Dr. O. Wesley Allen Jr. is the Lois Craddock Perkins Professor of Homiletics at Perkins School of Theology and co-directs the Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence.

He began serving his first church as a part-time student pastor in 1985. Of the congregation at Village Falls United Methodist Church, Wes says, “They loved me into the ministry, and they did so through a lot of really bad sermons in those early days.” That experience led him always to want to preach better—more faithfully to the gospel and more effectively for the hearer—and help others do so. This led him to study homiletics with Fred Craddock and Gail O’Day as part of his PhD program in New Testament at Emory University.

Dr. Allen often brings his New Testament interests into his writing (most recently, he has just completed a critical preaching commentary on Mark that will be published in the Spring of 2026), but perhaps his deepest homiletical passion is writing about how to preach faithfully and effectively in a postmodern age when trust of religious theology and belief in a shared overarching theological worldview have all but disappeared. Currently, he is working on a book on the use of analogy in preaching to address this question from a new angle. He has authored and edited many books, essays, and articles. Watch him preach and discover Dr. Allen’s books.