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 Craddock’s unpublished papers, letters, notes, and books from his personal library.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
Unintentional Self-disclosure in Preaching
by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence In the Introduction to his classic preaching textbook simply titled Preaching, Dr. Craddock set out his fundamental convictions about the preacher, the listeners, and the Scripture. In the section on the preacher, he gives two observations about the preacher. The first is that “the minister works within an unusual network of trust and intimacy that makes the separation of character and performance impossible.”...
The “Hallmark” Preaching Calendar
by Barney Wells, DMin Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence This Sunday is the second Sunday in May. Mother’s Day. That means a Mother’s Day sermon—or does it. While the role of mothers in all civilizations is certainly important, and there is certainly no doubt that mothers influence the faith development and discipleship of their children, how much impact on the planning of preaching should Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day,...