Seminary Receives Lilly Grant for Preaching

The Lilly Endowment has awarded Calvin Theological Seminary a $500,000, three-year grant to help improve the preaching skills of seminary students as well as of preachers who are already working at churches.

The grant to the seminary, via its Center for Excellence in Preaching, is part of Lilly's initiative to improve the quality of preaching and preaching education in North America.   

Calvin Seminary is one of eight seminaries that will begin the program that will have two primary components: first, the program will seek to enhance the education of M.Div. students through the seminary's preaching curriculum and, second, the program will offer continuing education to pastors already serving congregations through the formation of focused peer-learning groups.  

Rev. Scott Hoezee, director of the Calvin Center for Excellence in Preaching, will be the chief person working on the grant along with two others, John Rottman, professor of preaching, and Jinny Bult De Jong, chief financial and operating officer.

“The grant period runs from now until the end of 2016 with the robust part of it in the three years 2014-2016,” says Hoezee.

 The three-year program, he says, will reach hundreds of pastors in congregations as well as the students studying at Calvin Seminary across those years even as the grant program “will create a vital connection between the learning that goes on in the pastor peer groups and the way preaching gets taught to future preachers at the seminary."

Hoezee says he and the others are "honored and enthused to receive this grant and the opportunity it is going to give us to do what too seldom happens: connect the church and  the seminary by creating a conversation between working preachers and aspiring preachers.”

By bringing the learning of the peer-learning groups of pastors back to Calvin Seminary, seminary students will get a preview of contemporary issues in preaching they will soon face.

But those who teach preaching will benefit, too, “as we have the chance to revamp some of the themes and topics we cover in preaching courses so as better to prepare students to ministry in the twenty-first century.”  

Finally, he says, the grant should foster a conversation to see what's working and what's not to get at some best practices teachers can share more widely with students.

“Such a denomination-wide and inter-generational conversation among preachers might also help us begin to agree on an answer to the oft-asked question  ‘What makes for a good sermon?’"