Luke A. Powery, dean of Duke University Chapel and associate professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School, has co-authored a textbook on preaching in response to changing demographics in the classrooms and growing diversity in the art of preaching.

The book, Ways of the Word: Learning to Preach for Your Time and Place, published earlier this year by Fortress Press, was co-authored by Sally A. Brown, the Elizabeth M. Engle Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship at Princeton Theological Seminary.

The textbook aims to help develop a rising generation of preachers by addressing the changing realities in the church and theological education, the increasing diversity of classrooms, and increasingly complex communities both in and outside of the church.

Although different in race, gender, age, and tradition, Powery and Brown speak with one voice their belief that preaching is a Spirit-empowered event: an embodied, vocalized, actively received, and here-and-now witness to the ongoing work of God in the world. Both master preachers, the co-authors aspire to help both students and preachers reflect on a journey of learning by doing. They aim to help preachers become more attuned to the Spirit, more adept in preaching's component skills, and more self-aware about what is at stake in proclaiming the redemptive work of God in specific contexts.

Powery, who has been dean of Duke Chapel since 2012—and recently was re-appointed to a second five-year term—previously was an assistant professor of homiletics at Princeton. He is the author of Spirit Speech: Lament and Celebration in Preaching and Dem Dry Bones: Preaching, Death, and Hope. He serves as a general editor for a new, nine-volume lectionary commentary series titled Connections published by Westminster John Knox Press.