The Rev. Dr. Leonora (Nora) Tubbs Tisdale joined the Yale University Divinity School faculty in 2006 as the Clement-Muehl Professor of Homiletics. Before going to YDS, Dr. Tisdale served for four years as Consulting Theologian at the Fifth Avenue Church in New York City. She also served as Adjunct Faculty at Union Theological Seminary. Prior to that she taught Preaching and Worship at Princeton Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (now Union-PSCE). She began her ministry as co-pastor with her husband of an ecumenical parish of four churches in central Virginia. Dr. Tisdale is married to the Rev. Dr. W. Alfred Tisdale Jr., a Presbyterian minister. Outlook Editor Jack Haberer recently talked with her about the subject of preaching.
JHH: What in your spiritual journey led you to become a specialist in the practice of preaching?
NTT: I grew up as a child, actually loving preaching and hearing a lot of it. My dad, who is an ordained Presbyterian minister and still preaching at age 85, really was an evangelist at heart. I attended his church as a little girl, but I would also ride along as he ran the circuit when he would go preach revival services for other churches in the area. …
My mom, of course, was in the church before women’s ordination, but she was a very gifted–IS a very gifted–Bible teacher. She always did her scholarly homework and always had an ability to bring the text and life together. I heard a lot of good proclamation of the Bible as a child.
We all went every summer of my growing up years to Montreat Conference Center, where I got exposed to some of the great preachers of our denomination. They expanded my worldview and challenged it with their prophetic words. … I wanted to be a preacher from a very early age. …
Nothing in the church or the culture during the time I was growing up encouraged a little girl like me to pursue the ordained ministry. I don’t even think that I ever heard a women preach until I went to Union in the 70s. My father used to wonder aloud which of his three sons would be the preacher.
When I went to Union Seminary in the mid-70s, I went, wanting to study the Bible in Greek and Hebrew. And I thought that maybe I would go on to teach at a college one day. … In that (preaching) class — fell in love with it. This is what I’d longed to do for a long time, but I just didn’t have permission to do it.
At the same time, when we were in seminary, Al Winn was pastor at Second Church in Richmond and he’s really one of my preaching heroes and mentors. … He did some of the best weekly, congregational, consistent preaching I ever heard in my life — and with a very strong, prophetic edge.
So after seminary my husband and I went to be pastors at four little churches in our ecumenical parish in central Virginia. … It was a little bit of a shock to face so many other things in ministry that took up such a lot of time that weren’t preaching — like pastoral care, but I LOVED preaching. And I always found it to be the place where my love of biblical studies, my concerns for the world, and creativity could come to intersect. …
After we had our second child and were both running out the door Sunday mornings to preach at our two different services I just decided that I really couldn’t continue living that way forever. I really longed to have all our family to worship in one place on Sunday mornings. And so I started thinking about what other alternatives there were for me in ministry that would allow me to keep me doing what I loved to do. It seemed a natural that I should go back to school and get a Ph.D. in preaching for a teaching ministry. …
JHH: … Did each sermon click with one congregation the way it did with the others? What lessons did those (four) congregations teach you about the preaching task?
NTT: In many ways my dissertation and my first book, Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art, really grew out of that very dynamic in those first congregations and the questions they posed for me. … I got to preach the same sermon in all four and was constantly astonished with how it would seem to soar in one church and … just fall flat in the next. Those differences fascinated me as I thought, “What does this have to do with the work of the Holy Spirit?
I saw it had to do with contextual issues in the life of the congregations. The longer we lived there the more I realized that we were really preaching to four very different congregational cultures. … They all had very different worldviews, values, education levels. … So it was sort of their difference that really led to the questions I shared in that book about how to exegete congregations in that way. In seminary we just didn’t get that kind of training.
Dr. [Wellford] Hobbie was the first to use the term, “exegeting the congregation,” but it was sort of something we were expected to pick up by osmosis. … I continue [to be] fascinated by the congregation–by what makes them tick, what makes them unique, how we read those things.
JHH: It has been 10 years since the publication of Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art. … Given all the changes churches face these days, including a high turnover rate in many congregations, what tips would you offer … for contextualizing preaching in our congregations?
NTT: I’ve always assumed congregations are constantly in flux, sort of like pinning down an amoeba. … In some ways that’s a given.
The basic skills of how to exegete a congregation are still needed, but the assumption is that you’re always sort of peeling away the layers of an onion. So you’ve got to continually change and deepen and rethink the patterns and the paradigms you draw. There’s still something to be said for the congregational culture. What is it that, when people go church shopping, draws them to choose one church over another church? What do they sense? What do they see? What do they need? …
When I finished that book, … my hope (was) that I had just started a conversation that others would pick up and expand. … The whole issue of how do you preach to a congregation when you’ve got a lot of different sub-cultures within it — that’s something I couldn’t ever address there because I didn’t have the time or space to do it. … But part of what I delight (in) in homiletics is we’ve got new resources now that touch some of these other itches (like) the book, Preaching to Every Pew, by James Nieman and Tom Rogers, that looks at … race and class and belief systems within a congregation. What impact do those have upon the preachers preaching to all these people at the same time? Or Joey Jeter and Ron Adam’s book, One Gospel, Many Years, that looks at preaching through the lenses of gender, age, the way people normally process sermons.
I think we need to look not only at the culture but also the subcultures of congregations. … We need to sometimes mix it up, knowing that we are preaching to a diversity of folk and that we assume we are preaching primarily to one cohort in the congregation and allow others to overhear. …
Finally, coming out of my most recent parish experience … a 3,600-member congregation and many, many visitors … I found myself gearing my sermons to the universal human voices. I was drawing from William Sloan Coffin — him saying to me, you know, if we preach deeply to ourselves, if we dig deep enough, we often touch a common chord with the rest of humanity. …
So I think we need to hold all those in tension: the culture of the congregation, the subcultures within it, and the universals of human experience all have to come to somehow bear on the preaching act.
JHH: Why a set of lectionary preaching aids particularly by women? … What’s different about women preachers? And could male preachers use those resources, too?
NTT: I edited three volumes of women’s preaching aids for the lectionary texts. While those aids were all written by women including women’s sermons, women’s reflections on biblical texts, women’s liturgical offerings, etc., they never were intended to be read only by women any more than lectionary aids written by men would be just for men. …
But I also would say that part of the reason I thought that project was worthwhile, and frankly, why I still teach a course at Yale Divinity School called “Women’s Ways of Preaching,” is that I strongly believe that women need safe space in which to talk about the particular challenges they face in the pulpit. … We have to deal with the reality that women haven’t been preaching very long in our denomination, and in some denominations they still are not allowed to do so. … Part of my calling, frankly, I feel very passionate about this, is to create spaces in the classroom where women can come together and talk honestly about the challenges and concerns they face as they enter the pulpit that for a long time was a place where only men were allowed. And where we can also celebrate and affirm the unique gifts and perspectives they bring to pulpit so the women can find strength and encouragement for their preaching ministries.
JHH: If you were assigned the task to write, “What Princeton Theological Seminary [or any other seminary for that matter] didn’t teach me about preaching?” what would you highlight?
NTT: Well, I think more about Union Seminary, since that’s where I learned to preach.
I think that if you rush too quickly to biblical commentaries or go too quickly to hear what the experts say about a text, you really take yourself out of the conversation in a major way and block your own creativity in the preaching task. One of the first things I had to learn coming out of seminary, especially a seminary that was so strong in biblical and theological studies, was that I actually might have a valid, new insight into a biblical text. I think I came out thinking that my thoughts were going to be paltry compared to what the commentators who had spent their whole lives dealing with this text were. But one of the things I really stress in basic preaching is for students to spend time just reading the text, praying over it, mulling over it, asking their questions, coming up with their ideas about it, before they enter into that broader conversation with the experts, because once they do, then they have something to test their ideas against, rather than simply saying, “Give me a sermon idea.”
A second thing, I wish I had been encouraged in seminary to build a community of support for me as a preacher that could continue frankly through my lifetime. I really admire these groups, like the Moveable Feast and other groups that have formed around preaching, that meet every year. Part of what worries me is that many preachers never get another sermon critique after they leave seminary. That’s what really scares me for the church and really worries me for preaching. It ought to be a life-long learning, and therefore we need to help set up support systems where pastors can meet with a group of peers that they really admire and respect and can continue to get feedback on their preaching so they can continue to grow. …
A third thing I’d say is that … preaching is not only a work of ministry; it’s a spiritual discipline that feeds the preacher. The thing I miss the most when I’m not in the parish is the discipline of regular sermon writing, because it was really a spiritual discipline that fed me and while we talk about it as a work and a craft and an art and all that, … it’s also a spiritual discipline, and at it’s best, it’s hard work, but it’s also work that helps us grow into the best human beings.
