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The church must constantly promote dialogue.

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

I take it for granted that you do not wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from the theological class-room.

We are obliged, therefore, to say that whoever speaks that which is foreign to religion is using many words, while he who speaks the words of truth, even should he go over the whole field and omit nothing, is always speaking the one word.

Private religious speech can't be discriminated against. It has to be treated equally with secular speech.

However, it must always remain a dialogue, and never an imposition of the church's own convictions and methods. Propose, not impose. To serve, and not to dominate.

After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.

One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.

It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.