How do listeners create meaning when hearing a sermon? In this cutting-edge homiletical study, Marianne Gaarden draws on sociological, psychological, and other empirical research to offer new perspectives and presents the notion of the Third Room of Preaching, the place where the preacher’s words and the listener’s prior experiences come together and new meaning emerges. The new research insights challenge conventional understandings of preaching and invite homileticians to reflect theologically on the implications for the sermon as an act of communication. In addition, the book includes an appendix that offers new perspectives on how to best educate and train preachers in light of that research. "Marianne Gaarden's groundbreaking ethnographic work shows how sermons function less as acts of information-transmission than as facilitators of an inner experience of meaning-making. Sermon listeners take fragments of the sermon they hear and carry them off into a 'third room' of internal dialogue. This a very important book for what it reveals about the individual sermon-reception process." --John S. McClure, Vanderbilt Divinity School "This book prompts preachers and scholars of preaching to think afresh about how to understand what happens in preaching, and how to preach." --Ronald J. Allen, Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, Indiana "A fascinating book that studies what happens in the space between the preacher and the congregation during a sermon. Marianne Gaarden brings new insight to our understanding of the sermon as the message created in the third room, when pastor and congregation worship together. A 'must' for everybody who thinks sermons are important." --Peter Lodberg, Aarhus University, Denmark "With careful research and thoughtful analysis, Gaarden opens the door to a new relationship between the pulpit and pew. The Third Room of Preaching helps preachers and congregants to better understand what each may receive in the preaching moment--and to reimagine what is possible in the mysterious, godly interplay of preaching and sermon listening." --Dawn Ottoni-Wilhelm, Bethany Theological Seminary "Theologically reflective, theoretically sophisticated, and methodologically transparent, this beautiful book makes Gaarden's creative research available also to English readers. Her work is widely used as course literature in Norway, and has inspired Norwegian students, researchers, and pastors in their homiletical journeys." --Tone Stangeland Kaufman, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society Marianne Gaarden, bishop in Lolland-Falsters Diocese, Church of Denmark, holds a PhD in homiletics and is a former lecturer in homiletics at the Pastorale Institute in Denmark.