In a culture that is increasingly digital, artificial, and impersonal, the Incarnational Preaching Project explores how Christian proclamation can make the gospel come alive in our midst—in person, up close, and in community.
The Incarnational Preaching Project invites preachers and hearers to think together about what is contextual, human, and community-creating—that is to say, what is incarnational—about Christian proclamation. Through retreat, through broad dialogue with teachers, scholars, and other laypeople, and through peer coaching, participants will join a community of conversation about how preaching can manifest Christ in and for our churches. Thanks to the generosity of the Lilly Endowment, there is no cost for qualified preachers to participate in the program.
The 2025 Project
- Opening Workshop: September 15-18, 2025 in Santa Barbara, CA
- Cohort Year: September 2025-August 2026
Encounter God’s Presence in Preaching
Our culture seems to be losing its use for presence—for connection, community, and deep and lasting relationship. Our communication is increasingly impersonal, our information fragmented. But the Christian Gospel is entirely about presence, about a God who “became flesh and dwelt among us,” who meets us in our real lives and neighborhoods. Christian preaching, then, should be for people, with people. It should be relational, meeting us in our real lives and neighborhoods. Join us to investigate how preaching can reflect and enact God’s presence with us.
Explore the Cultures of Your Hearers
God doesn’t come to us abstractly, but through particular people, places, and cultures—as a Jewish carpenter’s son in first-century Palestine, for instance. Christian preaching does the same, as God’s Word takes root in different neighborhoods, different churches, different traditions. The resulting diverse proclamation is essential to our truly hearing the Gospel—we learn what the Word is as it sounds in our own community and in many others. Join us to explore how we can more fully understand the Gospel as we hear it proclaimed by different preachers, to different hearers.
Experiment in Your Preaching
As mission scholar Andrew Walls says, the Gospel is “infinitely translatable”--it can be expressed in as many ways as there are cultures to receive it. And not only can it be translated, it must be. Preaching is the living connection that joins us, in our place and moment, to the eternal truths of Christ’s incarnation; that task requires constant adaptation and experimentation. Join us to experiment in proclaiming the living Christ for today.
Engage Your Hearers
Preaching very easily becomes another product to consume, a pastoral “performance” that congregations encounter passively and without serious engagement. But incarnational preaching should involve the whole community in an act of proclaiming the living Christ. Join us for broad conversation—with hearers in your own congregation, Westmont faculty from many disciplines, people young and old and from every walk of life—about the meaning of the Gospel for today.
Celebrate Preaching as a Human Act
Preachers are always and everywhere human beings—in their encounter with the world, the Bible, and their hearers. When they channel the Gospel through their lived experience, when they devise a preparation and preaching process that works with their own strengths and limitations, when they juggle the complexity and fatigue of diverse ministry responsibilities—preachers come to the sermon, as we all do, in the fullness of their humanity. Join other preachers for a real, human look at what preaching demands, and what it might promise.
More Information
Each IPP annual cohort will assemble up to 30 preachers. “Preachers,” in this case, needn’t be people with the word “pastor” in their job title; however, preaching should be a significant and ongoing part of IPP participants’ ministry.
In the firm belief that more and broader perspectives are necessary to perceive and respond to the movement of God's Spirit, IPP intentionally assembles cohorts that are diverse across denominational, racial/ethnic, geographic, and gender lines. We welcome participants from all Christian backgrounds, all ordination statuses, and all pastoral ranks and specialties; participants should expect to learn and benefit from interaction with branches of the Christian family that are quite different from their own.
By the terms of our funding agreement, IPP is open to preachers who live and work in the United States, either temporarily or permanently.
The Incarnational Preaching Project is intended to help preachers contextualize, understand, and develop their preaching in ways that connect it more authentically to the human experience of the preacher and their community of hearers. We do this in conversation with a peer community of preachers, with liberal-arts faculty from many academic disciplines, with diverse laypeople, and with select hearers from preachers’ own congregations.
The centerpiece of the program is a four-day retreat (Monday-Thursday) at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA. That retreat will include:
- Opportunities for participants to locate themselves in the broad landscape of Christian preaching, for instance by encountering and responding to preaching in a variety of traditions;
- Opportunities for participants to explore the big human questions that animate preachers and hearers, for instance in conversation with liberal-arts faculty who approach those questions from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives (philosophy, theology, and history, for instance, but also art, biology, psychology, music, and other angles);
- Opportunities for participants to engage and seek wisdom from their hearers, for instance in dialogue with diverse laypeople from the Santa Barbara area about the value and hope that they find in Christian preaching.
- Opportunities for participants to consider the real needs and opportunities of the congregations to which they preach, for instance in conversation with senior preachers and cohort members about the common and particular dynamics of churches as learning communities.
During the cohort year following the retreat, participants will continue to develop their preaching through:
- One or several yearlong experiments with new incarnational habits in their own preaching, accompanied and supported by an intentionally diverse cohort of other preachers;
- Small-group cohort meetings and workshops;
- Grant-funded conversation with select hearers in participants’ own congregations.
2025-26 Project
Opening Workshop: September 15-18, 2025 | Santa Barbara, CA
Cohort Year: September 2025-August 2026
Thanks to the generosity of Lilly Endowment Inc., Westmont College is able to provide this program to preachers at no cost. Travel, lodging, food, and all program activities are included for free with registration, and we offer some support for caretaking expenses incurred by participants (for childcare, pet-sitting, house-sitting, etc.).
We will begin accepting applications for the 2025-26 Incarnational Preaching Project in January, 2025. Please contact the Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts at libarts@westmont.edu if you’d like to be notified when the application opens.