Academy News

Dear colleagues,  I am very pleased at being able to look back at our meeting in Washington DC with fondness and wonderful memories.  I am grateful to all of you for the extraordinary honor of having served as president of the Academy of Homiletics for the past year.  Now the gavel has been passed to Dale Andrews, who has taken over to prepare us for a great time in Atlanta next November. 

I do want to say “thank you,” though, to the numerous people whose efforts made the Washington meeting come together as the joyful and challenging experience that it seems to have been.  To Lucy Hogan, most importantly, who oversaw the thousand or more arrangements and details for what was an usually complex logistical get-together.  At first, it sounded impossible to pull off, but once we were there, the three, actually four, churches and our hotel seemed to meld together into a wonderful fabric.  All because of how Lucy managed to knit everything together for us.

She was helped, of course, by numerous people behind the scenes, and a few not so behind the scenes.  The staffs of all four churches—Mt. Vernon Place, Calvary Baptist, Asbury UMC, and Mt. Carmel Baptist—were phenomenal, and to them we should all be grateful.  Joseph Evans of Mt. Carmel must be singled out for special gratitude for a many tasks he performed, working with Lucy.  I will not try here to list all of those who did so many things for us, but our gratitude is being conveyed to every one of them.  We must also say “thank you” as well to the staff at Embassy Suits Hotel, who served us all wonderfully from the moment we arrived.

Our program was different this year than usual, and, with no more than a glitch or two, becomes a good memory for all of us.  Hearing the Chaplain of the U.S. Senate preach was a highlight of the meeting—and who knew that someone connected to all those legislators could preach like that!  The panel discussion on Thursday night, caught on tape for this web site, was a unique learning experience.  Thank you to all, both publishers and authors, who participated in it.

We are grateful, too, to our featured speakers, Bill Fore, and Julia Duin.  Both were challenging and deeply informative.  To the special lecturers as well as to all of those who presented papers, we say “thank you.”  Every session was well attended, and there were, as usual, some overflowing rooms on Friday afternoon.

For the first time on our site we are creating a “photo gallery” that, to some degree, will recreate the Academy experience.  Enjoy the pictures, and if you took a few that are particularly memorable, please send them along to Stephen for including in our “album.”

So we put the 2009 Academy meeting away.  We have a new president in our line-up.  Next year Dale, followed by Jana Childers, and our new second vice president is Alyce McKenzie, who will become our president a couple of years down the road. 

Thank you all who attended and those of you who support the Academy but could not make it to Washington this year—we have a great organization.  Follow the web site closely; have a look at it once a week or.  We have a lot of things from the meeting, and related to planning for next year, that will appear here very soon, including items from the business meeting in Washington, and audio tapes of most of the sessions, including the panel discussion on the future of homiletics book publishing. 

Till next year in Atlanta,

Joseph Webb