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Foreword

THE LEAST EFFECTIVE sermon in history is recounted for us in the book of Exodus. It was such a spectacular failure that it has become one of the foundational stories of our faith.

You know how it goes. In Exodus 20, God delivers the Ten Commandments to Moses. The people are willing to hear about these new laws, but not directly from God. “You speak to us, and we will listen,” they say to Moses, “but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.”

So Moses addresses the people and delivers the commandments. The very first one is simple: “You shall have no other gods before me.” After he is done preaching, Moses goes back up Mt. Sinai to get some more laws and instructions for building a tabernacle. Predictably, he isn’t gone long before the Israelites decide to melt down some gold and make another god.

The scriptures tell us that in the aftermath of this homiletical failure, about three thousand people died and those who survived were struck with a plague. This is worth remembering when you preach a sermon that doesn’t go the way you had hoped. No matter what, it will not go as badly for you as it did for Moses.

In this volume, Adam Trambley provides what we need to succeed precisely where Moses failed. With practical guidance and real-life examples, Adam helps us consider how our sermons—especially sermon series that unfold over weeks or months—can help the people of God see new visions and grasp new possibilities.

Adam’s advice is timely. In many ways, those of us who preach in the mainline church are in a wilderness time. The institutions we lead are facing what organizational development scholars call adaptive challenges, meaning that they cannot be solved by the expertise and skills that we currently have. The only way to address these challenges—like the church’s contracting human and financial resources, inequality and division in the world around us, and dramatic cultural shifts in the ways people find spiritual meaning—is to wander for a time.

Preaching in the wilderness, as Moses learned, is harder than it looks. But when our familiar signposts have disappeared, focused engagement with scripture in the form of weekly sermons can help the people of God find vision and exercise creativity. Bold and effective preaching can help us travel out of the wilderness to the promised land of freedom and new life in Christ.

The pages that follow can serve as a travel guide to those of us called to preach in these uncertain times. Adam is no armchair traveler; for more than a decade, he has served as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Sharon, Pennsylvania, a town situated on the border of Pennsylvania and Ohio in the heart of the depopulating Rust Belt. In Sharon, Adam and the people he leads have fostered growth in spirituality and stewardship while building long-term ministries that serve a community where more than a quarter of children live below the poverty line. Adam’s preaching series, as you will read, have been a linchpin of the congregation’s vitality.

In the book’s second part, you will find practical, real-world tips about strengthening your preaching with prayer, physical exercises, and a clear and authentic understanding of your vision of the kingdom of God and what the apostle Peter calls “the hope that is in you.” Adam delivers this advice, amassed over a preaching career of more than two decades, with candid stories of his own development as a preacher and anecdotes that will help even the most wizened preachers up their game.

As we journey in the wilderness of the twenty-first century, the scriptures invite us to imagine anew the ways we are called to participate in God’s mission. When we bring those stories alive through our preaching, as Adam shows us how to do, our churches can be transformed for the sake of the gospel, and the story of God’s saving deeds in history becomes ours.

The Rt. Rev. Sean W. Rowe

Bishop of Northwestern Pennsylvania and Western New York

Consecration of Samuel Seabury 2019