Barrie Shepherd, Whatever Happened to Delight? Preaching the Gospel in Poetry and Parables, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville-London, 2006, Paperback, 146 pp., $17.95

reviewed by G. Richard Wheatcroft

The author, until his retirement in 2000, was senior minister of First Presbyterian Church in New York City. He is also a published poet and sows a selection of his poems in the chapters of his book.

One spring day in 2001 he opened a letter from his alma mater, Yale Divinity School, inviting him to give the Lyman Beecher lectures in October 2002. He writes, "After the initial shock, I remember feeling a sense of excitement and even anticipation at the challenge offered and fired off a letter of acceptance without much hesitation." He was aware that he would be in a procession of distinguished lecturers which included Henry Sloane Coffin, Harry Emerson Fosdick, George Arthur Buttrick, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Forbes, William Sloan Coffin, Walter Bruggemann, Barbara Brown Taylor, and Peter Gomes to mention a few of the most familiar names.

He began to reflect upon his thirty-seven years of preaching and ministry which included involvement in the civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam War, and the recent movement to include homosexual persons in the life of the church. He asked himself, "Was there any vital message in all of this that I wanted to communicate to the next generation of preachers?" In time, his thoughts focused on what he calls The Art of Preaching, "an approach to the presentation of the gospel that sees it primarily as an art form, as a craft, an act of genuine creation that participates, in some way in that original creative act when, by means of the Word, the entire universe came into being."

This leads to the focus of the book, "whatever happened to joy?" He believes the reason joy is not heard in most sermons today is that "many preachers believe that the purpose of preaching is to instruct, to inform, to convict, to convert ..." Therefore, he suggests that we have "tried to sustain the spirit with abstractions, literal creeds, formulas, and exact definitions." He then builds on the theme of Walter Brueggeman's book, Finally Comes the Poet, that the church needs an "alternative voice, a distinctively different means of communication to renew its age-old message."

This alternative voice, offered as the lectures, is that "the essential foundation for proclamation" is imagination. He writes, "Imagination at its highest is nothing less, I would suggest, than the work of that pentecosting Spirit of God making us intoxicated enough to see and say things that have never been seen or said in precisely that way before." Four chapters, adapted from three lectures, are devoted to explaining and illustrating how the imagination can be used. They are, A Dearth of Delight, An Imagining God, Steps toward Delight, and Looking for the Resurrection.

In the final chapter he offers three delightful sermons selected as "typical examples of my own attempts at living out some of the advice and counsel offered in the preceding pages." Seeing preaching as an art, using the imagination, can elicit the delight of the Gospel, proclaimed and heard.

[The Covenant Journal, Number 24, March 2007]

The Revd Richard Wheatcroft is rector emeritus, St Francis Church, Houston, TX, and lives and writes in Irving, TX.