applied

APPL 501 — Preaching and Exposition

APPL 501 is a graduate course in the craft of biblical preaching: how a passage of Scripture becomes a sermon a congregation actually hears. The course begins where exegesis ends. It assumes a text has already been read carefully and teaches the homiletical work that follows, carried on four moves worked in sequence: the text’s own controlling idea, the bridge to a present hearer, the shape a sermon takes, and the voice that delivers it. Expository, inductive, and narrative forms are taught as co-equal options, none crowned as the one right way. A dedicated module surveys how the major Christian traditions preach, Reformed, Catholic, Orthodox, Wesleyan, Anabaptist, Pentecostal, and African-American, with the Jewish derashah heard as a comparative touchpoint, describing each fairly rather than ranking them. Throughout, preaching is held as an act in which God’s word is spoken to God’s people, a conviction the craft serves rather than replaces.

11 hr
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Learning outcomes

  • Explain a theology of Christian preaching grounded in the biblical witness and the historic homiletical tradition.
  • Derive a passage’s controlling idea and construct the homiletical bridge from its exegesis to a present congregation.
  • Compare the major sermon forms (expository, inductive, narrative, topical) and select an appropriate form for a given text and context.
  • Evaluate illustrations and applications for fidelity to the text, ethical sourcing, and relevance.
  • Analyze delivery and the preacher’s character as components of faithful proclamation.
  • Compare how the major Christian traditions understand and practice preaching.

The Theology of Preaching

This opening module asks what a sermon is and why proclamation matters before any craft is taught. It reads Nehemiah 8, where Ezra and the Levites read the law aloud and give the sense, as the paradigm of exposition, and introduces the four-move method the course uses throughout: the text, the bridge, the shape, and the voice. It then traces the biblical witness to preaching itself, Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth, Peter at Pentecost, Paul at the Areopagus and in the synagogue at Antioch, and Paul’s charge to Timothy to preach the word. The module closes by hearing five historic voices on preaching in their own words, from Augustine’s account of eloquence in service of truth to Broadus’s insistence on a single governing idea to Brooks’s description of truth carried through a living person.

From Text to Sermon

APPL 501 begins where exegesis ends, and this module marks that boundary directly. It assumes the exegetical work taught in BINT 302 has already been done and teaches the two moves that carry a passage’s meaning into a sermon: deriving the text’s own controlling idea and building the bridge from the passage’s original sense to what it says to a congregation today. The module names the errors that most often break the bridge, moralizing a narrative into a bare example, allegorizing details the text never intended as symbols, spiritualizing away a passage’s plain sense, and flattening what the author actually intended to say. It closes by weighing a Christ-centered reading of a text against a merely exemplary one, asking what each preserves and what each risks losing.

Sermon Forms and Structure

With the controlling idea and the bridge in hand, this module turns to shape: the structures a sermon can take and how to choose among them. It presents deductive and inductive order, expository, textual, and topical sermons, and narrative preaching’s homiletical plot, as co-equal options fitted to a text and a congregation rather than ranked against one another. It then works through the building blocks common to every form: an introduction that earns a hearing, movements that carry the sermon’s argument forward, and a conclusion that lands, and asks what makes a given form the right fit for a given passage.

Illustration, Application, and Relevance

A sermon’s shape is only as good as what fills it, and this module addresses the material that makes an idea land: illustration, application, and cultural relevance. It teaches the two-worlds bridge between the world of the text and the world of the hearer, and the ethics that govern a good illustration: no fabricated stories, no borrowed material passed off as one’s own, honest attribution of every source. It then turns to application that actually calls for a response rather than trailing off into vague uplift, and to relevance that meets a congregation’s moment without pandering to it or diluting what the text says.

Delivery and the Preacher

The final move of the method is the voice, and this module treats delivery and the person delivering as inseparable. It compares manuscript, brief notes, and extemporaneous delivery as legitimate options suited to different preachers and settings, and addresses voice, pace, and bodily presence in the pulpit. It then turns to what lies behind the sermon before it is spoken: the preacher’s own character, a life of prayer, and honest preparation, alongside the plain ethical rule against passing off another preacher’s sermon as one’s own. Preaching is treated throughout as an embodied act in which who is speaking is part of what the congregation hears.

Preaching Across the Traditions

The course closes with a descriptive survey of how the major Christian traditions preach: Reformed and evangelical expository preaching, the Catholic and Orthodox liturgical homily set within the lectionary and the liturgy, Wesleyan, Anabaptist, and Pentecostal preaching, and the African-American preaching tradition, with the Jewish derashah heard as a comparative touchpoint rather than a peer tradition to master. No tradition is crowned the model for the rest. The module closes with a capstone that applies the four moves, text, bridge, shape, and voice, to a single passage from the ground up, demonstrating the full method the course has taught.