This paper aims to reassess the North American contemporary homileticians’ discussions about the authority of the preacher since Fred Craddock. The issue of the preacher’s authority is a pivotal point to establish the ecclesiological perspective on the relationship between the preacher and the congregation as well as to develop homiletical forms which reflect such a relationship. While traditional preaching that proceeds in a form of deductive propositional didactic sermon assumes the preacher of authority, who serves as a herald of God, Craddock's inductive preaching purposes a preacher without authority, in which cultivates the horizontal democratic relationship between the preacher and the listener. However, a group of postmodern homileticians, like Lucy Rose and John McClure, do not consider Craddock's inductive sermon a fully non-authoritarian model, because they think the preacher in Craddock's model still exercise a superior authority to the listeners in another way, neglecting the limits of language and experience. Instead, they suggest conversational preaching or collaborative preaching as alternative ways of preaching which foster communal horizontal relationship between the pulpit and the pew. In reassessment of those scholars' discussions, I elucidate that their models also have limits to fulfill the communal democratic non-authoritarian role of preacher, because the asymmetrical power relationship cannot be fully resolved in reality. Rather, drawing on Thomas Long's preaching as witness model, I attempt to seek to reconfigure the authority of preacher, which is not based on their personal divine calling or gifts or institutional endowment but on the congregation's commission, and encourage to witness the Word with a sincere intention that pursues an authentic experience of the Word in their reading the Bible. Thus, I claim that the relationship between the preacher and the congregation should be understood not as a confrontational bipolarized separation but as a dialectical paradoxical union. I expect that this attempt would be helpful to cure the sick consciousness of authority among Korean preachers which is distorted by the wrong understanding of the authority and to transform them to become a non-authoritarian servant of the authoritative Word.