The Journey and Promise of African American Preaching

African American congregations have long been celebrated as a locus for powerful, prophetic preaching, but at its best they have also embraced a strong pastoral and wisdom dimension as well, what Kenyatta Gilbert calls a "trivocal impulse." Yet African American preaching today is more threatened than ever imagined and must now overcome its own apparent irrelevance in an increasingly pluralistic, postmodern age of intense spiritual and social crisis.

Gilbert asserts that the survival of both ...