Festival of Young Preachers Registration

Join us for our reboot of the Academy of Preachers’ Festival of Young Preachers! Please complete this form, submit your registration fee, and we will follow up with your Zoom link on November 12th.

While we will be in a virtual environment, we will create opportunities for everyone to preach and to participate in our PreachingCraft seminars. This will be a day of preaching, learning, and fellowship!

We are excited to reboot the AoP and delighted you can join us!

PreachingCraft Classes

Our festivals now offer PreachingCraft classes which will lead to Academy of Preachers' PreachingCraft certifications. Designed to provide instruction in key skills for preaching, each level of PreachingCraft certification helps equip the young preacher to develop foundational skills for a lifetime of preaching and pastoral leadership.

Stories form the foundation of our preaching so our first set of PreachingCraft classes focus on our stories and the stories of Jesus. Choose two of these sessions you would like to attend. We will then assign participation based upon even enrollment in the classes. 

Making Jesus’ Stories Your Own: Preaching the Parables

Jesus’ use of parables in his teaching and preaching was a remarkably powerful practice. This class will explore three parables in detail to examine how the parable functions as a teaching and preaching tool. It will explore how specific cultural and social meanings give the parable unique context and impact and illustrate how to use similar techniques in your sermons today. The goal of this class is to demonstrate how to exegete parables and integrate their teachings into your sermons while providing examples for applying parable elements in your preaching. 

Rev. Sarah Garrett Krey, M.Div., Associate Pastor, Salem Lutheran Church, Catonsville, MD. AoP ’13.

Becoming a Master Storyteller: Storytelling Practices that Work

Have you ever heard the story . . . ? This simple question often presents a great opportunity for relationship building, community identity, and fellowship. Storytelling is the core of preaching and acts as a key element in the communication with others. This class will explore the key elements of storytelling, define different goals for styles of stories, and create opportunities for experimenting with storytelling formats. The goal of this class will be to help equip the young preacher with important insights about the nature of storytelling in order to strengthen the use of storytelling in sermons.

Dr. Jon Roebuck, Executive Director, Curb Center for Faith-Based Leadership, Belmont University

Storytelling as Invitation: Finding Yourself in Jesus’ Story

The parables of Jesus invited listeners to locate themselves in Jesus’ story through His use of people and places familiar to listeners. The challenge of preaching the parables is to extend a similar invitation to listeners to a new way of thinking and living as citizens of the Kingdom of God. In doing so, the preacher also extends an invitation to the listeners to consider themselves a continuation of Jesus’ story. How this is homiletically accomplished through the preaching of parables will be the focus the goal of this class. 

Dr. David Latimore, Pastor, Fifteenth Avenue Baptist Church; Belmont Fellow, Belmont University, Nashville, TN

Storytelling as Resistance: Jesus’ Stories and Social Justice

The parables of Jesus often took the familiar expectations of the listeners and turned those expectations upside down. In doing so, Jesus offered the listeners the opportunity to understand how different His kingdom was and is from the world of the listeners. How does one use the parables, either in their content or approach, to invite listeners to envision a different world? How might preaching the parables provided preachers with a way to articulate a world that resists the normative claims of power and privilege? How does the preacher resist the gravitational pull of the culture to offer the Kingdom of God as an alternative? Examining preaching that strives for these outcomes is the goal of this class.

Min. Michelle E. Shaw, MDiv, ThM , Belmont Fellow, Communications

Registration Information

If you would like to sponsor a young preacher then please select the appropriate registration fee and send the young preacher's name and email address to aop@belmont.edu. 

To receive the coupon code for group registration, please send the names and email addresses for four or more young preachers to aop@belmont.edu and the coupon code will be sent to you. Group registrations do have a discounted fee.