Tony Cartledge Posts On The CBFNC General Assembly

Baptists Today Blogs: CBFNC challenged to share gospel, use words

Here is some of that post:

It’s not enough for believers to “walk the walk,” Fred Craddock told participants attending the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina’s 2009 General Assembly Mar. 20-21. “Somebody needs to talk the talk.”

Craddock, a retired professor perennial cited as one of America’s top preachers, spoke to an enthusiastic group of more than 1,000 registrants to Snyder Memorial Baptist Church in Fayetteville. In two sermons packed with his trademark stories, he focused on the difficulty of hearing Christ’s message and the challenge of sharing it with others.

“The principle pain in hearing is that we just don’t want to hear some things,” Craddock said. “We avoid things we don’t want to hear because they might disturb us.”

Read More: Here.

Here is an article on Craddock's preaching style from Wikipedia:

Preaching Style

There are at least three major features of Craddock's new homiletic that distinguish it from traditional homiletics. First, instead of using a traditional deductive approach, in which three points are named and illustrated, in his sermons, Craddock advocates an inductive style. Critiquing traditional homiletics--called the "old homiletic"--Craddock turned toward induction, in which the preacher re-creates for the listener the inductive process of study used to create the sermon itself. A second unique feature of Craddock's new homiletic is that a sermon should seek to create an experience for the listener, rather than attempting to gain the listeners' assent through sermons utilizing deductive, linear logic. As a result of Craddock's inductive model, the role of the listeners fundamentally changes: no longer are listeners passive recipients of a conclusion already reached by the authoritative preacher, to which they must acquiesce. Rather, in Craddock's scheme, the listeners are active participants in the sermon by virtue of the sermon form itself, which enables the hearer to "finish" the sermon that is intentionally left open-ended. Third, Craddock emphasizes that the form or genre of the biblical passage to be preached should shape in some way the form taken by the sermon. While Craddock does not require that a sermon slavishly adhere to the biblical form--a psalm need not be preached entirely as a poetic sermon--he argues that various biblical forms seek to accomplish a variety of rhetorical aims and as such, the sermon should attempt to "do what the text does" in both the "what" (content) and the "how" (rhetorical strategies) of the text.

Craddock offers an inductive approach to preaching with an aim of active participation by the listener in the movement of the sermon as well as in the discerning of the message. His grounding principle is that good preaching is a socializing force that creates community.[3]

Often characterized as preaching with a style that is "folksy,"[4] Craddock is a strong supporter of using humour in sermons.[5] Newsweek ranked him as one of America's greatest preachers.[2] Craddock's new homiletic has influenced further generations of homileticians who have developed new sermon forms while holding to certain values found within the new homiletic: narrative preaching, phenomenological preaching, and conversational preaching, to name a few.

Craddock's style like Harry Emerson Fosdick's style fits in well with the blended styles of CBF including it's welcoming embrace of the Emerging/Emergent Movement and Postmodern language and it's acceptance of the good parts of traditionalism.