Program Explores the Meaning of Preaching

Lilly Endowment Inc. has awarded Westmont College a $1.25 million grant to create a unique program exploring the meaning and value of in-person Christian preaching. At a time when much communication takes place online, remotely and impersonally, the Incarnational Preaching Project will invite active and aspiring preachers to investigate the value of preaching live to a church community. Westmont’s Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts expects to launch the program in spring 2025.

Aaron Sizer, Gaede Institute director of academic and congregational integration, says Christian theology depends on real human connection. “Christianity asserts, quite distinctively, that God became incarnate, became human,” he says. “God doesn’t ask us to think our way up to heaven but meets us in the tangible stuff of human life. That should inform everything we do in the church, especially our preaching.”

Westmont’s project will gather pastors, liberal arts professors, and others to think together about how incarnational preaching comes alive in particular communities. Rather than focusing on the development of better technical skills, as many preaching programs already do, this project will explore the people, relationships, needs and challenges that make preaching meaningful.

“Westmont lives and breathes relational learning,” says President Gayle D. Beebe. “With support from Lilly Endowment, we’re excited to expand that work to make our Christian liberal arts resources directly available to clergy and congregations.”

The Incarnational Preaching Project is funded through Lilly Endowment’s Compelling Preaching Initiative, which fosters and supports preaching that inspires, encourages and guides people to know and love God and to live out their Christian faith more fully.

Lilly Endowment awarded grants to 81 organizations that reflect the diversity of Christianity in the United States, including affiliates of mainline Protestant, evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, Anabaptist, and Pentecostal communities. Many of the organizations are rooted in the Black church and in Hispanic and Asian American Christian traditions.

Through its Gaede Institute, Westmont continues to cultivate relationships with faith communities across the broad spectrum of ecclesial traditions. The Gaede Institute’s Trailhead, Frontiers, Thriving Communities and Young Adult Leadership Lab programs offer resources and relational learning for high school youth, pastors, congregations and young adults.