Reimagining preaching?

Doug Pagitt: Preaching Re-Imagined: The Role of the Sermon in Communities of Faith (Zondervan, 2005)

I got hold of this because I wanted to read the best arguments for dialogical preaching; Glen suggested to me that this was one of the key texts. I found it particularly interesting, because it doesn’t assume the standard (in my experience) dialogical argument (the role of preaching is to convey information; but, monologues are a poor way of conveying information; therefore, monologue preaching is poor preaching; it seems to me that neither premise is sustainable…)

Pagitt’s argument/vision starts with a concept of community: Christian communities are to be places of genuine relationship; the role of Bible is to be ‘an authoritative member of our community, one we listen to on all topics on which she speaks’ (195). In community, Pagitt argues, the notion of deferential listening to a monologue has no place: we learn and discover by dialogue. The Bible’s voice is to be heard directly in the dialogue by all, not mediated indirectly by one particular person. The task of the community is together to grow up into Christian maturity.

Refreshingly, Pagitt recognises the power of the monologue to touch hearts and minds; however, he dismisses this as manipulation: ‘Knowingly manipulating the emotions of my hearers to get them to come to a predetermined  conclusion felt like the very thing a pastor shouldn’t do. It felt like a violation of the human relationship.’ (74). Well, perhaps. Pagitt is clearly deeply troubled about any intrusion into the sovereign interiority of the American self; I tend to the view that all of us are constantly shaped by all sorts of messages, and so I am less worried about attempting to convince my hearers of a point I believe happens to be helpful, meaningful, and true. (And appeals to emotions are the normal currency of human interactions, surely – I say to my wife, ‘Oh come on, you’ll enjoy it…’ or to my daughter, ‘I know you don’t want to – but you should do it…’; it can get manipulative, and we all know when it does; but making an appeal to the emotions is not in itself the same as manipulating.)

Instead of the monologue, Pagitt suggests ‘progressive dialogue’: a model of preaching where the preacher introduces a subject or Bible passage and then together the community discuss it, each listening to the other, and building insight and conviction through their shared conversation. The Bible becomes not a truth to be ‘applied’, but a story to be indwelt (a third-hand echo of Hans Frei?), and a voice in the conversation that carries peculiar authority.

Many of his criticisms of contemporary church life hit home, although perhaps particularly in America (I doubt there are many local churches in the UK where there are regular worshippers who do not know the pastor(s) personally, the ‘megachurch’ phenomenon not having particularly hit us, except in a few isolated instances in London). I am not sure that the proposed solution is adequate to the task, however. In particular, the notion that a rational dialogue about what Scripture demands of us will be enough to change the way we live in community seems to me astonishingly optimistic. Pagitt thinks that the problem with our communities is an informational deficit: we don’t know what we ought to be; I suspect it is far more a volitional deficit: we know what we should do, but it seems too hard, or asks us to give up too much, and so we evade the issue.

Paradoxically, I think most of the reason I disagree with Pagitt is that I have a much more modest – but, I think, more precise – account of the nature of the preaching task. As Pagitt imagined his ideal Christian community, I was reminded repeatedly and forcibly of the old vision of Baptist/Congregationalist life: a people covenanted together before God to seek the mind of Christ, to walk according the rule of Christ, and to call others into the covenant community. But you can’t do all that on Sunday morning. Conversation is vital as a part of the prayerful discerning of the mind of Christ for this people at this time – the task of Church meeting. The hearing of Scripture as a shaping voice in our conversations was a part of ‘godly conversation’, later formalised into small group ministries. Pagitt wants to do all that in the sermon, and discovers that the sermon isn’t very good at it. That might be why we used to do it elsewhere…

What is the sermon good for? In the earliest Baptist communities, three or more members would preach when the people gathered – but each sermon would be monological. Why? I think because they instinctively grasped that the monologue is uniquely powerful to address the emotions, and so to challenge for change. The preachers, week by week, would call the people to repentance and conversion, to a desire to re-align their lives with the gospel of Christ. Then, in ‘progressive conversations’ that took place elsewhere in the life of the church, that desire could be nurtured and realised. But until hearts are changed and godly desires awakened, the progressive conversations will achieve very little.

Pagitt is right to see progressive dialogue between the community and the Bible as vital; but he has nothing, I think, to say about the deceitfulness of sin, or about how, under God, stony human hearts will be melted and changed. Thus far, I know no better answer to that question than the monological sermon. So I keep preaching them.

Preaching, worship, and reality

(Further thoughts, relating both to my George Beasley-Murray memorial lecture, text available here in case anyone is interested, and to this post.)

Somewhere near the heart of the argument in my GBM lecture was the question, does preaching reflect reality or change it? To take the classic historical example, most of the Lutheran debates about the preaching of the law and the preaching of the gospel turn on the supposition that the preaching of the gospel is effective proclamation: an authoritative declaration that the hearer, merely by virtue of having heard the declaration, is now forgiven and reborn through the atoning sacrifice of Christ (which declaration, of course, demands the response of faith, and permits of no other response).

It seems to me that many of the recent ‘preaching wars’ have been between people who think preaching should reflect the realities of our lives as lived, and people who think preaching should reflect the reality of life as narrated in Scripture. (In Hans Frei’s terms, when preaching do we read the text into the world, or the world into the text?) I suspect that both are wrong: our life as lived is broken, fragmented, partial, unnarratable (‘fallen’) – it has no nameable reality. The only proper response to any proposed metanarrative is incredulity; we live in a theatre of the absurd, with no plot, no meaning, to interpret our various exits and entrances. In this context, preaching is an act of re-narration; it is a moment within God’s overarching salvific work of gathering up the broken pieces of life and world and, through Christ, weaving them into new creation, a moment in which the new story of life and world is written, and, by being told, is (at least potentially) actualised.

But this is not merely the announcement of the eternal reality, the unchanging truth, of things as revealed by the text of Scripture; as far as I can see, when it comes to created realities, Scripture is not very interested in unchanging truths. Rather, it is a series of announcements that God is doing a new thing – each new thing, of course, is perfectly congruent with what went before, but it is nonetheless, new, unpredicted, unexepected. The ongoing reality of salvation and sanctification is the weaving together of the broken fragments of our lives into a new story that can make sense. Preaching, thus understood, is a moment in which the Sovereign Lord is making all things new, it is the writing of names thus-far unspoken and unknown (Rev. 3:12) – the creation of hitherto-unimagined identities and meanings. It is, fundamentally, the effectual announcement that in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has determined that your life, also, will be changed decisively from this moment on.

(Theological aside 1: As some readers will realise, somewhere beneath all this is a particular account of the relation of created time to God’s eternity, such that election is something eternally real and so actual and happening at every moment in time. Call it ‘Barthian’ if you must, but it is splattered all over the earlier tradition if you bother to look for it (try tracing the doctrine of creatio continua for an extreme example) – as Barth well knew.)

(Theological aside 2: what, then, of Frei? He was, of course, describing an observed shift in hermenuetics when he came up with his memorable phrase (it’s somewhere early in Eclipse; I don’t have either book or precise reference with me); I suspect that the implicit ontology of the post-liberal theology developed by Frei, Lindbeck, and others might tend in the sort of direction I’m describing here, even if none of them would particularly locate the decisive re-narration in the ministry of preaching – Will Willimon has come closest to working it through in these directions, although with a more political slant than I’ve given here.)

If all this is right, then what of worship? Clearly, there is a liturgical place for both the narratings of reality that I have rejected: in worship we do recall and celebrate the eternal truths of God’s deity; and in worship we also hold the contingent and fractured reality of the world before God in intercession and petition. But is that all we do? Does worship change reality also?

The tradition of charismatic hymnody which was one half of the soundtrack of my Christian formation assumed, quite emphatically, that it does: ‘By the power of His blood we now claim this ground’; ‘Come and sing this song with gladness, as your hearts are filled with joy…’; and so on. There are strands of declaratory pronouncement in all traditional liturgy as well: the declaration of forgiveness following the confession; the epiclesis (in the Eastern tradition), or Eucharistic prayer (in the more Catholic end of the Western tradition); almost paradigmatically ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’. In each case, the saying of the words is liturgically assumed to effect a difference in reality. Presumably petitionary or intercessory prayer assumes something similar. A properly-pronounced benediction also tends in the same direction (‘The Lord bless you and keep you…’ as opposed to ‘May the Lord…’).

In worship, the community brings the fragments of its several partial and shattered lives before the Lord, not because those fragments are interesting, or even nameable, but because in God’s presence and by God’s Spirit they may and will be made into something new. And so worship ends with dismissal: ‘As God’s redeemed people…’; ‘Go into all the world…’; ‘Our worship is ended; our service begins.’

UPDATE: The link to the GBM lecture text is now fixed. Apologies.

Expository preaching

At the BUGB/BMS Assembly, I had the privilege of giving the George Beasley-Murray Memorial Lecture, on preaching, and of listening to several excellent examples of the art, notably from Pat Took and Lauran Bethell. Sally Nelson’s Whitley lecture, whilst not preaching, was academically excellent, pastorally sensitive, and personally moving – an impressive combination.

I made a comment in passing about ‘expository preaching’ in the course of my lecture which has led me to further reflection on the theme, following the thoughts of Haddon Robinson. He cautions, in his Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages, that we should understand ‘expository preaching’ to be a philosophy of preaching, not a method of preaching (p. 20). There is nothing magical about working through a text word by word, verse by verse, or whatever. Indeed, as I suggested in passing in my lecture, it is extraordinarily hard to do this well: the older preachers – Origen, Chrysostom, Augustine – did it by using all the techniques of classical rhetoric to add shape and colour to what might have been a very flat discourse; Pat Took gave the best example I’ve heard in a long time at the Assembly, not least by using different voices to bring illustrations of her points from literature, and to punctuate the shape of her sermon; but ‘this verse says this; that verse says that; …’ is usually pretty deadly, and the exaltation of it to some magical perfect method of preaching is merely bizarre. Understood as a philosophy, as a claim that, whatever the method and shape of the sermon, it is constructed to enable the message of the text to make its claim on the hearers, ‘expository preaching’ is vital, however – or so Robinson claims.

This seems to me precisely right, and it captures a couple of the emphases I made in my lecture. On the one hand, preaching finds its only reality in announcing and applying a message that is discovered through disciplined exegesis of the sacred text. If that is not happening, it is not preaching (it might be an inspiring lecture on a religious theme, but that is still not preaching). On the other hand, however, if the goal of preaching is to reshape and to change lives and worlds, not merely to inform and instruct (and I take it that this is the goal of preaching, for various reasons outlined in the lecture), then there is a need, under God, to select rhetorical methods that are best directed towards effecting such change. This will, of course, mean that we preach in extended monologues (which, and every communications professional I have read agrees, are the best way to effect change of behaviour in human beings); it will also mean that we give attention to all the skills of using such monologues to change hearts and minds, and a dry recitation of information is, oddly enough, not one of them.

Exposition as a philosophy, never deviated from; but methods drawn from far and wide – plotted moves and Lowry loops and constructed narratives, and all the rest. Perhaps I could call in ‘Ancient-future preaching’ and make some money?

The influence of Rudolf Bultmann on Evangelical preaching

Of course, there is a sense in which Bultmann ought to be influential on all preaching, as one of the truly great exegetes of the NT text. Any preacher faced with a text in John who doesn’t reach for Bultmann’s commentary is at best ignorant, and more likely a fool. But that wasn’t really my point…

It strikes me that the best of Evangelical preaching (i.e., that which seriously engages with the text), at least of the sermons that I hear and read, is too influenced by form criticism. Even when a book is preached through sequentially, there is little attention paid, typically, to the overall narrative or logical flow of the book; instead, it is treated as a series of isolated pericopae, to be dealt with and mined for meaning one-by-one, too often with almost no sense that their arrangement within the book is of any consequence to the meaning.

So, from now on my big question for Evangelical preachers is, ‘How Bultmannian are you?’ I predict this will go down a storm.

Prawn sandwiches and preaching

Roy Keane, one of the greatest footballers (’soccer players’ if you must) of his generation, current manager of Sunderland, and former captain of Manchester United, may not be everybody’s idea of a model for church members. Foul-mouthed, angry, and sometimes violent, his unquestionable talent and passion was too often eclipsed by all-too-public rants at almost anybody. He belittled his team-mates, the fans, his national team, and most of his managers (although never, at least publicly, Sir Alex Ferguson). But I’ve preached in several dozen churches over the past few years, and not met one that would not benefit immensely from listening to Keane’s views on prawn sandwiches. And I can tell you that, as an Arsenal fan from childhood, it costs me something to say that!

It was in 2000. United were playing Dynamo Kiev in a big European game. They were 1-0 up, and the atmosphere in the stadium was dead-not unusually, in Keane’s view. He announced ‘At the end of the day they need to get behind the team. Away from home our fans are fantastic, I’d call them the hardcore fans. But at home they have a few drinks and probably the prawn sandwiches, and they don’t realise what’s going on out on the pitch.’ (quoted from The Guardian, 24/8/06).

A week tomorrow, I will preach again in St Salvator’s, the University Chapel here in St Andrews. The pulpit there, removed from the town church, claims to be the one from which John Knox delivered his Reformation sermon; it maintains aspects of the traditional pulpit furniture of Scotland: an hourglass, turned as the preacher began, with the instruction that he should not stop before the sands ran out; and a lock on the outside, so that the congregation may confine the preacher to the pulpit until he has adequately preached the Word.

This was a land where people were more eager to hear the Word of God than their ministers were to declare it. No longer, except in odd places (I pay public tribute to the congregation of St Andrews Baptist Church, who do still value the preaching of the Word). My suspicion is that, almost regardless of the gifts or efforts of their ministers, the people heard better preaching as a result. As a preacher, you know when people care about the Word–you can feel it as you stand up to preach. And where the people are excited, eager, expecting to hear from God through the Word, you preach better. And where they have been praying for you through the week, taking their part in the corporate ministry of the Word, there is a chance of a miracle.

And where they are more interested in the prawn sandwiches, or the after-church coffee, they will get the preaching they deserve.

Learning to preach from Graham Norton

The preacher left me cold, although I could tell the, mostly elderly, people around me were enjoying it. I began to analyse what was going on. He was an able preacher, in a style I recognised, the message carried by good-humoured anecdotes. Then it struck me—it was like listening to Ned Sherrin (a comedian and raconteur who formed his style in the 1960s, although he was active in broadcasting until his death in October).

I pursued the thought: the preachers we admired fifteen years ago when I was at college could be compared to Ben Elton doing stand-up—the style was loud, brash, fast, and political, just like ‘motormouth’ had been.

So, I have a prescription for good preaching (in Britain) today: be like Graham Norton.

This is only half a joke. Preachers need to communicate in a culturally-aware and up-to-date way. If we sound like we’re two generations out of touch, then we reinforce the stereotype that church, and with it Christ, is irrelevant to modern life. What comedians witness to is the sense that cultural models of good communication change very rapidly. (I could write something very pretentious about hypermodernity here, but actually I think this happens from time to time in every culture—look at the shifts in poetic diction from Pope to Byron, or the development of dramatic voice during Shakespeare’s lifetime. If I were better educated, I’m sure I could find some examples from non-English speaking cultures…)

Norton, & with him other mainstream current comedians, cultivates a style that is self-deprecating and self-mocking (Sherrin exuded quiet confidence; Elton in-your-face brashness). The humour comes much less from stand-alone jokes as from comic themes that are developed and continuously re-appear later in the discourse; there is an assumption of cultural literacy, which allows allusive references or un-narrated visuals to become a part of the humour.

A homiletic style modelled on Graham Norton (or Jonathan Ross, or Ricky Gervais, or Linda Smith, or Sean Lock, who all exhibit the same style, more-or-less) would be relaxed and understated, refusing to take itself seriously, it would build in moments of mockery of its own shortcomings and mistakes. Illustrations would be themes developed early in the sermon and referred to several times in the course of the development. There would be an identification with the hearers by means of an easy assumption of shared cultural reference frames.

And in five years time it will be completely out of date.

An aphorism on evangelistic preaching

Written whilst listening to a sermon on John 3:16, which seemed to assume the subject of that verse was human faith, not divine love:

‘Our task is not to tell people that they must believe in Jesus, but so to tell them of Jesus that they must believe in Him.’

An aphorism on preaching

‘A preacher does better to deserve attention than to demand it.’

( I used a version of this in describing the second volume of Colin Gunton’s sermons in my ‘Introduction’, but it was developed in reflecting on the ministry of a faithful pastor whose sermons never excited, but always nourished.)