BANGOR – Theologians, preachers and writers will participate next week in Bangor Theological Seminary’s annual convocation at the Hammond Street Congregational Church.

The theme for the 102nd three-day event is “The Word and the World.”

“The theme is a very basic one,” said the Rev. William Imes, seminary president.

“The Christian faith is lived out in the intersection between our understanding of the word of God and our life in the world. In their own ways, each of our speakers brings wisdom and experience from living in and reflecting upon that intersection.”

The Rev. Thomas G. Long, a professor of preaching at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, will be the featured preacher. In addition to writing 14 books on preaching, he conducts research on the theology and practice of Christian funerals.

The Presbyterian minister also will deliver a lecture at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 23, titled “The Seven Habits of Highly Defective Preaching.”

“In the lecture,” he said in an e-mail, “I am going to call on my over 30 years’ experience of teaching and preaching and try to name some of the most common problems

that occur in sermons. For example, one of them will be the failure to help the hearers imagine in concrete, achievable, ethical terms what the sermon is calling them to do.

“The sermon may end, ‘So, Jesus summons us to pick up a cross and follow him.’ But what would that look like if the Millers on the second pew decided to do it? Many sermons fail to take that last logical, practical and ethical step.”

A Maine native who set her novel at the seminary’s former campus in Bangor will speak at 2 p.m. Monday, Jan. 22.

Author Elizabeth Strout set her second novel “Abide With Me” in 1959 in the fictional town of West Annett, Maine. The book tells of the story of a young Congregational minister reeling after the death of his wife. The Rev. Tyler Caskey tries to hold onto his family and his congregation, stumbling through a grief that tests his relationship with God.

She will speak about the book, which she researched at the seminary.

Strout was born in Portland to parents who were teachers, but grew up in Durham, N.H., and South Harpswell. It was in these communities that she attended Congregational churches with her parents and grandparents. Because the ministers in those congregations earned divinity degrees from Bangor Theological Seminary, Strout traveled to the historic campus on Union Street to learn what her fictional minister would have encountered as a student there in the mid-1950s.

It was not just her research at the seminary that got her invited to speak. In her book, Strout renamed the school the Brockmorton Theological Seminary, a play on the names of a couple who have been an anchor for the Bangor school for generations. The Rev. Burton Throckmorton was the New Testament scholar at the seminary for decades. His wife, the Rev. Ansley Coe Throckmorton, served as president from 1995 to 2001.

In the fall of 2005, the seminary moved from its historic campus in downtown Bangor to the Husson College campus on the other side of the city.

“The Brockmorton Theological Seminary sat on a hill, its old stone buildings and large elms dominating the town with a kind of quiet stateliness” is how Strout described the school in her book when Tyler returns to visit a professor. “Only the new library seemed out of place, built off to the side with a squat angularity, and the sight of it saddened Tyler, made him feel older than he was, for he would have preferred it match the old architecture instead.”

Convocation always has drawn graduates back to the campus.

Strout, whose first novel “Amy and Isabelle” garnered critical acclaim, lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Other speakers:

. Ellen Davis, professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke University Divinity School in Durham, N.C. Her work focuses on developing a response based on Scripture to the ecological crisis. A lay Episcopalian, she has been involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue for more than 30 years.

. The Rev. Karen Lebacqz. For more than 30 years, Lebacqz taught ethics at the Pacific School of Religion. Her publications include “Justice in an Unjust World” and “Sex in the Parish.” She is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. She also will discuss her work.

For information, visit the seminary’s Web site at www.bts.edu.