The Future of Preaching

Geoffrey Stevenson

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780334043621
• eBook ISBN: 9780334047728
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Preaching remains a central feature of almost all Christian worship. There are thousands of men and women in the UK who preach on a regular basis. This book covers such subjects as Preaching in a Communications Culture, Preaching and the Bible, Preaching and Personality Types, the Life of the Preacher and Educating Future Preachers.

part one

Contexts

1

Mediated Preaching

Homiletics in Contemporary British Culture

roger standing

The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish. (John 1.14, The Message)

As Eugene Peterson wrestles with the prologue of John’s Gospel and the mystery of the incarnation the mind-boggling reality that defines the whole of the Christian faith tumbles out. The one through whom everything was created became a flesh-and-blood person at a specific place and time. There was a locality, a neighbourhood, which was his. There were people that he lived next door to, a community that he was a part of, events that he was caught up into – this is real life as we know it.

Context has always affected preaching. It is no surprise that, when Jesus preached he spoke about what people knew, and used that as a means to open up the truth of God to his hearers. Scan the Gospels and you will find Jesus deploying insights from agriculture (Matt. 9.35–8; 13.1–43), the countryside (Matt. 5.25–34), the construction industry (Matt. 7.24–9) and familial rites of passage (Matt. 22.1–14) as he addresses those who have come to listen to him.

There is no pure, culture-free, gospel. The apostle Peter’s encounter with the Roman centurion Cornelius, with its accompanying heavenly vision, had woken him up to the issue (Acts 10 and 11), while Paul was clearly aware of it too as is evident from his time in Athens. Attracting the curiosity of certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers he was invited to the Areopagus to give a full account of his ‘new teaching’. Drawing on the poetry of Epimenides, Aratus and Cleanthes his preaching takes on a decidedly Greek feel, while the gospel themes of judgement and resurrection are the focus of his message (Acts 17.16–34).

Writing later to the church at Corinth he explains this gospel principle that informs his whole life as a missionary disciple, not just his preaching. ‘I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some’ (1 Cor. 9.22b). This is more than an evangelist’s strategy. When Jesus commanded the twelve to make disciples of all nations, he was thinking more of culturally distinct groups than nation states (Matt. 28.18). Similarly, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit affirmed the cultural diversity of the crowd as they each heard the ‘wonders of God’ in their own language (Acts 2.5–12). This reversal of Babel goes to the heart of cultural identity and expression. Indeed, the climax of John’s vision of the heavenly city is of a place where ethnic distinctiveness is retained as ‘the glory and honour of the nations’ are brought into it (Rev. 21.26).

If this principle has been at the heart of God’s self-revelation from the beginning, it poses a challenging question to every preacher. In what culture does the gospel we preach live? Is it held in a biblical time capsule? Is it embodied in the culture of a denominational tradition or the history and context of our own personal experience of faith? Or, following the incarnational example of the gospel itself, is it shaped by the culture and context of those who are to receive the message?

There are dangers here. To fail to clothe the gospel we preach in the culture of those who are to receive it is to risk it being heard as irrelevant. By contrast, culture cannot be embraced uncritically as that will only swiftly lead to a syncretistic compromise of the message itself. There are no easy answers and no simple shortcuts.

So, what are the elements of contemporary culture that the preacher must engage with in twenty-first-century Britain? What are the issues to be negotiated and the pitfalls to be avoided if the twin errors of dogmatic irrelevance and cultural surrender are to be avoided? In this regard ecclesial expectations and the homiletical objective will always need to interact with contemporary culture to establish an appropriate balance in the preaching task. A weekly sermon for a well-established and historic congregation will be shaped differently from an evangelistic preaching opportunity in a university mission. The task of this chapter is to map the current cultural landscape as it affects preaching, to note its implications and to look for signs that might help us shape the task to hand.

Contemporary British culture

What does it mean to be British? From Norman Tebbit’s notorious ‘cricket test’ to determine immigrant integration into the UK to Gordon Brown’s call to celebrate national identity and embrace the Union flag in the wake of the 7 July bombing in London in 2005, there have been repeated attempts to define ‘Britishness’. The difficulty of the task is cast in high relief by the lack of success of all those who have attempted it.

While many lament the passing of an overarching ‘British culture’ and the increasing fragmentation of wider society, it would be a mistake to assume that there was nothing to be said. There are a range of common themes that run through our shared life. They may not be of the quirky ‘stiff-upper-lip’ variety that was supposedly illustrative of our national stoicism, but they are integral components of our wider cultural experience. They may lack the ability to restore a substantive social cohesion, yet they form a part of the tapestry of our shared life that it is important for any preacher to have in view. More than that, they form the contours of the landscape we inhabit, the cultural environment in which we live.

There are any number of trends and observations that it would be interesting to explore, but outlined below are those which might be of particular concern to those charged with preaching God’s Word.

Entertainment

Back in 1985 Neil Postman wrote his classic text, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In it he charts how the ‘age of exposition’ has given way to an ‘age of entertainment’. Gone, now, are the days when public political debates could go on for hours in an orderly fashion as a series of speeches and rebuttals. Similarly, in the Church the day of the great revivalists like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney had passed. These were men of learning whose sermons were laced with theology and doctrine. Edwards, for example, read his tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions, not trusting himself to extemporaneous utterance. If his hearers were to be moved by what he said, they had to understand him first.

The developments in technology that led to the arrival of television overwhelmed the expositional age that was rooted in the printed word. Rationality and substance were supplanted by the seductive nature of visual images and thus the nature of public debate was redefined by the ‘supra-ideology’ of TV as entertainment. Indeed, communication and debate were now mediated by, and subject to, a technology defined by show business. As Postman shrewdly observed, if television is our culture’s principle mode of knowing about itself, ‘television is the command center of the new epistemology’ (1985, p. 78).

It is sobering to realize that estimates indicate people between the ages of 30 and 50 have watched an average of 40–50,000 hours of TV and some 300,000 advertisements.

The advent of 24-hour television news is illustrative of the demands of communicating content within the constraints of a medium defined by entertainment. A story only lasts as long as it can remain interesting or evoke an emotional response on the part of the audience. New angles can be explored and the speculation by commentators and pundits that precedes, accompanies and follows after events is constantly refashioned to maintain interest. When interest wanes, stories are dropped before ratings fall. This bears no relation to the substance and significance of a story, only to its ability to keep the attention of the viewers (Davies, 2009; Rosenberg and Feldman, 2008).

Narrative

If television has been the dominating medium of the last generation and it has embedded entertainment as the key component of communicating ideas within contemporary western culture, then it needs to be remembered that the staple diet of TV is story, and the narrative form heavily influences the whole viewing experience.

Narratives are impossible to escape. Like the air we breathe they are all around us. Most obviously in novels, films and TV programmes narratives actually inhabit the full range of human experience from our historic myths and legends, through conversational anecdotes to our own personal histories with their dreams and nightmares. Some have argued that narrative is so widespread that it must be one of the ‘deep structures’ of our makeup, somehow genetically ‘...

Table of contents

• The Future of Preaching
• Contents
• Foreword
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One: Contexts
• Chapter 1: Mediated Preaching
• Chapter 2: Preaching in the Roman Catholic Ecclesial Context
• Chapter 3: Preaching and Liturgy
• Chapter 4: Charismatic Utterance
• Chapter 5: Preaching in the Black Church
• Part Two: Practices
• Chapter 6: The Conversation of Preaching and Theology
• Chapter 7: The Future Use of the Bible in Preaching
• Chapter 8: Preaching on the News
• Chapter 9: Preaching for All
• Chapter 10: The Future of Language in Preaching
• Chapter 11: Sermon Form in a Digital Future
• Part Three: People
• Chapter 12: Preaching and Personality
• Chapter 13: The Preacher's Inner Life
• Chapter 14: Forming Future Preachers
• Afterword: Anticipating Unpredictable Resurrection
• Appendix: Spirit-ed Conversation
• Index