Welcome to LeonardSweet.com
Author of more than two hundred articles, 1500+ published sermons, hundreds of YouTube vlogs and over seventy books, Leonard Sweet’s recent publications include Rings of Fire, Telos (with Len Wilson), Contextual Intelligence (with Michael Beck), and Designer Jesus (forthcoming fall 2023), the companion volume to Jesus Human. Sweet often appears on the “50 Most Influential Christians in America” listings, and in 2010 was selected by the top non-English Christian website Christian Telegraph as one of the “Top 10 Influential World Christians.” His semiotic “LenTalks” are posted weekly on YouTube, and his “Napkin Scribbles” podcasts can be accessed on leonardsweet.com or spotify. His Twitter and Facebook microblogs are widely read and quoted. Former President of United Theological Seminary, Vice-President of Graduate Studies at Drew University and Dean of Drew Seminary, Dr. Sweet now works with graduate students at four institutions: Drew University, where he has occupied the E. Stanley Jones Chair, George Fox University, Northwind Seminary, and Southeastern University. Beginning in his late 20s, Sweet has written a lectionary-based sermon every week for various preaching resources like Homiletics (11 years), preaching plus (six years), sermons.com (eight years). In 2015 he launched his own homiletics resource preachthestory.com. One of the most sought-after speakers in the religious world today, he and his family reside on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands, where they operate a retreat center (or “advance center”) called Sanctuary Seaside.
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2025 Water Advance
Our next Water Advance is a first: We have “recalled” an earlier conversation partner for a second visit. Partly at the request of Tia Sweet, and partly because he is my favorite preacher in North America (I dedicated to him my textbook on preaching Giving Blood), we have asked Ken Ulmer to rejoin us to talk about the state of preaching today, as well as to share his thoughts about transitioning ministry after leaving a church one has served for over 40 years. Is there ministry after “retirement.”
Preaching is an oral art, and Ken Ulmer is a master of homiletic orality. The problem with reading from a manuscript is that written words are solidly grounded on the page, weighted with carved precision, while face-to-face speaking Ken Ulmer style flies on the wings of its utterance with an immediacy, intimacy and spontaneity that is airy, light and strangely moving no matter how ragged and jagged compared to manuscript preaching. I have seldom soared so high in the Spirit than experiencing a live Ken Ulmer sermon, and I have heard them all over the world. (Ask me about Latvia!)
Another reason for inviting Ulmer back? “We shall preach to no purpose unless we have a purpose in preaching.” So said Robert William Dale (1829-1895) in Yale’s Beecher Lectures (1890). And every Ken Ulmer sermons reveals the “purpose of preaching?” Lift up Christ.
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Semiotic preaching resources.
From semiotic exegesis to contextual ecclesiology: The hermeneutics of missional faith in the COVIDian era
This essay uses the global impact of the Coronavirus as a heuristic semiotic for exploring the future of the church. Unlike the pandemic of 1918, which left few dents on the world’s economic, social, and cultural systems, almost all the nations of the world have passed laws and implemented procedures that are only comparable to world wars in their impact on entire populations. Nations are acting in unison, but not in unity. This post-COVID, post-Corona world is the ‘time that is given’ to the church. But it will not be a post-pandemic world. We may become COVID-proof, but we will never be pandemic-proof. There is no pre-COVID reset. There is only risk assessment from natural extinction risks to existential dangers of our own creation that are catching up to us (climate change, GRAIN [genetic engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence {AI}, info-tech, nanotechnology]). Disruption is the new status that is never quo; stability is the new abnormality; global cataclysm is the ever-present peril. The only way to prepare for a future of constant ‘the end of the world as we know it?’ moments is by developing a high Contextual Quotient (CQ), and deepening our Contextual Intelligence (CI) so we can choose ‘the next right thing’ in a world of volcanic volatility.
Contribution: This essay frames the semiotics of a missional ecclesiology in the COVIDian wake from the hermeneutics of blessings not curses. What virtues might we expect to come out of a virus that is fast-forwarding the future, virtues that will shape the contours of Christianity. What if the pandemic is a shock treatment that is putting the world, and the church, back in a new and better equilibrium? What if there are goldmines on the other side of the landmines and minefields?
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