Philip Arthur Bence PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

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lecturers more frequently ask their students to prepare
written sermons, isolated from any actual preaching
event. These 'sterile' preaching assignments, divorced
from the test of 'live' hearers, give opportunity for the
lecturer to evaluate student preaching, not by its
relevance to, or effect on, a congregation, but by
comparison to a stated method of preaching (probably the
lecturer's method). The relationship between contrived
preaching settings and a more authoritarian teaching •
style is not a necessary one, yet the parallel appears
likely.
The varying level of examination use adds some
intriguing possibilities. Fourteen colleges employ
examinations as part of education for preaching. (See
question 14, table 19.) Four of these institutions are
Scottish universities. The use of examinations in that
setting is not unusual. Outside the university setting,
the use of this method (in learning what many,
particularly among theologically conservative educators,
see as a vocational task, 16. rather than an academic
subject) merits special attention. Of the ten
non—university settings which use examinations, nine are
'objective'; only one is 'subjective'. The percentage on
the 'objective' side is higher than the proportion of
those colleges in the whole. Of the nine non—university
'objective' lecturers who employ exams, four specifically
stated that the exams covered "homiletics"--a term
usually associated with the practice of preaching rather