Dr. Ahmi Lee: On Preaching God’s Grand Drama

Our final guest for the season is Dr. Ahmi Lee, author of God’s Grand Drama: A Biblical Theological Approach. Ahmi is an MDiv. graduate of TEDS, and she also gave the 42nd Annual Rohm Lectures on Preaching on campus this year. She has taught at Fuller Theological Seminary, and is now the Chief Partnership Officer at Resource Global, a Christian nonprofit organization dedicated to equipping young professionals for having an impact for the gospel in their contexts. She is interviewed by Dr. Michelle Knight and Dr. Madison Pierce.

Ahmi begins by sharing her calling to develop Christian marketplace leaders to make a difference for Christ at Resource Global, along with her prior experiences teaching preaching at Fuller. Her discovery of this calling originated from a life of preaching and ministry, beginning in South Korea and Japan. The secular and pluralistic environment she encountered in Japan instilled in her a desire to share the gospel to those around her. Ahmi reflects how these experiences taught her how to be a flexible preacher who listens to her or his people in order to identify areas where God is already working. She also speaks about how the church can be both faithful and faithless, beautiful and ugly, but how God still operates through all of it. The group then shift to discuss Ahmi’s book on preaching. She notes how her approach splits the difference between a more traditional, propositional approach and a more listener-based approach. To do so, she recommends four “perspectives” to which the preacher ought to attend when she or he preaches. From there she talks about her future project on the office of the pastor and the benefits the early church can provide. In particular, there are lessons to be learned from these figures on how to preach during difficult times. She concludes with some recommendations on how to prepare sermons, the role of delight in that process, and how one’s understanding of God ought to be formative.

Along the way, listeners will discover…

• What it’s like to do street preaching in Japan when you’re a highschooler
• Ahmi’s hopes for pastors and teachers as they construct beautiful things
• The best tools for preaching in a way that invites others into God’s great drama

To learn more about Dr. Ahmi Lee, you can watch her Rohm Lecture here, you can watch the follow-up Q&A here, you can acquire her book here, or you can see the kind of work she does with Resource Global here.