by Fr. John A. Peck
At Preachers Institute, we are pushing our focus to make the most of your time and efforts in building up the Body of Christ.
Just as we do in our 30(40) Days of Blogging exercise, we are setting a theme for this year’s preaching.
Discipleship is our theme and the focus of our preaching for the coming year.
Why Discipleship?
Well, as you know, I do a lot of reading about preaching and preachers, ancient, late antiquity, the medieval and byzantine era, and modern, and I do see a common theme in late and contemporary preachers. It’s a theme of regret.
Yes, regret! They regret NOT their preaching, but that they spent too little time focused on disciple-making, teaching discipleship and mentoring disciples. There are a multitude of examples of this, and a few very notable exceptions – men who did build up disciples. Interestingly, the common theme with those was that they started with the preaching.
This year, we will focus on preaching for Discipleship. We want you to address these direction in your own preaching as well. Let us not build a “rope of sand” as one preacher with regret put it, but a firm foundation of disciple teaching, training and mentoring.
We are about to celebrate the Theophany/Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ, the event which marked the beginning of His public ministry. As He consecrated Himself for His mission, and went into the wilderness for 40 says in preparation, we will do likewise – preparing ourselves for a deep and powerful experience of preaching this Great Lent; an preaching experience focused on disciple making.
And it all starts with our preaching. It really does.
Stay tuned. More to come.
