Fred B Craddock - Craddock Stories

There is a preacher I know who has a clay figurine called Pueblo Storyteller in her study. You may have seen this figure before, as it is quite prolific these days. Pueblo Storyteller is showing up in homes everywhere, near fireplaces, in living rooms, libraries, dens, and on mantles. He is the creation of Helen Cordero, a Native American potter of the Cochita Pueblos who, in 1964, wanted to honor the memory of her grandfather. Known among the Cochitas as a gifted storyteller, Santiago Quintana wanted the traditions of his people preserved, especially in the memories of the children. Come children, it is time! And the children would gather around him to listen to his stories of the people, Cordero remembers.

She has captured this image in clay and painted it in the colors of earth and sky. The Storytellers eyes are closed, but the mouth is opened to a round O. His eyes are closed because all storytellers have to keep a steady gaze on their inner worlds of memory, perception, and imagination; his mouth is open in order to transport others through the medium of sound, language, and imagery. Children are attached to the Storyteller in various places and exhibit a variety of emotional attitudes and facial expressionsone is crying in the cradle of his arm; one is sleeping in his lap; one is climbing to the top of his head; and another is listening peacefully on his knee.

We, of course, could be any one of them. Or we could sit in the Storytellers place. As preachers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are entrusted with stories others have been telling for ages and will be telling for ages to come. Do we attach ourselves to these gospel stories, or have they attached themselves to us? No matter. In either case, we sit in those holy spaces they create, and there we laugh, weep, rest, or remain restless.

We also look deeply into our own hearts in order to tell our stories of faithto give an account of those places where we too have encountered the living Christ. This is why Fred Craddock has been the Storyteller for many of us. We cling to the stories he tells, not simply because they comfort us, make us laugh or cry, or leave us scratching our heads. We cling to them because we hear in them both dissonance and harmony between our stories and the stories of God.

It is not surprising that the Pueblo Storyteller sits very close to the Craddock books on this preachers shelf. We certainly know Fred as a teacher of preachers. Fred opened the door to inductive preaching for a generation of preachers and revived the work of many who had been preaching for a long time. This method of preaching changed many preachers thoughts about the ways that narrative material is brought into the service of the sermon. Simply put, an inductive method of preaching starts in the middle of human experience and moves from there to conclusions about the gospel. It is counterpoint to another method of preaching, deductive, which states a truth in the form of a general proposition or conclusion, then breaks it down into points, instructions, and conclusions. In deductive preaching, stories and anecdotes are brought into service in the sermon to illustrate the points, little adornments that help dress the sermon up for church. Fred shows us that stories have a different sort of work to do in proclamation. What we experience in Freds stories is the revelatory power of the gospel even while its wisdom remains hidden from the world.

Freds homiletic has proven to be a capstone in the homiletical household for more than three decades. Even so, a good many preachers and other folk scratch their heads and say, Craddock? I think I have heard about him but cant say that I ever heard him! To read through the stories in this book is certainly not the same experience as hearing him tell them. It is our hope, however, that by reading through them you can catch a glimpse of Fred Craddock. We have attempted to capture elements of the oral style in which Fred speaks. Read the stories out loud and listen to the rhythms of ordinary speech that have extraordinary powerto reveal and conceal, to comfort and convict, to delight and teach. For those of you who read these stories for the first time, we hope that you will find him here, pointing to places in his life where the truth of the Christian gospel broke through into the clearing. Others will be listening to these stories again. That is the nature of storiesthey live to be told and retold in Gods loop of memory and imagination.