The Mission of Preaching

Equipping the Community for Faithful Witness

Patrick W. T. Johnson

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830897124
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

We hear plenty of discussion about missional theology, missional leadership and missional church planting. But what about missional preaching? Now that the church in the West lives within a post-Christendom context, how should preaching look different? What homiletical assumptions arose within Christendom but are no longer relevant for a missionary church? In The Mission of Preaching, Patrick W. T. Johnson develops the first missional homiletic, a model for preaching determined by the missionary encounter between the gospel and Western culture. Mobilizing the latest resources in homiletical theory and missional theology, he argues that preaching is a major form of the church?s witness to Jesus Christ, equipping the congregation for its witness to the world.

1

The Preacher as Witness

In recent years many homiletical proposals have cast the preacher as a witness, using witness as a metaphor to understand the identity of the preacher and the work of preaching. In that sense, describing a missional preacher as a witness is claiming common ground with a variety of proposals that understand the preacher as a type of witness. Rather than begin from scratch, I will build off of other witness-oriented homiletical proposals and extend the concept in the direction of missional preaching. Framing the witness of preaching in a missional context means understanding the preacher not only as a witness, but as a witness who equips the congregation for its own witness.

In this chapter we will examine three homiletical proposals that each present the preacher as a witness and together will serve as conversation partners in the development of a missional homiletic: The Witness of Preaching by Thomas G. Long, Preaching as Testimony by Anna Carter Florence and Confessing Jesus Christ: Preaching in a Postmodern World by David J. Lose. These proposals share a strong family resemblance when seen from the perspective of witness because each proposal understands the preacher as a type of witness and preaching as a form of witness, and each relies on common philosophical and hermeneutical underpinnings. Indeed, given the many theological and theoretical differences among them, it is remarkable that these three authors are unanimous in arguing that witness is the most appropriate way to understand and practice the ministry of preaching today.1

Despite this strong unifying theme, there are many differences among these proposals and we should not elide these differences under one totalizing perspective. Each proposal has a different animating concern, a different theological frame of reference and different conversation partners, and they each examine a distinctly different dimension of the broad concept of witness. Indeed, these differences are what help make the conversation among these proposals so rich and offer the resources to develop a more nuanced missional homiletic. In what follows, we will first attend to the basic theoretical and theological outlines of each proposal. By doing this we will gain a rich sense of why the metaphor of witness is the most appropriate way to understand preaching in our context, both in comparison to other metaphors and in response to contemporary philosophical and cultural challenges. For some homiletical readers this will be familiar material, but for other readers, especially those coming from the missional theological conversation, this groundwork is essential to understanding the current homiletical landscape, which has moved far beyond “three points and a poem.” In order to move our conversation forward, I will then draw out the way each proposal understands the relationship between the preacher and the congregation, and the preacher’s witness and the congregation’s witness, as these relationships are essential to understanding a missional homiletic.

The Witness of Preaching

The Witness of Preaching by Thomas G. Long is intended as an introductory textbook on Christian preaching, and as such most of the book is practical instruction on interpreting a biblical text for preaching, developing that interpretation into a sermon and delivering the sermon. What makes his proposal unique—and after twenty-five years it endures as a widely used textbook—is that Long tries to “allow the theological image of bearing witness to the gospel to govern and organize every aspect of the process of creating a sermon from beginning to end—from the interpretation of the biblical text to the oral delivery of the sermon.”2

In the first chapter, Long develops this theological image in contrast with other images of preaching by using four basic tropes that describe who the preacher is in the event of preaching. While contrasting each image with the metaphor of witness, Long argues that the preacher as witness “gathers up the virtues of the others and holds their strongest traits in creative tension.”3 So the first image Long explores is the “herald,” which he roots biblically by referencing the Greek term kēryssō and by which he means the action done by a herald, which is usually translated to the English “preaching.”4 He also connects this image to the early-twentieth-century theological movement that came to be called “neo-orthodoxy,” which was closely associated with the work of Karl Barth and helped bring the herald motif to prominence in contemporary homiletical literature.5

The essence of the herald metaphor is the very strong connection between the words of the preacher and the voice of God speaking to the congregation. The sermon is an occasion for God to speak, and one listens in order to hear not the preacher but the living voice of God. Long explains three basic implications of this image for preaching. First, “What truly becomes important about preaching . . . is the message, the news the herald proclaims.”6 The message is the gospel, which is the good news of Jesus Christ entrusted to the preacher through the scriptures. Thus the herald “has one clear task with two parts: to attend to the message of the Bible, and to proclaim it plainly.”7 As preachers do this, they rely on God’s promise to be present and to speak through the scripture and the sermon.

Second, just as this image emphasizes the divine presence in preaching, it consequently de-emphasizes the human presence in preaching. The focus is not on the preacher’s personality, style or skill in developing and delivering the message. Rather, it is on the one whom the preacher represents and on the faithfulness of the sermon to the message of the gospel. Third, and finally, “The herald preacher is both an outsider and an insider and bears, therefore, a paradoxical relationship to the congregation, the church.”8 That is to say, on the one hand, the preacher brings a divine message that comes from outside the congregation. On the other hand, the preacher speaks as one who is part of the church, and the church provides for and nourishes this preaching ministry through which they expect to hear word from God.

Long argues that the strengths of the herald image are that it (1) recognizes the importance of what preachers have to say, (2) reinforces the biblical and theological character of preaching, (3) provides a strong basis for prophetic preaching and (4) insists on the transcendent dimension of preaching. However, there are also significant weaknesses in the herald image. The most important weakness is the motif’s marginalization of the humanity of the preacher and the human work of preaching, which entails several problems: (1) it is contrary to what we know of the importance of rhetorical and literary forms of scripture and the importance of those forms for shaping the interpretation of the text, (2) it seriously undercuts efforts to theologically critique the practical aspects of crafting sermons and (3) it is not consonant with a theology of the incarnation of the Word. Finally, in addition to marginalizing the preacher, the image also ignores the context of preaching and the impact of context on the sermon.

The second image Long explores for the preacher is the “pastor.” Long writes, “If the herald image focused on the biblical word, on being faithful to God’s message, then the pastor image moves all the way to the other end of the spectrum and focuses on the listener, on the impact of the sermon on the hearer.”9 The essence of the pastoral motif is that the preacher seeks to help the listeners and to provoke some change in them through the sermon. Long highlights Harry Emerson Fosdick as the pastoral preacher par excellence, who had the unusual ability to make a personal connection with each hearer even in a large congregation and who encouraged other ministers to follow his therapeutic aim of preaching.10

Long lists three basic implications of the pastor image for the practice of preaching, each of which contrasts with the preacher as herald: (1) the most important dimension of preaching for the pastor is what happens inside the hearer, that the hearers are different or better people at the end of the sermon than they were at the beginning, (2) the image of the pastor shines a spotlight on the person of the preacher, “the preacher’s personality, character, experience, and relationship to the hearers,” and (3) this motif creates a hermeneutical lens through which the preacher interprets the biblical text; the preacher is looking for an interpretation that involves personal issues and offers the possibility of healing.11

The strength of this image, Long argues, is that it gives serious attention to the healing power of the gospel and how the gospel affects hearers’ lives. In addition, the preacher as pastor provides a much stronger basis on which to consider practical aspects of sermon development and delivery. Despite these strengths, however, Long sees many weaknesses with significant implications. First, the preacher as pastor (or equally as counselor) implies a one-to-one, individualized relationship between preacher and hearers. Long writes, “To think of the preacher as pastor almost inevitably views the hearers as a collection of discrete individuals who have personal problems and needs, rather than as a congregation, as a church, as a community with a mission.”12 Second, pastoral sermons almost always focus on the needs and deficits of the hearer and the problems that need to be fixed while forgetting that they also have gifts and assets that can be celebrated and potential that can be challenged. Third, and this is a particularly important point for Long, the pastor image tends toward a utilitarian understanding of the gospel in which the sermon begins with a problem and the gospel yields a solution. Long wants to stress that the eschatological nature of the gospel precludes immediate solutions to all problems. There are some areas of life, such as tragic suffering or inexplicable evil, in which the victory of God is not yet realized and the gospel offers us no immediate answer. Finally, the fourth weakness Long notes is that this motif “runs the risk of reducing theology to anthropology by presenting the gospel merely as a resource for human emotional growth.”13

Long’s third image for describing the preacher is “storyteller/poet.” This motif focuses on the narrative dimension of the sermon and the poetic expression of language. Moreover, its proponents argue that it can combine the strongest traits of the preacher as herald and as pastor. The storytelling poet/preacher can give serious attention and care to the biblical text and to the hearer’s communicational needs. Long identifies several possible ways in which homileticians identify the preacher as a storyteller/poet. Some simply intend a more critical and effective use of illustrations, while others want the whole sermon to be narratively structured. Some want to the sermon to be narratively “open-ended” so that listeners help make meaning, others focus on the imaginative experiences that can be communicated through poetic language, and still others see narrative as a biblical and theological category rather than a form of artistic expression.

Through this variety of possibilities, Long draws implications that set this image in relation to the others considered: (1) like the herald, the storyteller/poet is interested in the content of the gospel “but refuses to divorce that content from the rhetorical forms in which it is found,” (2) like the pastor, the storyteller/poet is concerned with the hearer, except in this case the focus is on the listening process, (3) also like the pastor, the storyteller/poet shines a spotlight on the person of the preacher, this time as a narrative artist, and (4) like the pastor, the storyteller/poet is most interested in what happens experientially to the hearer as a result of the sermon.14

The storyteller/poet image has several strengths and goes a considerable way toward capturing the strengths of the other motifs while avoiding their weaknesses. It is able to attend to both the message of the gospel and the experience of the hearer; it utilizes rhetoric in a way that is sensitive to the rhetorical form of the gospel; it helps to knit the individual and the community together by creating a common world in the experience of the story; the church is understood as an active teller of the story and not simply a passive hearer; and, finally, it uses a style that is interesting and memorable, making the storyteller/poet a welcome voice.

As with the other images, however, Long sees weaknesses. First he notes that this style tends to “underplay the non-narrative dimensions of Scripture and to narrow to a single method the communicational range of preaching.”15 Even though the broad sweep of the gospel is narrative, the biblical witness includes non-narrative texts that Long argues require a different rhetorical form. Second, he is again very suspicious of placing too much emphasis on the experiential dimension of the preaching event, specifically of measuring the success of a sermon by its effect on the listeners. As he puts it succinctly, “God does not always move us when we desire to be moved, and everything that moves us deeply is not God.”16

Thus all three images—herald, pastor and storyteller—have strengths and weaknesses. Moving into his own proposal, Long argues that the image of the preacher as a witness and preaching as an act of bearing witness to the gospel is more suited to “disclose the true character of Christian preaching” than any of the others.17 Moreover, he believes it is able to draw together their strengths and hold them in creative tension.

Long begins by grounding his own proposal in biblical imagery. He notes as an example Acts 20:24, “where Paul is reported to have said, ‘But I do not count my life of any value to myself, if only I may finish the course and the ministry that I have received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the good news of God’s grace.’”18 He also notes the Old Testament usage of witness, out of which the New Testament usage develops, specifically citing Isaiah 43:8-13. In two places in this passage the Lord through the prophet says to the people, “You are my witnesses.”19

This Isaiah passage is important not only for Long; it is also crucial for Paul Ricoeur, the Christian hermeneutical philosopher on whom he relies. Long writes that in his comments on this passage, Ricoeur deduces four features of witness:

1. The witness is not a volunteer, not just anyone who comes forward to give testimony, but only the one who is sent to testify.

2. The testimony of the witness is not about the global meaning of human experience but about God’s claim upon life. It is Yahweh who is witnessed to in the testimony.

3. The purpose of the testimony is proclamation to all peoples. It is on behalf of the people, for their belief and understanding, that the testimony is made.

4. The testimony is not merely one of words but rather demands a total engagement of speech and action. The whole life of the witness is bound up in the testimony.20

In addition to adopting these characteristics of witness from Ricoeur, Long also follows Ricoeur by locating the image of witness in the context of a legal trial.21 As in a trial, preachers are witnesses who give public testimony about what they have seen and heard and what they believe about it. They come from the people, as one of them, to a particular place in order to testify to the truth. The truth is ultimately what the court is interested in, and in this sense the person of the witness is not the focus of the proceeding. On the other hand, though, the court has access to the truth only through witnesses and their testimony, thus making their personal character and experience vitally important. In this sense the life of the witness is bound t...