To be true to itself preaching must be both biblical and contextual. Part of our context is the passing of Christendom. This has implications both for the task of preaching and the form of the sermon. Task: Walter Brueggeman has helped us to understand that preaching in exile must concentrate on nurturing a distinctive counter identity. Form: the monological form of the sermon was established because the conditions of Christendom. Critics of the monologue make some telling arguments, but fail to persuade that we should abandon the set piece liturgical speech. The church after Christendom should preach less often, but more effectively ... and with more of a flourish.
The genius of preaching is its ability to take with equal seriousness the ancient text and the contemporary context. To lose contact with text is to become a guru dispensing home spun wisdom rather than a servant of the word; to lose contact with the here and now is to turn the pulpit into a lecturer’s podium. Preaching is the ministry of the word made fresh. This article addresses one aspect of our context: the phenomenon know as post-Christendom.
The passing of Christendom is a contextual issue on the macro level. Whereas most contextual questions relate to local peculiarities (What is the socio-economic make up of my congregation? What are the challenges facing our community? What events have touched our fellowship this week?), our concern here is with bigger realities. Rather than mapping local topography, we will be responding to the cultural equivalent of continental drift.
Many homileticians have sought to help preachers respond to the transformation of our intellectual and cultural landscape with the advent of postmodernity. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the demise of the settlement between Church and wider society in western Europe that has lasted for nigh on 1500 years since the ‘conversion’ of Constantine.
In essence Christendom had to do with the relationship between Christian faith, secular power and mainstream culture. Alan Kreider’s definition is helpful:
... in contrast to Christianity, whose message and embodiment can take many forms, Christendom is a civilization in which (a) Christianity is the dominant religion and in which (b) this dominance has been backed up by social or legal compulsions.[1]
At times Christianity has been in bed with formal political power, as in the various state-church settlements of Europe. At times the symbiosis has been informal and cultural. So, for instance, Peter Berger, writing in the 1960s, can say that church membership in the USA, “in no way means adherence to a set of values at variance with those of the general society; rather it means a stronger and more explicitly religious affirmation of the same values held by the community at large.” [2]
This state of affairs is now a rapidly fading memory. Christianity has become less potent and more marginal. We are facing a situation in which the power and influence of the Church over the surrounding culture has been largely lost. The privileged position of the faith is greatly diminished and churches now belong more in the backwater than the mainstream.
However, many have yet to come to terms with the drift of the Church to the margins of society and the accompanying sense of alienation. Werner Ustorf tells of research conducted in Wolverhampton which detected a sense of dislocation that is typical of many Christians in western Europe: “Although the Christians of Wolverhampton have inherited a particular image of a ‘Christian Society’, the contemporary context in which they live is very different from that in which this inherited model was developed. There is now a feeling of discontinuity, displacement, loss and vulnerability...”[3]
With their own American context in mind, Stanley Hauwerwas and William Willimon are more poetic:
“Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her, but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and Church leaders (still) think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.” [4]
Preachers cannot afford to be so blind. We must be alert to the implications of such changes in our context for our understanding of preaching. Here we will consider two such implications: a change in emphasis in what preaching seeks to achieve; and a reconsideration of the taken-for-granted form of the sermon.
One writer on preaching who has taken seriously Christendom’s passing is Walter Brueggemann. Drawing inspiration from the response of Israel to its own marginalisation and loss of power during the Babylonian exile, Brueggemann calls on preachers to take account of the threat to the Church’s identity from our new social location.
Since the alliance between establishment Christianity and establishment culture is now unsustainable, the Church can no longer rely on the institutions of wider society to help form and maintain a Christian identity and therefore has to shoulder this responsibility itself, approaching the task with a focused determination and a sharpened intentionality. A significant part of that responsibility falls on the shoulders of the Church’s primary local spokespeople, its preachers.
Brueggemann identifies three dimensions to the task of nurturing the church’s counter-identity.
Articulating the often inchoate, repressed sense of bereavement is the first step. Preaching must encourage the practice of honesty, sadness, anger, and loss. Without this, the Church is likely to fall pray to the exilic temptations of denial or despair. Denial longs for the way things used to be when respectable people went to church; when Christianity rather than religious studies was taught in state schools; when people didn’t live together before marriage and Lord Reith set the tone for the BBC. Denial fails to face up to the radical nature of the changes brought about by the passing of Christendom seeking instead to continue with business as usual. Despair, on the other hand, recognises the magnitude of our journey away from the mainstream, refuses this new, marginal location and succumbs to the blandishments of conformity, adapting the faith for the sake of feeling at home to such an extent that the Church ceases to be a distinctive community. It is the calling of preachers to guard against such dangers by naming the change that has taken place, articulating the loss that this entails, but all the while insisting that we live in the world as it now is, shunning both nostalgia and capitulation.
If looking exile squarely in the face is the first task that preaching must undertake, the second involves looking back long before exile.
In pursuit of a distinct and faithful counter-identity, the preacher must help the church to remember who it is by attending to its core texts, its definitional narratives. If our search for relevance in our new setting becomes too desperate, if we lose contact with the oddity of the biblical text, we jeopardise our very existence. If the preacher is to insist that the church live in the real world of its exile, she is also to ensure that it does so in the light of its own peculiar story.
People in active touch with their memories become restless and filled with energy, prepared in a variety of ways to live beyond imperial definitions and boundaries.[5]
So in Deuteronomy 8:1-20, when God warns Israel that, should it forget, it will perish, what is in mind is not some crass, quid pro quo divine retribution, but the ceasing to be that comes with loss of identity - the inevitable consequence of failing to remember.
Israel will disappear as an option to the world, not by force, but by careless default. ‘To perish’ is not to be assaulted, but to give up one’s theological identity for a quick fix of well-being. ... Israel’s future depends on this unending, pervasive voice of the past kept powerfully audible in the present.[6]
Such remembering is dependent on the telling of the stories to be found in our foundational texts. It is also requires the imaginative re-rendering of these texts in a way that makes possible the final stage of the project of nurturing counter-identity, the disclosure of hope.
The honest articulation of loss forestalls the threats of denial and despair; determined remembering prevents the perishing that must come with amnesia and so the people of God are able to hear from its preachers the divine promise of a radically new future.
To this alternative community honestly living in the present, in the light of an intentionally remembered past comes the utterance of another world, another way of being. Crucially if such an alternative is to live, preachers must learn to exercise imagination. Exilic Isaiah is offered as the supreme biblical exemplar of this art.
As with Isaiah’s vision of a new beginning, daring imagination helps us to see beyond our current circumstances and is thus the first step beyond resistance towards transformation. Preachers are to imagine and evoke a new world, new possibilities. If the church is to have access to any reality other than that prescribed by the society within which it is exiled, the alternative reality is utterly dependent on effective rhetorical re-rendering of the biblical text-world by those called to speak on the church’s behalf.
If we wish to have transformed obedience ... then we must be summoned to an alternative imagination, in order that we may imagine the world and ourselves differently.[7]
Sociologists Berger and Luckman refer to this process as ‘switching worlds’ and observe that, “Nobody can switch worlds unless an alternative world is made richly available with great artistry, care and boldness.”[8] For the world to become different, it is essential that we can see a different world and then through speech evoke and construe such a world, effectively conceiving of it ahead of time so as to begin to call it into being. However, the preacher is not called to be rash or fanciful in her imagining. In Brueggemann’s words, “the preaching for which I contend is aimed at the image-making out of the text that may give rise to a church of new obedience.” [9]
For preaching to be effective in discharging this awesome responsibility it must adopt a particular kind of rhetoric. We are in need of speech that is “uttered in daring, venturesome ways that intensify, subvert and amaze.” [10] It takes dramatic, poetic rhetoric to help exiles break out of the empire’s flattened scripting of reality which they have unwittingly come to inhabit. Preachers are to be “poets that speak against a prose world.” [11] Safe and familiar words, routine speech and merely functional language will not get the job done.
Using the tools of rhetoric and poetry, preachers are effectively charged with overseeing a process of social reconstruction, creating the world in which the church is to live.
To summarise, the new priority for those whose pulpits stand amidst the ruins of Christendom is to guard and maintain the Church’s distinctive identity. This to be achieved by articulating its sense of loss, giving voice to its foundational text-evoked memories and uttering text-funded, imaginative construals of a future beyond exile.
If the first implication of the passing of Christendom relates to the task of the preacher, the second concerns the issue of the form of the sermon.
One of the consequences of the establishment of Christianity as the official imperial religion in late Roman society was a change in the way that Christians engaged with God’s word. Once Christianity was no longer a persecuted minority faith, but the officially sanctioned form of religion, there were fresh (if not entirely wholesome) incentives for people to join the church. Vast numbers signed up. New and larger church buildings were necessary to house growing congregations and an increasingly professionalized clergy, skilled in the art of formal rhetorical instruction, came to dominate gatherings of the faithful, so that the poorly informed and dubiously motivated masses could be properly instructed. The monologue became the taken for granted mode of engaging with the scriptures.
So, if the monologue is but one particular, culturally conditioned form of the sermon, we ought not to take if for granted that such a form is inviolable. Perhaps with the passing of Christendom there is an opportunity to re-examine such assumptions.
Those who attribute the dominance of the monologue primarily to extra-ecclesial influences are keen to show that the scriptures themselves neither presuppose nor require that our engagement with the word of God be limited to listening to speeches. According to Jeremy Thomson, “I
it is vital that we grasp this point: there is a real difference between the usual understanding of preaching today - the sermon - and preaching in the Bible.”[12]
Thomson detects great variety in the phenomenon of ‘preaching’ or ‘teaching’ in the New Testament: it was not confined to formal religious settings; it often arose spontaneously as Jesus and the early Christians involved themselves in the lives of others and found themselves responding to questions and challenging assumptions as they became apparent; it was addressed to all sizes of groups from one to a multitude; monologues were relatively rare - what we would recognise as speeches often taking place in a context that included interaction with the audience; it was not confined to the spoken word taking the form of writing and was as much a matter of behaviour as of words.
I can find no reason to disagree with this analysis. Equally I can find no reason why it is pertinent to the overall case that Thomson is seeking to make. His basic point is that, while we equate the word preaching with nothing other than the liturgical monologue, communicating the gospel in the New Testament was a varied and often interactive phenomenon. But then so is communicating the gospel today - books, street-preaching, discussions in pubs and at school gates, formal courses, group discussion Bible-studies, children’s talks. All that Thomson succeeds in establishing is that our use of the word ‘preaching’ is more limited. It does not follow from this that what we call preaching has to change. Much of what is missing from our use of the word is present in other dimensions of church life, but described by other words.
If the critics wish to establish a case against the monologue, they will have to do so on grounds other than the philology of the New Testament. Perhaps the most secure of such grounds are not biblical, but educational and practical.
David Norrington mounts the most sustained attack on our current practice for these reasons. In his opinion the monological sermon is as injurious to individual and community health as it is an ineffective means of communication.
“Good teaching means creating situations in which as many members of the group as possible are able to learn effectively. This inevitably involves different techniques for different gifts, interests, temperaments and abilities and requires involvement on the part of those being taught. Unfortunately the regular sermon, by its very nature, cannot succeed in such a task.” [13]
So the current practice leads to a number of damaging consequences, such as blunting the curiosity of the congregation, encouraging passivity, fostering of an unhelpful sense of dependence on the preacher, and reinforcing inappropriate forms of differentiation between clergy and laity.
In assessing this analysis we must be more careful than Norrington not to attribute to the sermon a narrowly didactic function. As we saw in our consideration of Brueggemann’s proposals, the sermon serves other purposes as well. Nonetheless the points about differentiation, dependency and passivity are well made.
Jeremy Thomson believes that the advantages of dialogue over monologue have a theological grounding. Dialogical relationship is at the heart of the being of God as Trinity and therefore at the heart of what it means to be human. This is reflected in the New Testament’s understanding of the way God communicates with God’s people. God’s speaking is not limited to the preacher who initiates a conversation, but, as Francis Watson’s analysis of 1 Corinthians 14 makes clear, also belongs to the dialogical weighing of what is said,
“If the image of God in the other constitutes a call to dialogue ... then the same will be true when God’s presence in the other is mediated not only in the universal form of the image of God but in the concrete form of the Word of God. ... While particular office-holders can be the initiators of communication, it is more appropriate to see the revelation or word of God as located within the process of dialogue thereby initiated than to locate it solely in the statement that opens it.” [14]
So the monologue is seen to be inappropriately anti-communitarian. “How can a community be a community if one person does all the talking?” [15]
Again while there is merit in this argument - it provides a healthy corrective to the traditional defence of preaching as reflecting and modelling the sovereignty of God, who takes the initiative in reaching out to human beings - we must be careful about the conclusions that we draw. Preaching alone must not be required to bear the entire burden of representing the way in which God communicates. There may not be much that is dialogical in the traditional sermonic form, but, as we have seen, this is not the only way that the Church encounters and responds to the word of God. It is perfectly consistent with Thomson’s reasoning, as his quotation of Watson makes clear, to see preaching as the initiation of a conversation that is carried out in the ongoing life of the congregation.
As well as the educational and theological arguments, there are also considerations which arise directly from the socio-cultural condition of post-Christendom. Perhaps the most significant of these are issues of pluralism, power and truth.
Tim Stratford points to changes in attitudes toward power. He insists that the Church must take this into account.
“... if the foundation the Church tries to stand on is its authority as the house of faith or its insistence that it has the only valid interpretation of God’s word to the world, it will find it is in a swamp. A far more open and dialogical approach, rather than authoritarian or didactical, might bring it again the firmer ground of credibility.[16]
We have been too wedded to a hierarchical view of power, a view undoubtedly reinforced by the Constantinian settlement. This manifests itself in the great asymmetry of power between the preacher and the congregation. The silent congregation passively listening to official spokespeople of the Church delivering monologues invulnerable to contradiction, challenge or even question, does indeed seem inappropriate in an age marked by thoroughgoing pluralism and instinctive suspicion of authoritative claims to provide definitive answers.
I find myself convinced of the need for the post-Christendom Church to move away from the dominance of the monologue sermon. If the Scriptures cannot be made to argue against sermonic monologue per se, neither do they come anywhere near to establishing it as the way to preach. If Christendom is not exclusively responsible for the dominance of the monologue, it undoubtedly provided a strong impetus in this direction. Therefore, if practical, educational and contextual considerations favour dialogue over monologue, then this should carry the argument.
Educationally the need for differentiation, the superiority of learner-centred approaches, and the dangers of fostering passivity and hampering community all tell against monologue. Contextually the end of deference, the questioning of the relationship between authority and power, the deep pluralism that is both cause and effect of the passing of Christendom, all bespeak the need to major on genuine dialogue.
But given that we have already noted the presence of such approaches in the wider life of the Church, why should we also seek to change the Sunday sermon? Setting aside for the time being the response, ‘Why not?’, what counts is surely the symbolic significance of preaching and its prominent position in the weekly gathering of God’s people. To enact in worship ways of behaving that repeatedly emphasise inappropriate clerical prominence, unhelpful congregational passivity and a less than rounded representation of the nature of the divine-human relationship, is likely to have a malign influence on the health of the Church.
On balance then, to allow preaching to be dominated by the monologue is neither theologically justified, pragmatically beneficial or contextually appropriate. Therefore it will not do to resist change on the grounds that current practice is comfortably familiar or supposedly an historical given. Those who write about preaching (preachers themselves almost without exception) need to acknowledge the danger of vested interest. What a shame it would be if inertia or a fearful clinging to practices that strengthen the status, power and ego of preachers, prevented the development of more effective and more appropriate ways for the congregation to engage with God’s word.
However, none of this is to argue that we abandon monologue sermons entirely. There are reasons, once we have overcome the dominance of the monologue, for including it in our repertoire of approaches to God’s word. While the relationship between God and God’s people is indeed genuinely conversational, we need to be careful not to give the impression that it is also a conversation between equals. God may not wish us always to stand silent in the face of God’s word - the hearing of that word may well involve congregational weighing - but this does not reduce the status of divine address to one voice among others offering suggestions upon which we are asked to vote. In this regard the symbolism of the monologue may help, alongside other approaches, to give a more rounded representation of God’s communication with us. Nor, for the sake of the undoubted benefits of drawing on the expertise of the congregation, should we minimize the benefits of the particular contribution of those gifted, called and trained to help the congregation to learn the language of their tradition and explore the contours of their text-world. Similarly, in the name of more effective educational practice, we ought not to make the mistake of reducing sermonic purpose to the narrowly didactic. The eye-opening benefits of poetic and dramatic rhetoric is a hugely significant contribution which is more likely to arise from the set piece monologue than a small group discussion.
In the end I find myself sharing Stuart Murray’s conviction that sermons should not be abandoned, but integrated into a more varied and holistic approach. “What if we have one well-prepared sermon each month and spend four weeks reflecting together on its implications?” [17]
If the preacher is delivered from the treadmill of week in week out sermon preparation, this creates space for better researched, more imaginative, better crafted sermons. If such sermons are seen as rhetorical discussion starters designed to provoke reflection, testing and fleshing out by the congregation, then the monthly balance envisaged by Murray and advocated here has the potential to deliver the best of both worlds.
So let us have less preaching and better preaching. Our post Christendom context challenges our understanding of sermonic form and sermonic purpose. What is needed is more interactive engagement with the word of God and more poetic, rhetorical, imaginative, biblical preaching. We should stop doing it so often and learn to do it with a flourish.
Berger P, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961)
Brueggemann W, Cadences of Home: Preaching among Exiles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997)
Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993)
Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989) 85
“Preaching as Reimagination” in Day D, Astley J and Francis L J (eds) A Reader on Preaching: making connections (Explorations in practical, pastoral and empirical theology) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)
Hauerwas S and Willimon W, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon Press 1989)
Kreider A (ed), The Origins of Christendom in the West (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001)
Murray S, Church after Christendom (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2005)
Norrington D, To Preach or Not to Preach? The church’s urgent question (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1996)
Stratford T, Interactive Preaching: Opening the word then listening (Cambridge: Grove Books 1998)
Thomson J, Preaching as Dialogue: Is the sermon a sacred cow? (Cambridge: Grove Books 20032)
Ustorf W, “Why Christian Experience in Europe Matters” in Yates T (ed) Mission and the Next Christendom (Sheffield: Cliff College Publishing, 2005)
Glen Marshall became a tutor at Northern Baptist College in 2004. Before this he pastored three Baptist Churches in the North of England. He studied theology at the London School of Theology (formerly London Bible College), Manchester University and Spurgeon’s College. Glen’s main teaching responsibility is in the area of mission, particularly in relation to Western Culture but he also teaches a course on contemporary British evangelicalism as well as contributing to modules on preaching and worship. His research interests tend to fall under the general heading of communicating the faith and include preaching after Christendom and contemporary approaches to evangelism. Alongside teaching Glen has particular responsibility at the college for student placements.
A former chair of the Baptist ‘Mainstream’ movement, Glen currently serves on the leadership team of Mainstream North, taking a particular interest in their theology days for local church leaders. He recently joined the steering group for Urban Expression in Manchester. Glen is also a regular speaker at churches, conferences and Bible weeks.
[1] Kreider A. (ed.) The Origins of Christendom in the West (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001) vii
[2] Berger P. The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961) 41
[3] Ustorf W. “Why Christian Experience in Europe Matters” in Yates T., Mission And The Next Christendom (Sheffield: Cliff College Publishing, 2005) 81, citing Mark H. Building God’s City in Wolverhampton: A Study of Local churches in Mission, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Birmingham, 2004
[4] Hauerwas S. and Willimon W. Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon Press 1989) 29
[5] Brueggemann W. Cadences of Home: Preaching among Exiles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997) 121
[6] Brueggemann W. Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993) 78
[7] Brueggemann W. Finally Comes The Poet: Daring Speech For Proclamation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989) 85
[8] Brueggemann W. “Preaching as Reimagination” in Day D. Astley J. and Francis L. J. (eds.) A Reader on Preaching: making connections (Explorations in practical, pastoral and empirical theology) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) 25
[9] “Preaching as Reimagination” 21 emphasis mine
[10] Cadences of Home 16
[11] Finally Comes The Poet 3
[12] Thomson J. Preaching as Dialogue: Is the sermon a sacred cow? (Cambridge: Grove Books 20032) 5
[13] Norrington D. To Preach or Not to Preach? The church’s urgent question (Carlisle:Paternoster Press, 1996) 75
[14] Preaching as Dialogue 16 citing Watson F. Text church and World (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1994,) 115f
[15] Preaching as Dialogue 18
[16] Stratford T. Interactive Preaching: Opening the word then listening (Cambridge: Grove Books 1998) 10
[17] Murray S. Church After Christendom (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2005) 220
You are reading Preaching Amidst The Ruins of Christendom by Glen Marshall, part of Issue 41 of Ministry Today, published in November 2007.
Ministry Today aims to provide a supportive resource for all in Christian leadership so that they may survive, grow, develop and become more effective in the ministry to which Christ has called them.
© Ministry Today 2024