Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Scepticism The Prolific Christian writer, pastor and evangelist Timothy Keller has written an important book not just for Christians but for anyone who has a message they want to get across. While Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Scepticism is aimed at those to expound the Bible in the modern age many of the techniques he advises and uses are adaptable to anyone with a message to sell. This book is one of the most positive I have read this year that even those who might not be used to speaking out in public would want to preach the word as guided by Timothy Keller. There is plenty of guidance and positive advice that just makes you want to get up and preach. While much of what he has written is standard for any preacher what Keller does bring to the table is how to preach the message to a very sceptical audience in the twenty-first century. What Keller does in this book is breaks it down in to three parts to make it easier to grasp the challenges and gain insight and understanding. Part one is the rise to the challenge arguing that Preachers should be ‘Serving the Word’, in this case preaching the Bible and in the Christian sense that means expounding on the New Testament and preaching about the glory of Christ. Part two is about ‘Reaching the People’ how do you take a message that was once preached to the Jews in the first centuries to the gentile of the modern age. One thing Keller does point out is that the Jew of the Bible is like the Gentile today highly sceptical of the message of Christ. In other words in two thousand years nothing has changed for the Christian preacher, but like Paul in Acts, the preacher today needs to contextualise their message. Take the New Testament and show how it is relevant today, as it was yesterday and will continue to be. The final part, Part Three is also the shortest, ‘In Demonstration of the Spirit and of Power’ which is really about the character of the preacher and how he should deal with the text and the context of the message. Keller also gives a short examination of the sub-text of the preacher, what is the motivator o f the preacher. For want of a better way of saying it why the preacher is is in front of his audience and what does he want to tell them and what he wants the outcome to be. For those who are continuing to learn how to deliver the message and those who want to improve the appendix has a helpful short chapter on ‘Writing an Expository Message’. This is where the basics of how to write a sermon, how to use Biblical texts, the theme of a Sermon, develop the arguments, how to illustrate and applications to life. This is one of the most useful chapters in the book which can be used as a reminder time and time again. Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Scepticism by Timothy Keller is one of the most positive, exciting, well written books on the subject of preaching. This book challenges and targets those who need to preach the word in the twenty-first century and encourages all to take that step to not be afraid of preaching. An excellent book, one I cannot recommend highly enough.