The Introduction to African American Preaching is an important,
groundbreaking book. This book acknowledges African American preaching
as an academic discipline, and invites all students and preachers into a
scholarly, dynamic, and useful exploration of the topic.
Author
Frank Thomas opens with a “bus tour” study of African American
preaching. He shows how African American preaching has gradually moved
from an almost exclusively oral to an oral/written tradition. Readers
will gain insight into the history of the study of the African American
preaching tradition, and catch the author’s enthusiasm for it.
Next
Thomas traces the relationship between homiletics and rhetoric in
Western preaching, demonstrating how African American preaching is
inherently theological and rhetorical.
He then explores the
question, “what is black preaching?” Thomas introduces the reader to
methods of “close reading” and “ideological criticism.” And then
demonstrates how to use these methods, using a sermon by Gardner Calvin
Taylor as his example.
The next chapter considers the question, “what is excellence in black preaching?”
The
next chapter seeks to create bridges and dialogue within the field of
homiletics, and in particular, the Euro-American homiletic tradition.
The goal of this chapter is to clearly demonstrate connections between
the African American preaching tradition and the field of homiletics.
Thomas
next turns to questions about the relevancy of the church to the
Millennial generation. Specifically, how will the African American
church remain relevant to this generation, which is so deeply concerned
with social justice?
