Workshops
At When Your World Shatters, you will have the opportunity to two workshops out of the eight being offered.
Workshop Times:
- Period 1 - 1:20 p.m.–2:20 p.m.
- Period 2 - 3:40 p.m.–4:40 p.m.
Cultivating a Godly View When the Hedges Are Gone
with Patricia Batten
This interactive workshop explores how to preach an expository sermon on Job 1. Together, we’ll work through identifying the exegetical idea, homiletical idea, purpose, and outline of the passage. We’ll also address the questions listeners bring about suffering. Finally, participants will reflect on the “hedges” in their own lives and consider how those protections can limit love for God, and how to help listeners examine their own.
How to Preach When God Doesn’t Promise the Answers
with Patricia Batten
When there are no easy answers, what should a preacher say? This workshop explores preaching through the lens of disability, where words alone may feel insufficient. By examining three relational stages of preaching, we’ll consider how preachers communicate faithfully with people with disabilities and their caregivers. This session is open to preachers personally affected by disability and to those seeking to grow in compassionate, thoughtful preaching.
The Applicational Power of Christ-Centered Exposition
with Dr. Bryan Chapell
This plenary session explores how biblical theology reveals unfolding themes of grace throughout Scripture that culminate in the work of Jesus Christ. These principles are not merely taught in general terms but applied to motivate faithful obedience in response to each text’s fallen condition focus. Participants will see how Christ-centered preaching sharpens, directs, and empowers the application of expository preaching.
Framing Job: Wisdom on Suffering with Job’s Friends
with Dr. Ryan Cook
Pastors and ministry leaders often stand beside people in deep pain. Like Job’s friends, we want to help—but our words can miss the mark. This session examines the reasoning behind the friends’ responses, their intentions, and what their failures teach us about presence, empathy, and wisdom. Participants will gain practical insights from Job on how—and how not—to walk with those who suffer.
Your Soul Is Required of You
with Reverend Dr. Tyshawn Gardner
Preaching in times of local, national, or personal crisis requires the soul of the preacher. This session explores how emotional stability, emotional intelligence, and emotional connection, shaped by the Holy Spirit, inform faithful preaching in crisis. Participants will consider how Spirit-governed emotions can be channeled into sound exegetical and rhetorical practices that lead to transformation for the glory of God.
Preaching as Incarnation: Job and Embodying Christ’s Sent Presence in Crisis
with Sarah Han
This workshop explores crisis preaching as both embodying Christ’s presence and sending God’s people as bearers of that presence. Grounded in the book of Job, the session considers how preaching forms communities that listen, lament, love, and live as Christ in suffering. Participants will gain tools for proclaiming comfort, practicing incarnational compassion, and commissioning the church to embody Christ’s healing presence.
The Unfiltered Soul: Reconciling Job’s Accusations
with Dr. Dominick S. Hernández
This workshop explores how to preach from Job’s most difficult words—spoken to God and to his companions. Focusing on Job’s accusation of divine injustice in chapter 9 and his parody of his friends in chapter 27, the session will examine how these poetic passages align with Job’s portrayal in the prologue. Participants will reflect on what Job teaches about relating to God in suffering, especially when unfiltered honesty sounds anything but orthodox.
Preaching as a Search for the God Who Is Silent: A Theology of Preaching from the Book of Job
with Kerwin Rodriguez
In the book of Job, long debates unfold while God remains silent. Job and his friends search for meaning, justice, and truth about God’s character in an unjust world. This workshop examines what the book of Job teaches preachers about proclaiming truth amid silence, suffering, and unanswered questions—and how to speak faithfully when God seems absent.
Preaching Presence over Platitudes: Relearning Job and Knowing the God of All Comfort
with Shenay Shumake
This workshop invites preachers to rediscover Job as a guide for holy lament rather than tidy answers. Participants will challenge Western assumptions about success and recover lament as covenantal, intimate speech with God. Expect theologically rich, pastorally grounded, trauma-sensitive tools that emphasize presence over platitudes, leading listeners from transactional knowledge about God to transformational communion with Him.
