What does preaching look like in the 21st Century?

One of the most daunting and exhilarating tasks for any pastor is preacher. Many churches, especially protestant churches, focus worship on the sermon, making it the climax of the service. In more liturgical traditions the sermon is not the center or focus of the service. Indeed it comes in the beginning of the service with the service building up to and focusing on the celebration of the Eucharist. As more evangelical and emerging churches use ancient and modern aspects of worship (See Robert Weber if you have not read Ancient Future Worship), how will preaching change?

If you have grown up in the church of the Nazarene you have probably been exposed to two major forms of preaching. Expository preaching is noted for its verse by verse in-depth analysis of scripture. Always searching for a hidden meaning, citing the Greek, and foregoing unnecessary illustrations, expository preaching is very common and popular in Evangelical churches. Topical preaching is based more on felt needs than on scripture. Typically topical preaching will begin with the preacher choosing and subject and trying to determine what they want to say and find scripture to relate to that topic. In Boomer Generation churches both forms are often highlighted by 3 points and a sermon outline for people to fill out in the pews.

My descriptions of these forms of preaching are certainly overly generalized, but neither is a critique of these types of preaching. For many decades that have faithfully served preachers who have ministered to modern generations. I have known fabulous preachers with both of these styles, and they are similar to the styles of preaching I was raised and trained in through college and seminary. But, are they sufficient for ministry to postmodern people? I think we need to breathe new life into our preaching to reach this changing and challenging generation.

In many emergent and more liberal protestant circles there is an emphasis on narrative preaching. Narrative preaching takes the text and draws it back to the context of the passage, views it as a work of literature, and applies it to the context of the congregation. Narrative preaching is not a postmodern invention. It was not created by the emerging church. As a matter of fact, scholars such as Walter Brueggemann have been toting narrative preaching for quite some time. You can find examples of narrative preaching and its critiques throughout the past century. The strength of narrative preaching is its ability to connect to the story of each person in the congregation and connect them to God’s story, which we find in the scripture. The downside is that many have taken narrative preaching and removed the power of the gospel from it. They believe that stories have more power than the word of God, which they may just sprinkle into their sermon to remind everyone it is a sermon. There are some amazing narrative preachers. There are terrible narrative preachers.

Is there a style of preaching that will work best in a postmodern context? Do expository, topical or narrative styles have a better fit for postmodern preaching than the others? How is preaching changing? I have a number of ideas for ways we can rethink our preaching to incorporate the strengths of all of these styles and think beyond styles.

1 – Connect the sermon to the service

Certainly the idea of having the rest of the worship service connect to ideas from the sermon is not new, but we can do a much better job of making our preaching bigger than the sermon slot of a worship service. There is great strength in the liturgical traditions that move the sermon from the back of the service to the middle or front. When the sermon shifts to the front of the service it removes the spoken word from its place the primary way of growing in our faith and knowing God. It allows for more experiential worship in response to spoken word and allows the congregation to simmer in the sermon before leaving the service. It is also powerful to allow for a time of silence immediately following the sermon for people to stop and allow God to speak to them. We have far too much noise in our world. Silence is powerful and stirring. By bracketing the reading of scripture or the preaching of the word with silence we allow for God to speak clearly in our worship.

2 – View the sermon as a communal effort

One of the most powerful things we have done at Evolution, the service I lead each week, is to create an environment where people expect to interact and participate in the sermon. I ask questions a lot, not just rhetorical questions, and listen for answers. We dialogue about how to apply to Word of God to our lives. We break into small groups to share our stories with one another and connect them to the narrative of the text. We have hosted Q&A sessions at the end of a series to cover topics or passages we missed. Most of all, we never presume that the preacher is the only one with a message to share about a passage. We want our people to own the text and live in it and dialogue is an awesome way to accomplish that goal.

3 – Preach without fear

So many preachers are simply afraid when they preach. They are afraid of tackling difficult texts, hard topics, or the sin of their congregation. We must reclaim our prophetic voice and speak out, balancing the truth with grace. Have you spoken to your congregation about living together before marriage, homosexuality, consumerism or war? I am not saying I know what you should be saying about those issues, I know what I have said, but I am sure we are supposed to be talking about them. We must love and live in the Old Testament (it is 2/3 of the Bible) as well as the New Testament. We can’t reinforce our congregation’s fear of part of the Bible they can’t understand. When was your last sermon from Leviticus or Judges or the Minor Prophets?

I don’t pretend to have all the answers as a preacher, but I think these are some places to start. I would love for us to have some further dialogue on preaching and hear some of your ideas.

Blessings-

Greg Arthur

Let's Kill the Covenant of Christian Conduct

Topic: The Covenant of Christian Conduct as it is currently written (particularly paragraph 34) is detrimental to the mission of the Church of the Nazarene to a postmodern world... discuss.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, the Covenant of Christian Conduct is that portion of the church manual that gives us Nazarenes the "rules" that we're supposed to live by. This is where they tell us that we are opposed to abortion, that we don't drink, and that we don't play the lottery. Strangely enough it's also where they tell us to conduct our meeting by Robert's Rules of Orders.

Our denomination in the last 50 years has been mired in the sin of legalism. It has only been in the last 10 years or so that this has really been recognized and the church has begun to repent of this cultural sin. In the "good old days" we had our Special Rules (the old name for the Covenant of Christian Conduct) and as long as you didn't break any of those then you must be a pretty good Nazarene. In fact, for a lot of Nazarenes, the old Special Rules were a sort of litmus test for your holiness level.

Don't believe me that we were legalistic (and still are in certain quarters)? Well they changed the name from Special Rules to Covenant of Christian Conduct so that people would no longer be able to point to these "rules" as the "rules" of holiness. Of course changing the name didn't stop them from being rules for a lot of people.

Because of our tendency towards legalism, which has been so deeply encoded into our collective religious culture, many in our church have given up true holiness for the outward likeness of it. I'm sure for many this legalism was rarely intentional, they just got confused. You see, there's the character of a person, and then there is the fruit of their character and sometimes it is easy to confuse the two. The Covenant of Christian Conduct is detrimental precisely because it's leads to more legalism because it focuses on the fruit a person bears rather than the character that yields the fruit in the first place.

I believe that if you have the right character, that is a holy character, then your actions, or the fruit of your nature will be evident and doesn't need to be codified. If you are living in God's holiness then your actions will, by definition, be holy. The fruit of this holiness can never be effectively codified (because it must be contextualized) which is one reason why the Covenant of Christian Conduct is detrimental to our cause.

So how does one get this right character that makes the Covenant of Christian Conduct obsolete? Or put another way, what are the practices of the holiness Christian? Interestingly enough we already have that in the manual too. These used to be called the General Rules but since we're getting rid of the word "Rule" and replacing it with the word "Covenant" they have renamed the General Rules the Covenant of Christian Character.

It is interesting to me that the Covenant of Christian Character has all or most of what we need to do to help foster the holiness life. It tells us what we should do (love God, love others, do good works) and it tells us what we should not do (evil of any kinds). The Covenant of Christian Character is good, concise, and covers all the bases of what a Christian's practice should be.

So why do we Nazarenes still feel compelled to then make a list (which starts by saying that no list could possibly be comprehensive) rather than allowing holiness people to use common sense, prayerful consideration, and God given discretion when deciding about the particulars?

So I say keep the Covenant of Christian Character and scrap the Covenant of Christian Conduct. People who follow the first will naturally embody (and exceed) the latter precisely because of the indwelling Spirit of God which is the true wellspring of holiness.

God Bless,

Kevin Rector
http://blog.kevinrector.com

Sweet on Nazarenes

Nazarene pastors throughout the eastern region met with Leonard Sweet at ENC last week. Leonard shared during three sessions on our three day Pastors and Leaders Enrichment Conference a message that stretched, challenged, and for some blew away previous ideas of being the church in today’s world.

To describe the church, and its reluctance to change even as it is gaining an awareness of the need to change, Leonard once used the amended Red Green motto: “I’m a church… but I can change… if I have to… I guess.” This statement embodies some of those who attended this conference as they wrestled with how the world was changing around them and how they could be relevant in it. Even the most old school of pastors attending were at least wrestling with these concepts and listened as Sweet forecasted that the church right now is in perhaps it’s first “Perfect Storm.”

“The Perfect Storm” is the convergence of Post-Modernity, Post-Christianity, and Post-Humanity. Any one of these alone would be a significant storm on its own and each one deserves far more attention that I plan on giving them in this blog entry. But the point is that all of these are coming and together are reaching critical mass or as Sweet says “post-scale”.

One of the examples of post scale Sweet used was scrambling eggs. At first you whisk the eggs around in the pan as a liquid until the eggs reach post scale and become something all together different, a solid. At this point our whisking becomes destructive to the eggs now in a solid state and we get scrambled eggs. Reaching post scale means that the things we did that were productive in the past have now become destructive as the scale of the modern world has grown so large that it has actually shifted and become something else.

Because of this, the things we as the church may want to do instinctively in a storm could be the most destructive. We may want to secure our vessels to the docks, but that would be the worst thing we could do. In reality the best thing we could do is head out into the storm and have the ride of our lives. The church seems to want to retreat into self preservation; unfortunately the church is fighting to preserve modernity far more than Christianity.

Our context is changing, and the church is far behind in changing with it. We have for so long understood our faith in our previous context that we are fighting the doomed battle to preserve our modern context with the false perception that we are fighting for Christianity. In reality, this change of context is a gift for us to help us filter out true Christianity from Christianity in one limited form and applied context of modernity.

Church of the Nazarene gets an MRI Exam

Leonard Sweet gave lots of practical advice for navigating this perfect storm, but the thing that resonated most with me was becoming a M.R.I church. M.R.I stands for Missional, Relational, and Incarnational. Leonard also said that he felt like Nazarenes have one of the best chances to navigate this storm.

Forget all of our modern vision and mission statements because God already gave us our mission statements; the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. The Church of the Nazarene has a solid heritage of missions, both foreign and domestic. Yet I wonder as we have grown into a modern institution if it is far more natural for us to love ourselves more than God and our neighbor and retreat into self preservation than go out into all the world an make disciples. I do not think our people have lost this sense of mission as much as we are finding it difficult to be effective through a modern institution in a changing post-modern world. I believe that because of our heritage Nazarenes are inspired by true missional vision. The question is, will we learn to live it or will we fail because we depend on our modern institutional models and strategies to do it for us?

When it comes to being relational Sweet was most hopeful for us because of our holiness heritage. After all Wesley spoke of holiness in the context of perfect love, and nothing is more relational than love. Leonard Sweet pointed out that unfortunately that the modern church has turned the brilliantly unique relational message of Christianity into another propositional faith. All other faiths in the world are based on buying into truth as a set of propositions, and the modern church has done the same thing. However, Christianity is the only faith that says that real Truth is embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. For Christians, truth is far larger than just an idea or proposition; it is a person whom we can have a loving relationship with who changes how we relate to everything and everyone else as well.

I would say that our holiness heritage is helpful in navigating this relational world we now live in, but we need to recapture the true heart of holiness. Leonard Sweet said we need to become EPIC (which is Experiential, Participatory, Image-rich, and Connective). But instead of dynamic and authentic holiness seen in the context of our relationships with others we have often reduced this to just a proposition as well. We have forgotten about the relationships and about love as we draw diagrams and models that make holiness about self help and just about freedom from our vices rather than freedom to love in our relationship with God and our neighbors. It is in this kind of EPIC holiness that I can see us truly making an impact on the world.

Finally we come to being incarnational. I think this is where we, like, many modern church institutions have fallen most short. We have a much more attractional and colonial model of the church. Ironically we were probably much more incarnational when we were formed as a denomination and we desired to live a life of holiness in the modern culture of that time. Unfortunately as we grew, we grew in a tangent churched culture rather than growing up in modernity and transforming into post-modernity naturally like the rest of culture. It is perhaps hardest for us to see the church outside of the cultural context we invented for it, and it is even harder to see the church outside the modern context we were established in. So seeing the church incarnate in the context of postmodern culture blows our minds.

Our heritage is based on separation not incarnation. The call to be “set apart” has been misunderstood by us as we have become the modern day Amish who shine our dim light under the rooftops of our churches where no one can see it. We have bought into the false notion of separating ourselves from the “secular” and exchange it for a cheap imitation of the “sacred.” Our theology might be sound, but as a church culture we define holiness by what we abstain from rather than what we have in our relationship with God. We truly hold to a form of godliness but we deny its power to really transform lives in the context of the world we live in.

God has called us, and empowered us to be holy in the world rather than apart from it. The idea of incarnation and separation are not mutually exclusive when we understand them correctly. As we live in, and have relationship with the real world, the secular world, we should stand out and be noticed because of our love. We should not separate ourselves from culture, but as we love God and people in culture our love will set us apart and we will stand out as a truly unique and holy people.

Being incarnational also means that rather than calling people to come into church as a place we should take the church as the body of Christ to the world. We need to spend more time equipping people to be the church where they live rather than to run the programs that make our church organization go around.

Hope for the Nazarene Tribe

Leonard Sweet said that the future is coming so “C.O.D.” (Change Or Die). A medical definition of death is a body that does not change. But our body is changing and we are growing. It helps me personally to see the Church of the Nazarene as body rather than as an Institution. As an Institution I could be far more discouraged as I look at how we organize and strategize in such a modern way. I could be frustrated as we treat our denomination like a franchise rather than a movement of people. And I could become heart broken as we define holy living through a Covenant of Christian Conduct rather than through radical love and relationships. However, when I see us as a people, outside the cogs and gears of what makes our institution go, I see a movement of people seeking God’s face and wrestling with how we can be relevant in the world we live in. Last week was encouraging because I saw us as a people entertain the idea of what it means to change and to grow. Hearing Leonard Sweet was great, but the best thing about the conference was the conversations it sparked among us. Real dialogue is taking place and I believe this is just the beginning of real growth and change.

James Diggs