The mission of the Columbia Preachers Studio for Renewal (PSR) is to cultivate practices, provide resources, and facilitate holy encounters to help preachers proclaim the gospel in postmodern contexts in more compelling, effective, and faithful ways.
The Columbia PSR endeavors to facilitate holy encounters between preachers, scripture, the world around us, and the God who sustains us. While these are not experiences that can be manufactured or guaranteed, we do know that when we provide spaces for homiletical rejuvenation, reflection, and renewal, the conditions are primed for a holy encounter. Accordingly, we’ve designed this program to foster participation and learning through three intersecting activities to encourage holy encounters with scripture, society, and self, including:
Quarterly preaching workshops designed to foster more faithful, creative, and transformative engagement with scripture;
Online homiletical resources and educational opportunities curated in response to preachers’ expressed needs; and
Facilitated experiences of renewal to foster preachers’ selfhood and resilience.
Rationale
Responding to the expressed needs of working preachers to renew their preaching lives and practice, the PSR will facilitate novel approaches in three distinct areas:
Deeper encounters with the biblical text, to sustain weekly preaching. The sermon is an act of communication. The genre fosters engagement and understanding between ancient texts and contemporary contexts, as well as innovation with methods of sermon development and delivery—yet many preachers struggle to know where to begin. Here is where facilitated workshops can teach new practices that will foster fresh perspectives for the preaching life. Our experience with creative methodologies has taught us that preachers have much to learn from artists, and that engaging biblical texts can be a form of communal rehearsal. Just as actors are always participating in scene work, no matter how gifted or experienced they are, so preachers are always participating in text work, no matter how long or how frequently they have been in the pulpit. The famed Actors Studio in New York City is one rehearsal space that has inspired our own homiletical research and pedagogical methodologies; we have also drawn on the creative processes of poets, novelists, stand-up comedians, and visual artists. We have learned the wisdom of stepping out of confining “searches for meaning” when engaging the biblical text, so that preachers have the freedom and precision to experiment with different interpretive strategies. We have spent years teaching preachers how to hear the text afresh and anew. We know these (rather unconventional) methods work: preachers are energized and renewed by deeper engagement with the biblical text, and their relationship with scripture changes. They fall in love with God, all over again. Holy encounters with scripture can save a preaching life.
Deeper understanding of current homiletical theories and resources, to sharpen skills for postmodern preaching. Our findings among our alumni corroborate what we have been hearing from clergy for years as we’ve offered preaching consultations and workshops around the country. Our resolve is stronger than ever that preachers require new ways to proclaim God’s Word amid these complex sociopolitical shifts taking place in our world. At the same time, we have witnessed moments of rejuvenation and enthusiasm among working preachers when we’ve offered novel ways of engaging sociopolitical contexts for preaching. Furthermore, as we have nurtured spaces for frank discussion about the trials and travails preachers have endured of late, we were pleased to witness preachers rediscovering their calling to preach and their voice to do so. These pedagogical experiments taught us how important it is to offer working preachers opportunities for communal rest, play, and experimentation. We’ve learned that new approaches to preaching and facilitated peer-engagement contribute to their renewal as both human beings and as preachers. Our research and classroom experience bears witness to the need for preachers to engage in ongoing instruction about how to engage society with imagination and resilience and the role that peer-learning plays in facilitating homiletical growth in this area.
Deeper formation of preacherly identity, to rejuvenate body and spirit as well as the preacher’s sense of call. Homiletician Ruthanna B. Hooke writes that “God chooses most to be revealed in preaching not when the preacher strives to become invisible, a hollow tube through which the Word comes, but when she is most present in her particular embodied humanity, meeting the text and God in the text.” Accordingly, the personhood of the preacher is an essential component of compelling preaching; however, clergy “frequently neglect their own well-being” as they are experiencing increased job stress due to cultural change and social fragmentation. Research supports the importance of clergy resilience to sustain the personhood of the preacher, which in turn influences the wellbeing of the congregation she serves. In a recent study, scholars identified four practices to increase clergy resilience: intentional boundaries, self-awareness, spiritual practices, and peer groups. The PSR’s initiatives aim to enhance preachers’ self-awareness through life-giving spiritual practices and supportive peer groups.
