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This study explores the social dimensions of preaching, focusing on how preaching is shaped by, but also gives shape to, its social reality. It aims at responding to the current widespread loss of public confidence in Korean Christian preaching by calling for a renewed appreciation of the preaching event embodied and accomplished in the congregation's social context. And preachers should concern the pervasiveness of social dimensions implicit or explicit in their sermons and the biblical texts, and recognize that the sacred texts that ground preaching come to expression fully in the culture of a community. The Korean pulpit, however, has lost its public influence and confidence in society. The study accounts for why the pulpit is no longer as socially significant as once the Old Testament prophets’ preaching was. Since 1960-70 the patterns of preaching in Korean churches has been set: a biblical positivism (biblicism) appealing to the authority of Scripture but irrelevant to the social realities on the one hand and therapeutic personalism emphasizing psychological or positive/possibility-thinking methods but silencing about public affairs on the other. The study argues that Korean preaching itself needs to form symbolic reality in the consciousness of Christian communities as it articulates the concrete social implications of God's new creation. The pulpit should be renewed in terms of building itself on the Biblical preaching tradition founded on the Old Testament prophets' preaching as social preaching and of learning how to transform faith community and society. The study ventures two modest suggestions. Firstly, we must dare to reconsider our whole understanding of preaching in terms of the Old Testament prophets’ preaching understood and interpreted by the components of social preaching, some kind of their social concern, criticism, and consciousness. Secondly, we must widen the focus of our preaching and address human beings as social beings, and our social preaching can transform the social worlds we have internalized, the worlds in which we actually live.
