Preach Magazine Issue 5 - Preaching to the unconverted | Page 46

46

SERIAL

Welcome to the first ever Preach Book Club! Each
quarter, we’ll be introducing you to a new book to
encourage and challenge you in your preaching
ministry. You can expect a summary, a review or
two, discussion questions written especially for the
book club, an interview with the author, and an
online forum to share your thoughts with others.
We suggest you get together with three or four
other preachers, lay on the coffee and cake, and
dive into some inspiring conversation.

Igniting the heart:
Preaching and imagination

Kate Bruce | SCM Press | published 30 September 2015

SUMMARY
It has been said that the day of the sermon is over. Kate Bruce argues that
the day of the poorly conceived, ill-prepared, dull, disconnected, boring,
irrelevant, authoritarian, yawn-inducing, patronising, pontificating,
pointless and badly delivered sermon is indeed over. Imagination can
help to engage the hearer in a sermon which seeks to evoke rather than
to inform. Imagination frames how we see the world and ourselves in it.
As such it has a vital role in shaping how preachers see the preaching
task itself, which in turn affects how we go about the task. A theology
of imagination is presented to demonstrate the central importance
of imagination in the life of faith. Allied to this is an analysis of the
sacramental nature of preaching and the role of imagination in enabling
the ‘Aha, now I get it’ moment of sacramental ‘seeing as’. Connected to
enabling new seeing, preaching in t H\