Creative, Compelling Preaching
The name of Fred Craddock is synonymous with excellent preaching. Preaching is excellent when it changes people, and those changed people change their local community, and eventually the culture. Excellent preaching begins with a clear understanding of God’s word, shapes that message through a clear understanding of the local culture, and delivers that message through careful and creative engagement with the lived experience of the audience, all guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit. The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence carries on Dr, Craddock’s concern
for excellent preaching.
Whether you’ve been preaching for years or are just exploring a call to preach, the Fred Craddock Center is here to help support and equip you for the task of preaching.
The Center provides overnight retreats, one-day workshops, lectureships, and online content focusing on various topics to accomplish this, as well as facilitating peer groups encouraging preaching excellence. In addition, also have the privilege of curating and making available to scholars and students of preaching Dr. Craddock’s unpublished papers, letters, notes, and books from his personal library. While we are pleased to serve all who preach the Gospel, the Fred Craddock Center shares Dr. Craddock’s concern for preachers from smaller congregations that have little time or money for more advanced education. That concern leads us to focus our efforts on two geographic and cultural areas—Appalachia and Hispanic central and southern Florida, both of which are also historic areas of focus for Johnson University.
OUR goals
“If there is a disease in the preaching that I hear most often, it’s not that what
the minister says is wrong. It’s that it is just too small.”
CRADDOCK ON THE CRAFT OF PREACHING
FUTURE events
8 April
2026
The Craddock Lectures on Preaching
Building Accessible Bridges: Engaging Disability in the Preaching Event
with Dr. Rochelle Scheuermann
Assistant Dean of Ministry and Evangelism
Wheaton College
OUR namesake
Fred Craddock is one of the most influential homileticians of his era. His books, sermons, and lectures have been used in homiletics classrooms around the world for over fifty years, and Newsweek published a study that included him among the twelve most effective preachers in the English-speaking world. Craddock’s greatest contribution was his innovation in homiletical theory in an era when preaching needed new life.
THE sermon crafting BLOG
Enriching the Form (Part 1: Language)
by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence In last week's blog post, we looked at the process of selecting a form for the sermon—the shape in which the message is packaged and delivered. In his book Preaching, Dr. Craddock went on to describe the next step of the sermon crafting process, which he called “Enriching the form.” By this he did not mean adding extraneous decoration like amusing jokes or...
Form Follows Function (mostly)
by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence “Form follows function” is a common maxim in many areas of art, architecture, and engineering. It was first stated in those words by architect Louis Sullivan in 1896, but it speaks of a much older principle. Like architecture, preaching is also both an art and a craft, and so the maxim generally holds for preaching as well. The form that the message of...