Program Details
Expand your preaching into a risk-taking art form.
Risky Preaching: A Shared Experience will have a cohort of nine to twelve accomplished preachers eager to grow in our craft together. We will learn not only from each other but also from a diverse group of artists who take risks in their own fields, writers, performers, artists and thinkers who can inspire us to reach both the minds and hearts of people today.
What makes this program unique – and what you’ll get out of it.
What you’ll get out of this – what we’ll all get out of this shared experience – is to move beyond the preaching plateau we’re on, really cut through to the world, and give people in our turbulent, complicated age new reasons to come to church, discovering the connections and courage worship provides.
We will meet monthly for two years. Our first year will call us to cohere as a group, to encounter each other, and to learn with a diverse group of artists. Our second year will call us to turn toward our congregations, inviting them into this effort.
Each participating pastor must recieve the endorsement of their congregation to join, and each congregation should both expect and encourage our risk taking.
Year One
In our first year, we will begin with a full day retreat. After this, we will meet monthly, alternating between gatherings with a diverse group of risk-taking artists and practitioners (all referred to here as “guest artists”) and gatherings alone as a group. In all of these sessions, the assumption is that we will risk and learn and discover together, rather than simply receiving information from a group of experts.
The experience will be deep and conversational. It will not be didactic. The “day long” sessions will last between 5 and 8 hours, including a shared meal (lunch) or meal and drinks (dinner).
YEAR ONE SCHEDULE
- May: A one day retreat to encounter each other and cohere.
- June: Half-day session with a guest artist, on eliciting and uncovering emotion.
- July: 90-minute Zoom session for group reflection, evaluation and collaboration
- August: Day-long session with a guest artist.
- September: 90-minute Zoom session for group reflection, evaluation and collaboration.
- October: Day-long session with guest artist, on taking creative risk..
- November: 90-minute Zoom session for group reflection, evaluation and collaboration..
- December: No meeting.
- January: Day-long session with a guest artist.
- February: 90-minute Zoom session for group reflection, evaluation and collaboration.
- March: Full-day retreat to reflect on the year’s sessions, and begin planning how to bring what we have learned to our congregations, for year two of the program.
- April: 90-minute Zoom session for group reflection, evaluation and collaboration.
- May: Full-day retreat to reflect on the year’s sessions, and begin planning how to bring what we have learned to our congregations, for year two of the program.
Year Two
In the second year we will involve our churches, creating and using a curriculum designed to engage our congregations and wider communities. Working in our local settings, we will work with our congregations to find new ways of preaching that are mutually precarious; dialogical preaching that asks all involved to risk change in the preaching moment; risky speaking, risky listening, risky dialogue.
The full agenda for the second year will be worked out together, as a group. The shape and scope of year two sessions will be determined together, at the first meeting of our second year.
Evaluation
Evaluation will be ongoing, and a special emphasis of our bi-monthly Zoom sessions. In each of these meetings, a participant (or two) will share a recent sermon, and reflect on:
- Risks taken
- Healing emotions surfaced
These conversations will not evaluate the participants’ sermons, but instead ask if our program is helping participants find greater freedom to risk change in the pulpit, and if our program is helping them evoke healing emotions in their listeners.
At the year’s conclusion, participants will share written responses to a few focused, individualized questions, based on information gathered in the bi-monthly Zoom meetings. These questions will aim to garner feedback specific to each individual’s experience of risk and healing emotion in the pulpit during the first year of this program.
There is no cost to participate – in fact, you'll get paid.
You will not be so much a student here as a collaborator, a co-creator of the future of preaching, Accordingly, there is no tuition; rather, you’ll receive an honorarium to compensate for your time and pay respect to your contributions.
Risky Preaching
Funded by the Compelling Preaching Initiative of the Lilly Endowment, Inc. Hosted by the University of Chicago Divinity School. © 2025