Preaching and theology of preaching : the hermeneutic and theological presuppositions of Korean preachers

Abstract

Church membership continues to indicate a decline from the 2010s (cf. Cho 2015:416) due to the recent shift in the socio-economic culture in Korea. This study aligns with Osmer’s practical theology (2008) for the research approach to investigate evangelical preaching praxis for inquiries and guidance in response to the decline of church membership. The study adopts the following methodologies: Taherdoost’s (2016) for sermon sampling, Pieterse’s (2010) grounded theory for sermon analysis, and McClure’s (2003) for sermon encoding as a descriptive- empirical task. The study concerns interpreting evangelical preaching and its influential components from the sociocultural and economic phenomena and traditional religious thoughts embedded deeply in the culture. The study interprets the concept of preaching theologically and ethically and considers the good practice of preaching from the ancient persuasive rhetoric and the modern homiletical approaches in the normative task. The study offers a transition from the traditional expository preaching to a holistic approach in homiletics in response to the current evangelical preaching as a possible partial remedy for the church membership decline in Korea in the pragmatic task.