Who We Are and What We Do

The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence at Johnson University is a program funded in part by the Lilly Endowment Compelling Preaching Initiative. Our mission is to equip aspiring and active preachers to proclaim the gospel in their contexts in engaging and effective ways. Our work focuses on understanding what makes preaching effective in its God-given purposes and using that understanding to shape training opportunities both in the academic setting of Johnson University and in informal workshops and retreats. While we want to serve preachers everywhere, our primary efforts are with preachers located in Appalachia and those serving Spanish-speaking congregations in central and southern Florida.

Some of our primary activities include:

  • One-day Sermon Crafting Workshops, in which participants work with teachers of preachers to hone their abilities in crafting sermons with a solid biblical foundation, creative forms, and culturally appropriate content and delivery. Participants work on the preparation of sermons they plan to preach in the near future, with coaching experienced preachers and teacher of preaching. The Workshops are designed for participants to be able to travel to, engage in, and return from the Workshop all in one day’s time.

  • Compelling Preaching Retreats, led by both faculty and leading local-church preachers and drawing on the experience of the participants, these 2- or 3-day retreats give time for preachers to get away in a retreat setting, learn new skills and sharpen existing ones. Topics range from shaping the sermon from the text to cultural insights into the congregation to expanding the preacher’s repertoire of sermon forms.

  • Engage Groups, formed from participants in the Workshops and Retreats as well as other activities, provide preachers with an ongoing peer group to challenge and support each other to make sermons more creative and compelling.

  • The Fred Craddock Preaching Lectureship is an annual one-day event on the campus of Johnson University that provides the opportunity for students and guests to hear from some of the leading voices in contemporary preaching both presenting training the theory and practice of preaching as well as demonstrating in a chapel sermon.

  • Webinars are presented occasionally to offer training on a specific topic related to the task of preaching.

  • The Sermon Crafting blog appears weekly our website. With contributors from around the country, the blog offers a variety of insights into what makes for Compelling Preaching.

  • The Fred Craddock Archive holds the personal library of Dr. Fred Craddock, along with many of his personal and professional papers, correspondence, and other artifacts from his career as a preacher, biblical scholar, and professor of both preaching and New Testament. The archive is available at Fred Craddock Center on Johnson University’s Knoxville campus, and portions are being made available online.
  • The Fred Craddock Center also conducts research both with preachers and with congregations to discover what it is about a sermon, and a preacher, that makes the sermon compelling and effective.

We invite you to join us in any or all of these activities.