Simeon Trust workshops: the hermeneutic is the homiletic

It's that time of year again. I'm in Wheaton, Illinois with 80 other pastors at the Simeon Trust workshops. The workshops are being held at College Church. The unique thing about this conference is that it is solely dedicated to refining one's exegesis and homiletic. A few weeks before the conference we get our assignments in the mail. We develop a sermon outline, present it to a roundtable of our peers who then give constructive criticism about how the passage is being expounded in the potential sermon. It is truly an exercise in humility. For the curious, my two passages are Exodus 4:1-17 and Exodus 24:1-11.

This year's keynote speaker is Philip Graham Ryken. Yesterday, he gave a couple of lectures on the need for expositional preaching and how it functions in Exodus. David Helm of Simeon Trust also gave a lecture on 6 tools for expositional preaching, spending a lot of time on how to find the structure of any given passage... and how that structure plays itself out in a sermon. It has been refreshing to hear this refrain that many who claim to be expositionists don't get: the hermeneutic (and its exegesis) *is* the homiletic.