A prayer from John Stott's book Your Mind Matters:

I pray earnestly that God will raise up today a new generation of Christian apologists or Christian communicators, who will combine an absolute loyalty to the biblical gospel and an unwavering confidence in the power of the Spirit with a deep and sensitive understanding of the contemporary alternatives to the gospel; who will relate the one to the other with freshness, authority, and relevance; and who will use their minds to reach other minds for Christ.

The final version of my thesis includes this paragraph:

Theocentric preaching does not begin with the inexhaustible demands of the human condition; it begins with the sufficiency of God. Rather than dwelling in the depth of human need, it lives within the realm of God's richness. The preacher is not pressured to only provide answers; instead, the preacher brings the congregation into the presence of God, who is on a mission to re-create the cosmos and to redeem all things. Discouragement is part of the assignment of preaching, but a theocentric approach reminds us that our sufficiency is not found in ourselves. God, not the preacher, is the only source of eternal satisfaction and joy.

This is not the paragraph I had originally written. I had originally argued that theocentric preaching can help prevent against discouragement. Haddon Robinson challenged me during my thesis defense. There is no way, he said, to avoid being discouraged as a preacher. I forget his exact words, but the phrase in the paragraph above comes pretty close: "Discouragement is part of the assignment of preaching."
There probably aren't many preachers who don't get discouraged at least part of the time. The main character in the novel Gilead wrote, "So often I have known, right here in the pulpit, even as I read these words, how far they fell short of any hopes I had for them." In Lectures to My Students, Spurgeon wrote:

Be not dismayed by soul-trouble. Count it no strange thing, but part of ordinary ministerial experiences. Should the power of depression be more than ordinary, think not that all is over with your usefulness. Cast not away your confidence, for it hath great recompense of reward…Cast the burden of the present, along with the sin of the past and the fear of the future, upon the Lord, who forsaketh not His saints. Live by the day – ay, but the hour. Put no trust in frames and feelings…Trust in God alone, and lean not on the needs of human help…When your own emptiness is painfully forced upon your consciousness, chide yourself that you ever dreamed of being full, except in the Lord…In nothing let us be turned aside from the path which the divine call has urged us to pursue.

Discouragement is part of the assignment of preaching, but it's also a reminder to us that our hope doesn't lie within ourselves or the people around us. As i wrote in my thesis, "Our sufficiency is not found in ourselves. God, not the preacher, is the only source of eternal satisfaction and joy."

in his excellent book Preaching for Revitalization, Michael F. Ross describes a shift in literature on preaching. Prior to the twentieth century, books did not indicate that preaching was in decline or a question in people's minds. "Rather their emphasis is on the spiritual aspects of preaching: the minister's life and heart, prayer, Spirit-led preparation, the hope of the gospel, and so forth."

In the 1930s and 1940s, books began to describe a decline in preaching.

Ross describes how the emphasis has shifted in response to this crisis in modern literature:

Overall, the current works focus most on communication theory and practice – style, SAIs (stories, analogies and illustrations), voice methods and time usage – while the earlier works dwell and content, theology, spiritual motivations and the character of the minister.

Ross argues that we need to look beyond communication skills if we want to see a revival of biblical preaching:

The crisis of the American pulpit is not one of communication theory, but rather one of content, conviction, and consistency of theology and life…This is not to say that communication theory and practice are not important, but rather to keep two concepts separate: homiletics and preaching. Good homiletics does not necessarily result in good preaching. Homiletics does not transform the soul; true preaching does!

From an interview with Kevin Vanhoozer:

The problem in too many evangelical churches is that we know what we're supposed to believe, but we're not sure what practical difference it makes and so we're unable to bring it to bear on everyday life. To be sure, biblical and theological illiteracy remains a problem too. But that doesn't really explain why even in churches where the Bible is faithfully preached the congregation doesn't look that different from everyone else.

My own hunch is that we need to recover the imagination in order to set the cultural captives free. I believe that many people in today's society, and church, suffer from an impoverished imagination. By imagination I mean the cognitive power of seeing things together, as wholes; clearly a worldview is an affair of the imagination, at least in part. In any case, I believe that our imaginations are captive to secular stories/worldviews that do not nourish our souls. Eugene Peterson says something similar about the function of the 10 plagues of Egypt: they were intended to free the imagination of the Israelites from thinking that the power of Egypt was sovereign. The plagues systematically deconstruct Pharaoh's power. It takes imagination to see that what God is doing with a small tribe of slaves is greater than the might of Egypt or the grandeur that was Rome. Similarly, it takes imagination to see that North Americans are not in bondage to similar powers and principalities: consumerism and therapism, to name but two. I wonder whether in our haste to preserve doctrinal truth, we have not done our evangelical churches a disservice in surrendering our imaginations to stories (and advertisements) that serve the interest of some worldly empire (or multinational corporation) rather than the kingdom of God.

Pastors need to make it a priority to teach their congregations how read Scripture theologically, and this requires the imagination, the ability to make sense of thing by fitting the little bits into larger patterns – the big canonical picture. It takes imagination to see the Bible as a unified whole, and then it takes even more imagination to fit one's own time and place into this biblical drama of redemption.

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From an interview with Mike Horton:

Ministers are often expected to be CEOs, managers, therapists, and coaches – just about anything other than shepherds who answer our Lord's mandate to Peter: "Feed my sheep."

I think that we have to resist every attempt to turn our studies into offices. An open-door policy is not necessarily virtuous. It is often more helpful to the body if the minister closes the door, with an eagerness to mine the treasures of God's Word. The diaconate was established in the first place so that the apostles and pastors could devote themselves to the Word and to prayer.

I believe that one of the primary responsibilities of the elders is to ensure that the minister is free to meditate prayerfully on God's Word, read great books, and take part in conferences or other forms of continuing education – and to ensure that this is in fact happening.