NEW YORK — Holy Name Province’s evangelization directorate will be sponsoring a preaching workshop Feb. 8 through 10 at the Franciscan Retreat Center in Tampa, Fla. The workshop will begin on Monday with dinner and end Wednesday with lunch.
As a directorate charged with looking at more effective ways to bring the Gospel message to contemporary hearers, we realized that for most friars, preaching is a key evangelizing moment. We began asking the question: “How can our preaching as Franciscans be truly evangelizing preaching, i.e., part of a process of ongoing conversion to the Gospel message as disciples of Jesus Christ?”
In this workshop, we will invite an outside expert — noted preacher Thomas Long of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University — as well as several friars known to be effective homilists to preach to the participants in worship settings and then offer reflections on why and how they developed their homilies in the way they did. We want to answer such questions as: How was it uplifting? How was it thought provoking? How do we bring God’s Word to life on a particular issue?
The intent of this retreat/workshop is to lead us to more effective, imaginative and evangelizing Franciscan preaching. Details on registration for this workshop will be forthcoming. Friars who might be interested are asked to save the date.
— Father David, of Raleigh, N.C., is co-chair of HNP’s evangelization directorate.
Editor’s note: A list of events planned for the coming months by the Province and its ministries will be provided in the next issue of HNP Today.