Festival preaching

Neil posted a comment today about what he hopes to get out of this year’s ‘Baptist’ (sic, ‘English and a few Welsh Baptist’) Assembly. In it he offered two version of a criterion for judging the quality of the preaching: I trust that those who speak in the main celebrations will ensure that their words are driven by the Biblical text, showing an appreciation of the theological questions that surround the text and their subject and communicate with clarity, conviction and character in a way that inspires us with a grander vision of God. (My private test is whether I would want to invite them to preach in church here, which is a marginally more humble way of asking if I think they are better than me). This caught my eye, because it chimed with one of my ongoing reflections from Spring Harvest. Dave Steell preached an excellent sermon to us one night; in trying to analyse what made it good, I commented to Heather that it was the first time I’ve heard a preacher at SH and wished s/he was my pastor. This is not quite the same as Neil’s ‘private’ criterion, of course, but it suggested to me that there might be an important sense in which everything else I’ve heard failed a basic test. As soon as I made the comment, it struck me as odd – SH gets some great preachers, after all, and I’ve heard many sermons there (and at similar large events, including the BUGB/BMS Assembly) that were powerful, inspiring, Biblical, and engaging. (Those adjectives in no particular order…) Many of them were preached by people who I knew for a fact had done great work in local church ministry over the years and decades. But they were not, generally, sermons that made me want to listen to that preacher week by week. Does this make them bad sermons? I have tentatively come to the conclusion in my musings that the answer was no, but that ‘festival preaching’ is a different genre from ‘normal preaching’. A festival sermon is a one-off, or at best a short stand-alone series, delivered to people you don’t know. There is thus a premium on offering something that is immediately accessible and engaging, that works to make the people comfortable with the preacher, trusting her and able to open themselves to the challenge she brings. (This is the function of the lengthy and amusing self-deprecating anecdote at the start, for instance, stuff sometimes dismissed as ‘entertainment’ – but to dismiss it like this is to miss the important homiletic function it is fulfilling.) There is also a heightened expectation – many people come to festivals expecting to hear challenge or direction from God in a way they don’t expect to hear Sunday by Sunday. This expectation seems to me to invite and almost require a level of directness and challenge that would be profoundly out-of-place if repeated every week. (I don’t need to be offered a new direction for my life every Sunday!) Being unable to build and develop and qualify a theme over weeks and months requires a high level of dexterity in handling exegesis and sermon construction: the text invites us to trust God in every circumstance; OK, but how to preach it as a one-off without either encouraging an unbiblical quietism, or weakening the force of the text by qualification? This isn’t to say that festival preaching is harder or better than normal preaching – in many ways it is much easier. You can (and, mentioning no names, some have) sustain an entire ministry on a diet of about six funny stories, for instance. You can probably get away with a lower level of exegetical skill. The pastoral sensitivity needed is perhaps no less, but it is of a different sort. Festival preaching is different, with different challenges, and asks for different skills. Some people have both skill-sets, and can work well in both settings; there are others who are fantastic on stage, but could not serve a pulpit well week-by-week; others again who do a great work in their local church could not preach in the festival setting. Of course, local church ministry is the primary place for the ministry of the Word and for growth in discipleship amongst the people. Festivals and assemblies, if they have any place at all, exist only to serve that primary context. But if they do have a place doing that, it is worth being aware that what goes on in the celebration is not the local congregational meeting writ large, but a different beast. Dave preached a sermon that was masterful, in...

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Tom Wright appointed to chair in St Andrews

N.T. Wright will be joining the School of Divinity here in St Andrews as Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity from September this year. Full announcement here. This makes me wish I knew how to do one of those smiley things…

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Being Baptist at Spring Harvest

Just back from Spring Harvest, which (as ever) was generally exhilarating, often encouraging (our eldest daughter making visible strides through the week in her own faith), and occasionally bizarre (dancing on stage with a rap band in front of some thousands of people; wondering quite what to do with the guy who I gave the microphone to in a live vox pops as he was describing a ‘profound sexual awakening’). The highlight for me was preaching on Tues night. It wasn’t a great sermon (the opening was pitched wrong; the end was weak; the delivery was a bit stilted; and one of the running gags was, on reflection, probably inappropriate – on the plus side, the content was  OK), but the people I was working with were wonderful – I have already ordered my ‘Graham Kendrick is my worship leader’ t-shirt (and hoodie, fridge magnet, lapel pin, and car number-plate). And, although I am a bit ambivalent about the idea of an ‘altar call’, seeing scores of people waiting to register their response to what God had been doing after I sat down was profoundly moving and humbling. I spent most of the week working with a great guy I’d only briefly met before, Andrew Grinnell. He asked me in one of our breaks, ‘Does being Baptist matter to you?’ The answer to that one was rather easy (‘yes…’); the follow-up (‘why?’) was more interesting. I became Baptist by accident (humanly speaking) – a university Christian Union mission convert, a friend happened to be going to a Baptist church at the time. He took me along, and I have never left… I am aware, though, and Andrew noticed pretty quickly, that I do fairly regularly preface comments with ‘As a Baptist, I naturally think…’; Andrew was interested to know what lay behind that statement. It is not that I am signed up to a platform, the way a party politician has to toe the line. The major British Baptist denominations (BUGB & BUS) are not good at giving long lists of things which must be believed – their ‘Declarations of Principle’ are slightly different, but either version contains three brief clauses, totaling to significantly fewer than 150 words. Rather, it is a recognition of context: ‘being Baptist’ means that I inhabit certain liturgical practices and traditions, received my ministerial formation in a particular way, and am committed to a small number of ecclesiological distinctives – and ‘being Baptist’ means that these things mutually reinforce, because the British Baptist tradition is a vibrant and coherent tradition. The way I think about mission, say, is informed at an intellectual level by a commitment to congregational ecclesiology, and to believers’ baptism; it is also shaped at an unconscious and visceral level by the practices of evangelism, discipleship, and worship of the Baptist communities which have formed me and which continue to form me. And these two aspects support and interpret each other. I am aware, of course, that there are other vibrant Christian traditions that others inhabit; I make the effort, as a theologian, to try to understand how it feels to inhabit some of those other traditions, what life and faith looks like from there. But that is an effort of imagination; to be Baptist comes naturally to me. Is this a problem? To confuse ‘being Baptist’ with ‘being Christian’ would be a problem; but there is, as ever, no neutral view from nowhere. We either inhabit a particular tradition, and so understands one way of being Christian instinctively, or we live incoherently, believing something that practices deny, or we come to questions of faith as an outsider to every tradition, not understanding anything intuitively. The first, I believe, is the best way to be. So I will go on cheerfully being Baptist, and being self-conscious and open about the particular interpretations of things that my Baptist context creates and reinforces in...

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Preaching the resurrection

I heard an excellent Easter sermon from one of our pastors, Liam, on Sunday, which got me thinking. Generally, over the years, I have been disappointed with the preaching I have heard on Easter Sunday – not always, of course, but often enough that I am aware of it as a trend. Further, I recall that when it used to be my lot to preach the Easter sermon I found it a difficult task. My problem over the years has not been hearing ridiculous attempts to make the Easter message into some generic truth about death and rebirth – thankfully, the preachers I have sat under have not been so faithless or so vacuous. They have wanted to preach the wonderful, unique, gospel truth that God raised the crucified one from death. Which makes it all the odder that it often has not worked. I think a good analysis of the problem goes like this: we think of a sermon in terms of a message. The message of Easter is simple: Christ is risen! This is a disputed truth in the contemporary world. So Easter sermons (in evangelical congregations) are often apologetic in nature, seeking to demonstrate that it is plausible to believe that Christ is risen (‘and then 500 people saw him at the same time – mass hallucinations like that just don’t happen…’). I have preached that sermon. I was dissatisfied with it. There is a discussion to be had, of course, about the appropriateness of apologetics in general; even assuming it is a useful thing to do, this piece of apologetics, in this context, will always, I fear, grate badly. It just does not work liturgically. We have (sic, ‘should have’) begun the service with the acclamation ‘Hallelujah! Christ is risen!’ / ‘He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!’ This is reinforced in hymnody (‘Christ the Lord is risen today!’; ‘Endless is the victory thou o’er death hast won!’; …) The only liturgical note sounded is (sic, ‘should be’) confidence and joy (‘Let the church with gladness, hymns of triumph sing – for her Lord now liveth and death hast lost its sting!’) (The proliferation of exclamation marks, a curse of so much bad writing (sic, ‘blogging’) these days, is simply necessary in Easter liturgy, surely?) Then, into this heady liturgical feast of joy and confidence and triumph, comes the preacher asking, with her apologetic sermon, ‘can it be true that Christ is risen? Can we believe this strange and difficult claim?’ Such a sermon cannot work, not in this context. However good the sermon, it will jar and grate, puncture the mood of celebration, deflate the faithful, and feel an inappropriate anticlimax. On Sunday, Liam took as his text and message Peter’s words on Pentecost ‘know that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.’ Instead of trying to convince us of the truth of what we had been proclaiming and celebrating all morning, he tried to explain to us some of the manifold reason why the message was worthy of celebration. This was a good message, liturgically appropriate – it fitted in the context of Easter worship. It was also very well-preached. I was edified and uplifted. I reflect that the best Easter sermon I remember was preached here in St Andrews by George Verwer, the founder of Operation Mobilisation. He is a consummate communicator, of course; he began by commenting how nice it was to preach on Easter Sunday, because he tended only to get the mission slot, and obviously Easter has nothing to do with world mission… As anyone who knows George will understand, however, his obvious aim was simply to excite, to enthuse – he didn’t try to tell us anything we didn’t know, but to make us feel again the wonder of what we did know. That seems to me a far better target for Easter preaching than apology or questioning. Typically, in Baptist life, there will be a closing hymn between the sermon and the benediction that ends the service; let the preacher’s aim be to make the hallelujahs chorused in that hymn twice as loud as those with which the service began. The only message that needs to be heard on that day – perhaps on every day – is ‘Christ is risen!’ and the only possible or desirable response is ‘Hallelujah!’ Why strive, in our preaching, for anything...

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William Dunbar, On the Resurrection of Christ

The greatest of Scots poets – a claim I make with no apology to Burns – Dunbar’s life is shrouded in mystery, but I hope that the tentative identification of the great poet with the Dunbar who took his MA from St Andrews in 1479 might be correct; certainly the timing is about right. His greatest works are court satires; but his exercises in piety are, in my estimation at least, honest and heart-felt. Here is one: Done is a battell on the dragon blak, Our campioun Chryst confountet hes his force; The yettis of hell ar brokin with a crak, The signe triumphall rasit is of the croce, The divillis trymmillis with hiddous voce, The saulis ar borrowit and to the blis can go, Chryst with his blud our ransonis dois indoce: Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro. Dungin is the deidly dragon Lucifer, The crewall serpent with the mortall stang; The auld kene tegir with his teith on char, Quhilk in a wait hes lyne for us so lang, Thinking to grip us in his clows strang; The mercifull Lord wald nochrt that it wer so, He maid him for to felye of that fang: Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro. He for our saik that sufferit to be slane, And lyk a lamb in sacrifice wes dicht, Is lyk a lyone rissin up againe, And as gyane raxit him on hicht; Sprungin is Aurora radius and bricht, On loft is gone the glorius Appollo, The blisfull day depairtit fro the nicht: Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro. The grit victour agane is rissin on hicht, That for our querrell to the deth wes woundit; The sone that wox all paill now schynis bricht, And dirknes clerit, our fayth is now refoundit; The knell of mercy fra the hevin is soundit, The Christin ar deliverit of thair wo, The Jowis and thair errour ar confoundit: Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro. The fo is chasit, the battell is done ceis, The presone brokin, the jevllouris fleir and flemit; The weir is gon, confermit is the peis, The fetteris lowsit and the dungeoun temit, The ransoun maid, the presoneris redemit; The feild is win, ourcumin is the fo, Dispulit of the tresur that he yemit: Surrexit Dominus de...

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