Traditional and contemporary in Christian preaching: a thematic and hermeneutic analysis of 50 sermons from 5 denominations

An investigation of 50 Christian sermons from 5 denominations in Britain preached between May 2002 and November 2004. Recordings of the sermons and results of structural, semantic, and content analyses are presented. An introductory chapter sketches salient features of contemporary religious, secular, and academic contexts. Chapters on methodology and the data collection process follow. Chapter 4 combines detailed quantitative findings with general conclusions concerning two broad hypotheses about contemporary Christian preaching. The Subject analysis maps topics on four different classificatory schemes and concludes that the first hypothesis - that, for all its claims to be relevant to the whole of life, the church is in practice concerned with only a narrow slice of it - is perhaps stretched but not overturned. The Traditional language analysis finds that the second hypothesis- that Christianity, certainly at the local level, refuses to address the 'credibility gap' from which it suffers today- emerges much more patently unscathed. Given the implied 'literalism' predominant in these sermons, it further maps the applications of traditional Christian terminology to modern life. Chapter 5 reviews the findings in the light of the contemporary context as outlined in chapter 1