Preaching is a very special form of public speaking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preaching is a special form of public speaking which has been done for thousands of years, as shown above by a 1517 print of Saint Paul in Athens. Wikipedia defines a preacher as:  

 

“A person who delivers sermons or homilies on religious topics to an assembly of people.”

 

And it defines a homily as:

 

“A commentary that follows a reading of scripture, giving the ‘public explanation of a sacred doctrine’ or text.”

 

The art of preaching is called homiletics:

 

“Homiletics, the art of preaching, studies both the composition and the delivery of religious discourses. It includes all forms of preaching, including sermons, homilies and catechetical instruction. Homiletics may be further defined as the study of the analysis, classification, preparation, composition, and delivery of sermons.”

 

When I looked at the Internet Archive for books on preaching, I found one over a hundred and fifty years old - the 1872 Yale Lectures on Preaching by Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887).

 

There is an article by Michael Duduit at Preaching.com titled The 25 most influential preaching books of the past 25 years. Number 21 on the list from 2005 was edited by Haddon Robinson and Craig Brian Larson and is titled The Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching. You can read it online at PREACHINGtoday. Chapter 13 is about The History of Preaching. It discusses key preaching types:

 

Teacher preachers

Herald preachers

Inductive preachers

Narrative preachers

 

There are ten chapters just in the section on Delivery, starting with Chapter 160: The Source of Passion.