T. David Gordon's diagnosis of poor preaching: it is not mainly a spiritual failure but the result of a culture that no longer reads or writes carefully. Read more.
Why Johnny Can't Preach examines why preaching does not have the effect on people that it once had. Gordon's analysis is of the shifts in dominant media over the second half of the twentieth century and their effects on our culture, many of them profound and, for preaching, unfortunate: a generation that has not learned to read texts closely or to compose carefully cannot be expected to preach well.
Gordon wrote the book after a cancer diagnosis prompted him to say what he thought needed saying, and the result is short and unusually blunt. His prescriptions are as concrete as his diagnosis: read poetry, write for an audience, submit sermons for criticism. A bracing read for preachers and for the committees who evaluate them.
