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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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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Curtis Freeman on prophetic women in C17th Baptist life

Curtis Freeman of Duke has a fascinating article in the latest Baptist Quarterly, entitled ‘Visionary Women among Early Baptists’ (BQ 43 (Jan 2010), pp.260-83). He reflects on the (well established, but not well known) history of women exercising public teaching ministries amongst the radical protestants under the Commonwealth, examining particular examples from Baptist life. The sociological context is significant, of course: Curtis notes in concluding ‘[r]evolutionary forces had destabilized the centres of power and dislodged the mechanisms of social control that long had kept women in their place [sic!]. The social space that opened up enabled women, not just to think for themselves, but to speak their minds.’ (279) We might add that toleration, which inevitably brought a rapid institutionalisation to the Baptist movements, led to a reassertion of  culturally-dominant models of gender roles within Baptist churches. Curtis also notes the broader themes within Baptist, and other congregationalist, ecclesiology that created a pressure towards a counter-cultural assertion of the full moral agency of women in the seventeenth century. If obedience to a husband’s (or father’s) command was not an acceptable response to a matter of church discipline – and it seems that generally it wasn’t – then an important blow against the intellectual assumptions that shored up patriarchy had already been struck. (Curtis quotes a delightful line from Knox’s History of Enthusiasm which I had not come across before: ‘the history of enthusiasm is largely a history of female emancipation, though it is not a reassuring one.’) I would add the context of expansion and missionary activity as a driver: generally, an openness to the ministry of women and expansion go hand-in-hand in evangelical (and broader radical protestant) history. No doubt in part this is sociologically explicable: revival disrupts social control mechanisms, and creates a particular focus on the achieving of certain results (so even John Wesley, accepting the preaching ministry of Sarah Mallett because it worked…). Dare I hope that it is also an example of the leavening work of the Spirit, calling the churches away from conformity to patriarchal cultures and forward to true holiness? The General Baptists seemed to be more open to a full preaching ministry from women, on Curtis’s telling; but it was the stories of the Particular Baptists that I found most interesting.  Curtis offers five brief biographies of women who, as prophetesses or through writings, exercised a significant teaching ministry: Sarah Wight; Anna Trapnel; Jane Turner; Katherine Sutton; and Anne Wentworth. By the time these accounts are done, we find that Henry Jessey, John Spilsbury, and Hanserd Knollys had all publicly supported the ministry of one or more of the women mentioned. These are central figures and national leaders – perhaps only Keach could claim to stand above them in influence. The ministry of women was not marginal to the movement, on this evidence. An excellent article, well worth reading. (BQ is not online, unfortunately – you’ll need to find a library that takes it.) (If you are online, and have access to EEBO, have a look at the exegesis on 1 Cor. 11 offered by the Quakers Mary Cole and Priscilla Cotton from prison towards the end of their pamphlet To the Priest and People of England; it is quite...

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The problems of preaching

Preaching is difficult. Yes, it is spiritually difficult – it costs, it hurts, to preach well. But that’s not what I mean just now. It is an astonishingly difficult task to ask of anyone to find a worthwhile and meaningful – and, ideally, engaging and entertaining – message weekly, or, commonly, twice a week, for the same group of people. It is something we ask of almost no-one else in our culture. There are a select handful of newspaper commentators who do it in print, and are rightly revered by other journalists. No broadcaster that I can think of, since the demise of the astonishing Alistair Cooke, would dream of doing it without a battery of researchers and writers in support. Yet we expect our pastors to succeed in the task. Talking to another member of my local church recently, I reflected on my own experience of the preaching ministry within a local fellowship. I have, it happens, only rarely, and for fairly brief periods, been the sole preacher in a church; I have fairly often sat under preachers called to a maintain the pulpit ministry alone – some of them extraordinarily able. When I began my own ministry, I regarded team preaching as a necessary evil; when in a particular circumstance four of us, all in full-time employment, had to work together to maintain the pulpit of a church in a difficult context, I thought it would be a problem: there would be problems with continuity and coherence of the teaching, but we would work to do the best we could. That team lasted, with minor changes, for over two years. By the end of that time, I had changed my mind: team preaching – with the necessary work to ensure continuity and coherence – is, for me, the ideal; solo preaching is common, but to be regretted. Why so? For the reasons I began with. Preaching is, just, hard. In particular, all of us have native styles, particular weaknesses, idiosyncracies, and even our own strengths. I think I am fairly self-aware about my own preaching. There are some things I do pretty well, and there are some serious weaknesses (I am not, for instance, good at detailed application – I am far more comfortable with ringing truths that remain in elevated oratorical splendour, without ever touching messy ‘reality’). Were (Deus avertat…) I to have sole occupancy of a pulpit, over time, inevitably, my weaknesses would become magnified, and my strengths vitiated. We speak sometimes of preaching being ‘food’ for God’s people; to feed on one foodstuff, rich in potassium and vitamin A, but lacking magnesium and vitamin C, is not good for us; eventually we will be desperate for a tiny dose of what we have been missing, and even sick of the the good things we have been getting in excess. So with preaching. It is not about (in abstract) how good a preacher is – it is about the need for God’s people to receive Biblical instruction, powerful inspiration, practical help, warm comfort, prophetic challenge, and all the rest – most of us who preach can only provide perhaps two or three of these with any competence. So, ideally I believe, we need a preaching team, indeed, a diverse preaching team – ordained and lay, some male members alongside the women, different ages, different cultural backgrounds, different styles and gifts. I know that ideals are never attained, but examining an ideal helps us, often, to come to a more clear-sighted evaluation of where we are and how we might address the imperfections of our present...

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Reimagining preaching?

Doug Pagitt: Preaching Re-Imagined: The Role of the Sermon in Communities of Faith (Zondervan, 2005) I got hold of this because I wanted to read the best arguments for dialogical preaching; Glen suggested to me that this was one of the key texts. I found it particularly interesting, because it doesn’t assume the standard (in my experience) dialogical argument (the role of preaching is to convey information; but, monologues are a poor way of conveying information; therefore, monologue preaching is poor preaching; it seems to me that neither premise is sustainable…) Pagitt’s argument/vision starts with a concept of community: Christian communities are to be places of genuine relationship; the role of Bible is to be ‘an authoritative member of our community, one we listen to on all topics on which she speaks’ (195). In community, Pagitt argues, the notion of deferential listening to a monologue has no place: we learn and discover by dialogue. The Bible’s voice is to be heard directly in the dialogue by all, not mediated indirectly by one particular person. The task of the community is together to grow up into Christian maturity. Refreshingly, Pagitt recognises the power of the monologue to touch hearts and minds; however, he dismisses this as manipulation: ‘Knowingly manipulating the emotions of my hearers to get them to come to a predetermined  conclusion felt like the very thing a pastor shouldn’t do. It felt like a violation of the human relationship.’ (74). Well, perhaps. Pagitt is clearly deeply troubled about any intrusion into the sovereign interiority of the American self; I tend to the view that all of us are constantly shaped by all sorts of messages, and so I am less worried about attempting to convince my hearers of a point I believe happens to be helpful, meaningful, and true. (And appeals to emotions are the normal currency of human interactions, surely – I say to my wife, ‘Oh come on, you’ll enjoy it…’ or to my daughter, ‘I know you don’t want to – but you should do it…’; it can get manipulative, and we all know when it does; but making an appeal to the emotions is not in itself the same as manipulating.) Instead of the monologue, Pagitt suggests ‘progressive dialogue’: a model of preaching where the preacher introduces a subject or Bible passage and then together the community discuss it, each listening to the other, and building insight and conviction through their shared conversation. The Bible becomes not a truth to be ‘applied’, but a story to be indwelt (a third-hand echo of Hans Frei?), and a voice in the conversation that carries peculiar authority. Many of his criticisms of contemporary church life hit home, although perhaps particularly in America (I doubt there are many local churches in the UK where there are regular worshippers who do not know the pastor(s) personally, the ‘megachurch’ phenomenon not having particularly hit us, except in a few isolated instances in London). I am not sure that the proposed solution is adequate to the task, however. In particular, the notion that a rational dialogue about what Scripture demands of us will be enough to change the way we live in community seems to me astonishingly optimistic. Pagitt thinks that the problem with our communities is an informational deficit: we don’t know what we ought to be; I suspect it is far more a volitional deficit: we know what we should do, but it seems too hard, or asks us to give up too much, and so we evade the issue. Paradoxically, I think most of the reason I disagree with Pagitt is that I have a much more modest – but, I think, more precise – account of the nature of the preaching task. As Pagitt imagined his ideal Christian community, I was reminded repeatedly and forcibly of the old vision of Baptist/Congregationalist life: a people covenanted together before God to seek the mind of Christ, to walk according the rule of Christ, and to call others into the covenant community. But you can’t do all that on Sunday morning. Conversation is vital as a part of the prayerful discerning of the mind of Christ for this people at this time – the task of Church meeting. The hearing of Scripture as a shaping voice in our conversations was a part of ‘godly conversation’, later formalised into small group ministries. Pagitt wants to do all that in the sermon, and discovers that the sermon isn’t very good at it. That might be why we used to do it elsewhere… What is the sermon good for? In the earliest Baptist communities, three or more members...

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