{"id":612,"date":"2010-10-08T08:33:19","date_gmt":"2010-10-08T08:33:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/richardlittledale.wordpress.com\/?p=612"},"modified":"2010-10-08T08:33:19","modified_gmt":"2010-10-08T08:33:19","slug":"colourful-preaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/2010\/10\/08\/colourful-preaching\/","title":{"rendered":"Colourful preaching"},"content":{"rendered":"

..what colour is yours?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Just unpacked the year planner to do some serious planning for next year, as you can see below. Mind you, with all those little boxes and all those multi-coloured tabs my head is hurting already!<\/p>\n

Got me thinking though – if I had only the three primary colours to describe my sermons, which would I use?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Red:<\/span> full of fire, lots of passion, but likely to burn and tending towards the angry. In his book, Playing With Fire<\/a>, David Schlafer says :\u201cPreaching is not just talking about God\u2019s play of fire; preaching is participating in, actively entering into the divine energy of freedom, community, adventure and creativity.\u00a0 Preaching is playing with fire”<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Yellow:<\/span> bright and cheerful, full of life, but likely to grate on those whose lives are full of shadow. Bonhoeffer, in Worldly Preaching,<\/a> talks of his best sermons as those in which\u00a0in which ‘I spoke enticingly of the gospel, like someone telling children the story of a strange country.\u2019 <\/em>We have to be careful that the upbeat sermon is, indeed, enticing.<\/p>\n

Blue:<\/span> mellow, peaceful and reflective, but tending to wards the melancholy. In his stimulating book The Jazz of Preaching<\/a>, Kirk Byron Jones describes how great preaching, like great blues music, can be born out of hardship:\u00a0\u201cTrue gospel preaching is blues preaching.\u00a0 It finds ways to honour the hurt without romanticizing it\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

AS preachers we are called upon to minister God’s grace in all its\u00a0multicoloured\u00a0forms. Peter urges us to faithfully minister the ‘rainbow grace’ of God (\u03c0\u03bf\u03b9\u03ba\u03b9\u03bb\u03b7\u03c2 \u03c7\u03b1\u03c1\u03b9\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2- 1 Peter 4 v.10).\u00a0\u00a0If you are honest, though, what colour do <\/span><\/em>your sermons tend to be?<\/span><\/em> <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

[polldaddy poll=3890217]<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Oh, and whilst you’re at it – what colour should a church business meeting be on my year planner, do you think?<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

..what colour is yours? Just unpacked the year planner to do some serious planning for next year, as you can see below. Mind you, with all those little boxes and all those multi-coloured tabs my head is hurting already! Got … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/176.32.230.12\/richardlittledale.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}