Advances

2025 Water Advance with Ken Ulmer

March 7-8, 2025

Conversation Partner: Ken Ulmer

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.