Preaching Day - Anna Carter Florence

SCRIPTURE. We can study it carefully. We can listen to sermons on it and read what the experts say about it. But in the end, Scripture needs to be rehearsed and encountered—and we can do that best in community with others. We’ll work through concrete, practical tools for reading and rehearsing Scripture in groups. Suitable for new and seasoned Bible readers alike, this session will invite solitary readers to become community readers as well—to gather around a shared text and encounter God anew together.

Anna Carter Florence is the Peter Marshall Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and holds degrees from Yale University and Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div 1988, Ph.D. 2000). Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1998, Dr. Florence served as an associate pastor for youth and young adults at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. Her books include Preaching as Testimony, Inscribing the Word, and Rehearsing Scripture: Discovering God’s Word in Community, based on her 2012 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School; her current book project is ‘A’ is for Alabaster: A Preacher’s Alphabet. She has also published articles and chapters in numerous books and journals, including a year’s worth of lectionary text commentaries or www.WorkingPreacher.com.

Tuition for Preaching Day is $45* and includes coffee in the morning and lunch.   If you would like to pay by credit card, please use this link:  OnlinePayment.   Checks, made out to PTI, may be mailed to 633 Walnut La, Haverford, PA 19041. If you are driving, there is free parking there and a bus stop about a three minutes' walk away, at Ridge Avenue and Cathedral Road.  

Dr. Florence’s research focuses on testimony, preaching pedagogies, and creative strategies for communities to engage and encounter the biblical text for our present context. She is a frequent preacher and lecturer in the U.S. and abroad, most recently for the 2019 Macleod Lecture at Princeton Seminary, the Festival of Preaching at Christ Church, Oxford, UK, and the Fjellstedstka Preaching Program in Uppsala, Sweden. These give her plenty of chances to do what makes her happiest: sitting around a table with a group of people, a big passage of Scripture, and a big block of time to dive into it. She and her husband, the Rev. David Carter Florence, have two grown sons. They also have two dogs, two cats, and way too much knitting yarn.