Sunday's Sermon for Monday's World

Preaching to Shape Daring Witness

Sally A. Brown

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780802871121
• eBook ISBN: 9781467458139
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

What can preachers do to help congregants navigate everyday life with the courage, imagination, and savvy it takes to testify in action and word to God's mercy and justice?

Christianity's witness depends on credible Christian lives carried out in ordinary settings of everyday life.  Sunday's Sermon for Monday's World helps preachers design sermons that equip believers to act with improvisational, creative courage in the ordinary settings of their Monday-to-Saturday lives. 

How can we who preach inspire the "ordinary prophets" of our time—those who, in Christ's name, will act in great or small ways as agents of redemptive interruption? Sally A. Brown, with her extensive experience both in parish ministry and training others for ministry, shares preaching strategies that equip these ordinary prophets to take daring action. 

Brown begins by reconsidering the power and limits of the missional model of Christian witness and argues that Christian witness today must be adaptive, and therefore imaginative and improvisational. She then turns to the connection between the sermons our listeners hear on Sunday and their capacity to timely, inventive action in everyday situations. 

Sunday's Sermon for Monday's World will inspire both preachers and those who listen to them to move from sanctuary to street, week after week, eager to discern and participate in the ongoing, redemptive work of God already under way amid the ordinary scenes and settings of their Monday-to-Saturday lives.

PART I

Rethinking the Shape of Christian Witness in Everyday Life

CHAPTER 1

Public Witness: Why the Testimony of Individual Christians in Everyday Spaces Still Matters

I was presiding at a wedding in the main sanctuary of the church I had served for thirteen years when I made a discovery: the way “the public” regards the worship rites of religious communities in our society has changed. Once upon a time, all Protestant churches talked about “public” worship—and it really was public. It wasn’t surprising to see nonmembers in a service—visitors from out of town, whether visiting family or not, and from time to time, the curious.

But what struck me as the processional music started up and the first bride’s attendant started in my direction is that religious worship services, even Christian ones that still think of themselves as “public,” are regarded less and less as truly “public” by the general population. Instead, in the minds of many people, Christian worship rites—even wedding services—occupy a social zone somewhere between the public and the private. This realization struck me the moment I stepped to the center of the chancel and assessed the size of the congregation. I knew the family was expecting upward of two hundred people at the wedding reception that afternoon; yet barely eighty looked back at me from the pews. It dawned on me that I was seeing this more and more. These days, for more and more people, “going to a wedding” means showing up for the food, the drinks, and the dancing. The wedding service itself is regarded as mostly a family-and-close-friends’ affair; for everybody else, attending the religious service, if there is one at all, is strictly optional.

The loss of the truly “public” dimension of “Christian public worship” extends considerably beyond weddings. Long gone—at least in most parts of North America and most assuredly in Europe—are the days when going to public worship was a normal feature of the weekly schedule of those who identified themselves, at least loosely, as “Christian.” Very far gone are the days when prominent preachers’ sermons were regarded as “public” discourses. The sermons of a city’s most prominent preachers might make it, at least in abbreviated form, into Monday’s newspaper. (For that matter, the daily newspaper itself has gone the way of the fountain pen and the hand-written party invitation.) True, much more of the preaching we do is publicly available now; many churches post their sermons on their websites. Undoubtedly, persons who profess other faiths, or no faith at all, click on these postings and either listen to them or read them. It would be interesting to know how many of these virtual passersby stick with it all the way to the end. Most hits, on most websites, last ten to twenty seconds.¹

The cultural shifts that have made religious communities’ ostensibly “public” worship services far less “public,” in the minds of many, raise a question for those of us who want to make the news of God’s mercy and justice, expressed in Jesus Christ, more available: If the credibility of Christian faith no longer depends on the sermons we preach in our “public” worship services, on what does the credibility of Christian faith depend? The answer seems obvious. If Christian faith is going to have any persuasive appeal for the religiously uncommitted, that appeal will depend on what Christians say and do outside their church buildings in their Monday-to-Saturday lives, in those truly public spaces where they work, learn, exercise, socialize, and volunteer, shoulder-to-shoulder with persons who embrace other faiths or none.

Efforts to make our worship services and other programs welcoming and appealing to those without religious affiliation are laudable. To some degree, these efforts do draw seekers and newcomers into our worship spaces. But we may be considerably overestimating the likelihood that those who profess no religious affiliation, or who indicate on surveys that they are finished with organized religion, are going either to stumble over our website or drive by the sign announcing our sermon title, resolve to get up, dress up, and show up at church next weekend—and then actually follow through. Maybe. Maybe not.

None of this is news to scholars working in the fields of theology, ecclesiology, and mission. One robust, scholarly and pastoral response to the shifting relationship between Christian congregations and their surrounding communities has coalesced under the banner head of missional theology. This initiative involves a rethinking of ecclesial life, both theologically and practically. At its core is the insight that Christian communities, rather than expecting the public to come to them, are intended to go to the public. Rather than being designed primarily to host warm gatherings of the already-committed and the eagerly seeking on a Saturday night or Sunday morning, congregations need to be designed in such a way that they are turned decisively outward, functioning as the “sent” ambassadors of the redemptive love of a “sending” God.²

The emphasis in missional theology falls on the congregation as the basic unit of public Christian witness.³ The congregation as a whole testifies in its public action to the mercy and justice of God. Yet it will be my contention, in this chapter and those to follow, that the public witness of the church may have at least as much to do with a form of witness that missional theologians, to date, have understressed: the credibility of individual Christians taking creative, faithful action in those ordinary, everyday spaces where they carry out their lives, side by side with those who do not share their faith commitments or understand them. In other words, I contend that for many in our culture, the merit of Christian convictions stands or falls with their most visible and accessible embodiment: namely, the words and actions of ordinary professed Christians in those everyday spaces where believers and nonbelievers alike work and learn, socialize and shop, volunteer and vote.

If this is true, then pastors and preachers need to be giving much more focused attention to preaching in strategic ways to equip those in the pews to become the agile, credible witnesses they need to be. To be sure, adult education classes and involvement in outward-focused, communal efforts of Christian congregations also have an important role in shaping lives of courageous, creative action in everyday settings. Yet, as nearly every pastor readily admits, the proportion of a congregation that consistently attends adult education is considerably less than those who are present for Sunday’s sermon. We can’t afford to underestimate the capacity of strategically planned preaching to shape the weekday choices that our listeners will make.

The Preaching Task: What’s at Stake?

Most preachers say they care about preaching sermons that jump the gap from Sunday’s worship service to the world of Monday and beyond. But some cruising through YouTube videos and church websites reveals a pattern: Many preachers’ main strategy for shaping Monday-to-Saturday action on the part of listeners is to hand out plenty of “must,” “ought,” and “should” toward the end of sermons.⁴ Well intended as such moral admonition may be, there are reasons to question its effectiveness. Most seasoned churchgoers have learned to expect this language and have become rather good at distancing themselves from it to a degree. On the whole, the motivational “punch” of the ringing moral admonitions we launch into the pews week after week may be considerably less than we hope.

On top of that, preachers can have a somewhat simplified and overly optimistic notion of the degree of “agency” (leverage to undertake action) that those in the pews possess in the settings where they work, learn, and socialize. Truth be told, the everyday spaces where our congregants conduct their daily lives are quite socially and religiously complex. In addition, individuals’ degree of power to leverage change in these settings depends on the roles they play there, and the social (or professional) capital they have at their disposal. In some settings, they are leaders; in others, they follow. In other words, everyday life is a complex matrix of constraints as well as opportunities. To put it another way, in most of life’s everyday, Monday-to-Saturday spaces, those in our pews are likely to find themselves in the minority, religiously speaking. They are “flying solo.” On top of that, in many settings, they may exercise fairly limited leverage to challenge prevailing norms in the places where they work, learn, and socialize. More will be said about this later in this chapter.

Realism about the relative weakness of must/ought/should rhetoric, coupled with a sober assessment of the complexities of the “field of action” that is everyday life these days, suggests that we need to rethink the connection between our preaching strategies and the challenges our listeners actually face when they walk through the doors of the sanctuary and into the street. What can we do in the pulpit that might really help them move into the world of Monday and beyond with the courage, imagination, and savvy it may take to testify in action and word to God’s mercy and justice?

Before we can get down to the homiletical nitty-gritty of answering this question in part II of this book, some orientation to current theological thinking about the nature of public Christian witness today is in order. In addition, developing a more fine-grained and realistic understanding of the dynamics of the “field of action” that is everyday life can help us better understand our homiletical task.

In the remainder of this chapter, we address this question: How might we better understand what public Christian witness looks like, theologically and practically, amid the religiously plural and socially complex landscapes of today’s Western and westernized societies? In the next chapter, we’ll appropriate the insights of social historians and theorists of human action to better understand the “field of action” that is everyday life. First, we’ll explore the “politics”—that is, the power dynamics, constraints, and opportunities—of everyday life settings. Then we will consider some fresh thinking about the role imagination and improvisation may play when individual Christians in ordinary situations seek to testify, in action and in word, to the mercy and justice of the God they’ve come to know through their faith in Jesus Christ.

Rethinking the Nature and Mission of the Church in a Changing World

These days, dozens of scholars and ecclesiastical leaders around the globe are rethinking the nature of public Christian witness. This rethinking, which began in the late twentieth century, continues to unfold not so much a single theological conversation as an array of concurrent and overlapping ones. In the pages to follow, I will invite readers to listen in on three of these scholarly and pastoral conversations, in particular, distinguished from one another by their dominant perspective, yet in some ways mutually reinforcing.⁵ After describing the basic contours and commitments of these three projects, we’ll consider how they’ve influenced each other. Finally, we’ll take stock of their lasting contributions, as well as possible weaknesses or underdeveloped themes.

This overview will set the backdrop for chapter 2, where the focus is on the nature of action itself in those everyday settings where our sermon listeners work, learn, raise families, socialize, volunteer, and vote.

Missional Theology and Christian Public Witness: A Brief Overview

The first of the three theological projects we’ll consider is what is sometimes called the missional initiative. Scholars and church leaders who identify with this theological perspective redescribe the nature and mission of the church as missional. Since the emergence of the missional movement from robust scholarly conversations on both sides of the Atlantic in the late twentieth century, the language of the movement has suffered a loss of clarity in some sectors, thanks to its popularity. In other words, church leaders of all stripes have readily picked up missional lingo but have sometimes done so without taking fully into account the deeper theological commitments of the crafters of missional thought.

Missional theology emerged in the early 1990s out of a theological conversation among primarily English-speaking, white male theologians in Britain and the United States, many of whom identified in some way with the Reformed stream of theology and worship practice. Two decades later, its core ideas were being energetically appropriated and adapted by working pastors and church leaders across a wider array of denominational and nondenominational churches, although the scholarly conversation continued to be dominated by white male scholars—issues we will touch upon later in this chapter.

The conversation that came to be known as missional theology or the missional initiative was an effort to wrestle, theologically and practically, with the implications of massive sociocultural shifts that were changing dramatically the role of churches in wider culture and raising questions about the nature and effectiveness of their witness. Most notably, the “alliance” between Christian churches’ perspectives on human flourishing and the views of the wider culture had clearly broken down. This shift caused some, albeit not all, missional thinkers to begin speaking of the “post-Christendom” status of the church.⁶ Yet regardless of how one named the growing disjunction between the vision and mission of the churches, on one hand, and wider cultural aspirations and norms, on the other, it was clear that the implications for Christian public witness were profound.

Thus, the fresh thinking that began to emerge from the ongoing conversations on both sides of the Atlantic converged around the connection between the nature of God as a “sending” God and the church as a “sent” community. This meant that the “post-Christendom” church ought not to be a refuge from the wider cultural scene, but a source of outward-directed witness to the Triune God whose nature is to move toward the world in mercy and justice, a movement distilled most fully in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The first set of programmatic missional proposals took shape as a collection of essays, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church, published in 1998.⁷ Since then, the term missional has been used and adopted by both scholars and pastors, although—particularly at the level of strategic practices of mission—some of the core theological commitments of the missional initiative’s founders are left aside. A brief review of these core commitments is in order.⁸

Core Theological Commitments of the Missional Initiative

First, a key theological point of departure for missional thinking is a robustly Trinitarian understanding of God’s redemptive work in the world (the missio Dei, or “mission of God”). While the teaching, acts of mercy and justice, death by crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are clearly central to God’s redemptive work in the world, missional theologians emphasize that redemption is the ongoi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Luke A. Powery
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Being Christian in Public
• Part I: Rethinking the Shape of Christian Witness in Everyday Life
• Part II: Preaching to Shape the Everyday Witness of Ordinary Lives
• Index