"NTS eConnection - April 2018" Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, United States for Thursday, 29 March 2018
NTS E-Connection - April 2018
I write this on a Tuesday evening, reflecting on the privilege I had earlier in the day to listen to not just one, but three sermons in our weekly NTS chapel service. Now we like preaching at NTS, but three sermons in one service is certainly not the norm. But this was a special chapel, set aside to hear the preaching of the three student finalists for the Corlett Senior Sermon Award. Following the chapel service NTS faculty, along with a committee of pastors, selected one student to receive the annual award which includes an invitation to preach the sermon during graduation chapel in May.
After I opened the chapel with a greeting and a call to worship (another privilege I had), I introduced the student preachers and read the history of the Corlett Senior Sermon—the history in which these three finalists were now participating. I had heard the history before; the award’s significance, its intent, and the persons who had faithfully sponsored it. But there in chapel I was struck by the year it was first presented: 1945. NTS has a lot of rich traditions, and certainly its fair-share that have endured shifts in theological education and changing models of ministry. The Corlett Senior Sermon, however, is more than just another long-standing tradition, it actually originated the same year NTS started.I have heard it said that preaching is at its lowest currency in history. That this practice, once so central to the corporate activity of the church is now adrift amongst the sea of information, chatter, and polemics that inundates every corner of our lives. A sermon is just more content; content we neither have the energy nor patience to process. We are overloaded with content, and so consciously and subconsciously we are shutting it out and ignoring it, especially if it does not immediately captivate us. There is, of course, some truth to the statement of preaching’s low currency. Preaching faces a whole set of challenges previously unimaginable that call into question how we preach and just what we think we are accomplishing. Yet the statement is also woefully shortsighted and misleading. Partly because it equates preaching with content—more information to put into our minds—but largely because it assumes preaching is the [sole] work of the preacher when in fact it is the work of God who offers the Word, opens our hearts and minds, and infiltrates our lives.
The three Corlett Sermon preachers today were a reminder of just how vibrant this central practice of the church remains. They didn’t do tricks or succumb to entertaining their audiences. They committed themselves to be preachers who opened the scriptures and invited us in. In this way, their sermons were not their content. You could say the preaching had currency—high currency—grounded in the intrinsic value of the good news of God’s reign as revealed in Jesus Christ. Such “content” is not easily shut out or ignored, for it stands in contrast to all the other content of the world.
I am thinking now that the Corlett Senior Sermon, first presented the year NTS began in 1945, is like a microcosm of NTS’s purpose to shape and form faithful ministers of the gospel. No one in 1945 knew what the context of 2018 would hold, but they did recognize the importance of minsters developing theological know-how, not just for one time and place, but for the diverse and ever-changing contexts of God’s world. The Corlett Senior Sermon lives on. Not as a tradition for tradition’s sake, but as an expression of the enduring art of proclaiming God’s reign.
Dr. Joshua Sweeden
Dean of the Faculty
Nazarene Theological Seminary
Special thanks to those who have made the Corlett Senior Sermon possible for over 72 years: Mr. Eric A. Mabes, Dr. and Mrs. L.T. Corlett, and Mr. R. Wesley Blachly.
Congratulations to the 2018 Senior Corlett Sermon Award winner, Lesley Hansher,
and runners-up Kevin Portillo and David Goodwin. Watch the chapel service here.
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