Life-situational Preaching

Life-situational preaching has as its starting point the personal concerns of its audience. It seeks to bring the hearer into the Word of God by making connections between Scripture and the hurts and issues of life. The Starting Point. Life-situational preaching arises from the problems of life and seeks to touch the listener at the point of his or her personal concerns. Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), pastor of New York's historic Riverside Church from 1926 to 1946, and closely associated with the development of life-situational preaching, called it "personal counseling on a group basis. " Whereas expository preaching begins with the biblical text and seeks to apply it to life, and topical preaching begins with a subject and seeks to make it relevant to life, life-situational preaching begins with life itself and seeks, in the words of one life-situational preacher,"to find a need and meet it; find a hurt and heal it. " Fosdick summarized the method involved in life-situational …