Preaching To A TV Generation: The Sermon In The Electronic Age

Michael Rogness has put his finger on a serious homiletical problem -- people accustomed to being fed a video diet are having difficulty digesting the verbal food we preachers set before them each week. Readers will be relieved that Professor Rogness not only identifies problems, but offers some tantalizing recipes to help us in our task. William R. White Author of Stories For Telling Madison, Wisconsin The crisis of preaching is that we face an audience accustomed to new forms of communication. The way people listen is shaped mostly by today's most dominant medium -- television. And yet we preach about the same as preachers did before the arrival of television. It isn't working very well. (from the foreword) The gospel has always been conveyed primarily by speaking it to people. The problem is that in today's world of television people listen and hear differently than they listened and heard in the past. "When preachers understand the dynamics of this new world, then the gospel can ring with new vigor and life in our preaching," writes the author. Preaching To A TV Generation explores the changes brought to our society by television. It suggests what preachers can do in the face of these changes -- in terms of language, structure, creativity and delivery. Michael Rogness, St. Paul, Minnesota, is a professor at Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary. He is a former Fulbright Scholar and holds a doctorate in theology from Erlangen/Nurnberg University, Germany. For 15 years he was senior pastor of First Lutheran Church, Duluth, Minnesota. He is the author of many books and articles. His sermons have appeared in a number of Augsburg Sermons Series.