Austin Seminary receives $1.2 million grant to strengthen preaching

Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary received a grant of $1,248,603 from Lilly Endowment Inc. to help establish The Faithful Preaching Project, a new initiative designed to help preachers of small mainline congregations instill deeper faith in their listeners and empower them to live out their faith more fully in worship and in the community beyond their church walls. The Reverend Dr. Carolyn Helsel, Associate Professor in the Blair R. Monie Distinguished Chair in Homiletics, wrote the grant and is charged with designing and administering the program.

The program is funded through Lilly Endowment’s Compelling Preaching Initiative. The aim of the initiative is to foster and support preaching that inspires, encourages, and guides people to come to know and love God and to live out their Christian faith more fully.

“The goal of the Faithful Preaching Project will be to identify what makes sermons faith-full and faith-inspiring, and then to coach preachers on how they can infuse their own preaching with those skills,” says Professor Helsel. “When I taught lay preachers in our Certificate in Ministry program last spring, I was struck by how the students’ sermons so powerfully demonstrated and communicated a deep faith. My hope is to help more preachers cultivate a preaching life that fosters faith in listeners.” The project is guided by three goals aimed at strengthening preaching skills for clergy and lay preachers:

• Coach preachers and lay proclaimers of small mainline congregations to inspire listeners to know and love God and live out their Christian faith in the world.

• Equip preachers to empower their congregants to create worship liturgies and testify to God’s love so all members practice being proclaimers.

• Train preachers to communicate faith-instilling messages to reach outside the walls of the church and engage the community beyond their congregation. The project’s main activities include coaching preachers, hosting cohorts of preachers, hosting preaching workshops, and creating a worship camp for worship leaders and pastors to come together and consider creative ways to reimagine faithful worship.

Lilly Endowment launched the Compelling Preaching Initiative in 2022 because of its interest in supporting projects that help to nurture the religious lives of individuals and families and foster the growth and vitality of Christian congregations in the United States. Austin Seminary is one of eighty-one organizations receiving grants through this competitive round of the Compelling Preaching Initiative. Reflecting the diversity of Christianity in the United States, the organizations are affiliated with mainline Protestant, evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, Anabaptist, and Pentecostal faith communities.

Dr. Helsel is the author of Anxious to Talk About It: Helping White Christians Talk Faithfully About Race, and Preaching about Racism: A Guide for Faith Leaders. Together, both books earned the 2018 Book(s) of the Year Award from the Association of Parish Clergy. Dr. Helsel served on the editorial board for the commentary series Connections, published by Westminster John Knox Press, and contributed nine essays across the volumes. She authored, with Y. Joy Harris-Smith, The A.B.C.’s of Diversity: Helping Kids Embrace Our Differences (Chalice Press, 2020). She and faculty colleague Song-Mi Suzie Park published The Flawed Family of God: Stories about the Imperfect Families in Genesis (Westminster John Knox, 2021). Dr. Helsel is ordained to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). She currently administers one grant related to anisemitism and another designed to equip theological schools and students with tools to equip them for changemaking in their communities.