Professional Dissertations DMin

Date of Award

2010

Document Type

Project Report

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Doctor of Ministry DMin

First Advisor

Ricardo Norton

Second Advisor

Jorge Mayer

Third Advisor

Pedro Navia

Abstract

Problem

On September 27, 2008, the body of fourteen elders from the Charlotte Spanish Seventh-day Adventist Church in North Carolina had a meeting where they indicated that it was necessary to develop a preaching seminar to prepare and train the twenty-three active preachers and church members willing to participate in such a program. These preachers had not had previous academic training or instruction on how to prepare and deliver sermons. This need, identified by the local church elders as urgent, provided the basis for the present D.Min. project.

Method

The procedure for the development of a preaching seminar took various steps in its preparation process. Once the problem was identified in the elders meeting, a recommendation for a preaching seminar was submitted to the church board. After the motion was discussed in that meeting, the board voted to present the seminar, which was to be held for a total of fourteen hours, on seven Sabbath afternoons from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. This research has used the Bible, the writings of Ellen G. White, and contemporary literature on preaching as the theological and philosophical foundations for the study. Ellen G. White’s concepts regarding the content and the delivery of sermons were underlined; she emphasized that preaching must be centered in the person of Christ. The literature reviewed on preaching included insights from the Old and New Testaments. Statements from Ellen G. White applied to the work of the Holy Spirit in the preparation of sermons and the personal influence of the preacher in their delivery have also been examined. The analysis of the literature included a study of four approaches to persuasion and their influence on preaching. It also analyzed Ellen G. White’s statements on the use of emotional appeals during the delivery of the sermon. The discussions of terminology such as, inductive and deductive in relation to preaching were included in the study. The study of sermon types such as expositive, topical, textual, and narrative were also analyzed in this document.

Results

Several results emerged from the research of this thesis and from the presentation of the preaching seminar. One of these results was that the preachers learned to prepare better sermons and this provided better spiritual nurturing of the church members. The continuity and the schedule of the seminar classes followed in a satisfactory manner, favoring the learning process of participants. The lay preachers practiced the theory and were evaluated by their classmates. This provided feedback to the participants regarding the impression received of the sermon presented, its strong and weak points, and other recommendations to improve their preaching. After the seminar’s conclusion, it was observed that the preachers continued using the information given during the classes as a tool to improve their sermons. The majority of the attendees have since opted for the thematic discourse as their favorite preaching model in preparing sermons. In a final session, certificates of participation were given to all those who had attended faithfully. They also received a CD-Rom with all the teaching content of the seminar. In this last meeting, the lay preachers were encouraged to suggest recommendations related to the program and its effectiveness. The participants said that they had been blessed with the theory and practice which provided both useful information and helpful training in preparing them to proclaim God’s message more effectively.

Subject Area

Preaching--Study and teaching; Charlotte Spanish Seventh-day Adventist Church (Charlotte, N.C.)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dmin/513

Download

Files over 3MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Share

COinS