returned to their home churches in person, they came with suggestions for their pastors.
Billy Strother, who is leading the Level Up Preaching Initiative at Central Christian College of the Bible and CCLN, said he saw it occur over and over again. Church members liked their local pastor. They just wanted him to preach better. Subpar sermons won’t cut it.
The question for many preachers, then, became how to get better. “Leveling up has become a burden for a lot of preachers post-COVID because of people’s awareness,” said Strother, a longtime preaching professor at CCCB.
‘As Important as It’s Ever Been’
At Point University, David Allgire will serve as executive director for the Center for Compelling Preaching. He spent 30 years in pastoral ministry at Compassion Christian Church in Savannah, Georgia. He helped start the church’s downtown campus that targeted college students and young adults. He preached regularly in those days, and he said he’s noticed an additional challenge for preachers in this internet-saturated age. Not all preaching found online—and not all information shared about Christianity there—is good and accurate.
“[Preaching] is as important as it’s ever been,” he said. “I think we might even feel the importance in a more dramatic way because of how readily accessible bad ideas and false ideas and untruth are to everybody.” He said he’s discovered this through his own social media forays. He has a TikTok following of 60,000 people, which started when he posted some simple videos about archaeology in Israel.
Over time, Allgire has found his way into discussions with people who share false ideas about Christianity—and with people who simply have genuine questions. There’s room on those social media platforms for more gospel-centered preaching and for creative-minded pastors who want to make a difference, he said.
Point’s new preaching center will incorporate some of those ideas into its work. “Preaching’s a unique thing,” Allgire said. “You have the opportunity to speak truth into a small, medium, large, or really large group of people. Preaching is a medium in the middle of dozens of other mediums that people are immersed in more than they are necessarily immersed in the church or the Word.”
And, so, there is opportunity in social media, if preachers can learn how to seize it.
Following in Fred’s Footsteps
At the same time colleges seek to help preachers explore new avenues for sharing the gospel, they are remembering some well-trodden paths.
The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence at Johnson University will remind preachers of the lessons of one of the most influential preachers of the past 50 years. Fred Craddock launched into ministry just as the United States entered into a major period of cultural upheaval. The nation in the 1960s faced civil unrest and change, marked by racial tension, the Vietnam War, and the sexual revolution.
At that time, said Daniel Overdorf, who leads the preaching program at Johnson, “a lot of churches and preaching lost their effectiveness and ability to connect.” Craddock helped preachers rethink how to communicate the gospel. Craddock, who passed away in 2015, developed and taught an “inductive” style of preaching, which diverges from the three-point deductive method used by many preachers of his era. A gifted storyteller, Craddock’s method relied heavily on narrative and sought to help his listeners experience the text—and the interpretation process—for themselves.
The Craddock Center won’t try to create preachers who can parrot Craddock’s style. That’s impossible, said Smith, Johnson University’s president. Instead, the center will help pastors learn to communicate the gospel in the modern era, which has its own cultural unrest.
Preachers must learn to understand the cultural context into which they are preaching—something at which Craddock excelled, Smith said. Smith once did an interim ministry in a church where Craddock had served. Craddock would return for homecoming gatherings and connect with that extremely rural congregation.
And then Craddock would preach effectively to an urban church. “It didn’t matter the audience. He sort of knew how to connect,” Smith said.
The Craddock Center also will curate resources from Craddock’s career—manuscripts, sermons, videos, lectures—and create a clearinghouse for the preacher’s materials. The university also has acquired Craddock’s library. “We’ll be able to put some of that on display,” Overdorf said.
‘We All Can Get Better’
While each college is carving out a niche for their new preaching initiative, none will stray far from the task of direct mentoring of preachers. Each program will offer mentoring groups where less-experienced preachers can come under the watchful eye of a longtime preacher.
Milligan’s mentoring cohorts will gather monthly to help each other with sermon planning and to provide preaching feedback and encouragement. One hope is to encourage pastors to stay in the ministry longer, through the ups and downs of week-to-week preaching.
“If newer preachers don’t feel isolated on an island, . . . then the chances are they will stay in ministry a lot longer,” Kastens said. And in addition to that, he said, “anybody who preaches can get better. We all can get better.”
Point University’s mentoring “pods” will be available to professional preachers, as well as to elders and lay leaders in local churches. Some groups might even be available to students who still are exploring their call to ministry. “We hope that somehow with what we’re doing we can be available for that type of person, too,” Allgire said.
The Level Up Preaching Initiative for Central Christian College of the Bible and CCLN already has one mentoring cohort up and running as a pilot project. The goal is to launch at least a half-dozen more in August.
Strother, who is leading the effort, said he’s had no trouble finding mentors. A lot of former students and colleagues from his 37-year teaching career are coming to him with offers to help. He said he’s grateful that four Restoration Movement schools are moving in the same direction in the training of preachers.
“We’re all in this together, and we’re coming together from different angles,” he said. “I’m excited that there’s so much extra help now.”
Chris Moon is a pastor and writer living in Redstone, Colorado.
0 Comments