Series: The Gospel and Our Culture Series

What can preachers do to help congregants navigate everyday life with the courage, imagination, and savvy it takes to testify in action and word to God’s mercy and justice?

Christianity's witness depends on credible Christian lives carried out in ordinary settings of everyday life. Sunday’s Sermon for Monday’s World helps preachers design sermons that equip believers to act with improvisational, creative courage in the ordinary settings of their Monday-to-Saturday lives. 

How can we who preach inspire the “ordinary prophets” of our time—those who, in Christ’s name, will act in great or small ways as agents of redemptive interruption? Sally A. Brown, with her extensive experience both in parish ministry and training others for ministry, shares preaching strategies that equip these ordinary prophets to take daring action. 

Brown begins by reconsidering the power and limits of the missional model of Christian witness and argues that Christian witness today must be adaptive, and therefore imaginative and improvisational. She then turns to the connection between the sermons our listeners hear on Sunday and their capacity to timely, inventive action in everyday situations. 

Sunday’s Sermon for Monday’s World will inspire both preachers and those who listen to them to move from sanctuary to street, week after week, eager to discern and participate in the ongoing, redemptive work of God already under way amid the ordinary scenes and settings of their Monday-to-Saturday lives.

Table of Contents:

INTRODUCTION: Being Christian in Public

PART I: Rethinking Everyday Christian witness

1. Public Witness in Everyday Life: Why the Testimony of Individual Christians in Everyday Spaces Still Matters

2. The Everyday Witness of Ordinary Christian Lives as Faithful Improvisation

PART II: Preaching to Support the Everyday Witness of Ordinary Lives

3. Preaching Promise-Grounded Hope: “Reading” Word and World through the Lens of Divine Promise

4. Body Talk: Preaching about Life-Forming Christian Practices

5. Story as Rehearsal Space: Preaching the Dynamics of Hope-Driven Action

6. Sermons that Travel: How Metaphor Reveals Sightlines of Redemptive Hope