I said yesterday I tended to agree with David Fitch’s assessment that expository preaching isn’t actually helping us faithfully proclaim the gospel, and preaching should never be reduced to three alliterated points from a text and a "take home application" (which way too often implies individualistic application). So what should preaching do, if not simply explaining the Bible and telling people how to "apply" it? This answer is a bit off-the-cuff, but hey, it’s just a blog.
Preaching ought to create new worlds, new possibilities. It should
challenge the principalities and powers of our day (like consumerism,
materialism, and dualism) with the message of Christ’s victory over
them on the cross. It should shake people free of their pre-conceived
notions of God and his kingdom. It ought to pull back the curtain on
God’s new world and make us gasp with astonishment at the audacity of
what God intends to do with us and his world. It should offend and
delight, make us bow our heads in sorrow and raise them in hope, bring
us to our knees in wonder and put us on our feet dancing.
The proclamation of God’s Word should be setting fire to the grandiose
dreams of the young and stoking the embers of the old. It should fill our days with visions of the kingdom come and haunt our nights with dreams of the dead rising and God’s glory covering the earth. It should transform the way we see reality and awaken the idealism we dismissed as… well, "idealistic." Preaching should disturb us and make us itch, it should also be healing to us and a place that we can breathe. It should renew our faith in this God who is writing us into His Story.
So wow, not only is that off-the-cuff, it’s pretty idealistic. But if we don’t aim at something higher, we’re never going to rise above our current state.
What is preaching? I guess there are different ways to answer that, and the way you answered it is beautiful. I’ve always tried to use my sermons to connect the stories of the congregation to the stories of scripture. Sometimes this means helping people understand the context of particular scripture stories, but more often, it involves helping people understand their own stories in the context of the ongoing story of God’s interaction with humanity.
One result of this is that my own sermons often become more story-like…. When I was young, I spent a summer counseling at a wonderful Presbyterian camp, and every Sunday (before that week’s campers arrived) they had someone come in and lead worship for the staff; every sermon that summer had 3 points. By the end of the summer, I was almost laughing during the sermons, because there was absolutely no subtlety about it. “I have three points to share with you today. Point number one…” blah blah blah. Back then, I thought that maybe it was a Presbyterian thing.
I just realized I explained my point by sharing a story. See what I mean?
If we think of preaching as a form of teaching, then our postmodern context stresses a different mode altogether. Perhaps an interactive approach in narrative form which by the way, is also very pre-modern. So, if we use Jesus as an example, he would apply ‘storytelling’ with crowd participation — ‘Teacher, what did you mean by saying?”
Rather than Q&A after a sermon, Q&A is embedded throughout. Something to think about.
vapor