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We began to recognize that the ways the church preached over its history, as well as the ways it celebrated the Lord’s Supper or showed hospitality to the stranger, were not just applied theology; they were theology—lived theology, theology in action, theology embedded in practice.
For most church settings it may seem somewhat far-fetched to imagine a minister rising from a pew to give the call to worship or to preach the sermon,
Extremely normal for us
They come from God’s people, stand up in front of God’s people and act in God’s name.
We are members of the body of Christ, participants in the worshiping assembly, commissioned to preach by the very people to whom we are about to speak.
When a congregation opens its fellowship hall on winter nights as a shelter and provides hospitality for the homeless, it bears witness to the gospel.
When, in the name of Christ, members of the congregation bring words of comfort and encouragement to the sick and those in prison, pray for and with those in distress, and welcome the stranger, they announce the good news of the kingdom.
So when a preacher stands in the pulpit, reads the Scripture, and preaches the sermon, this act of speaking the gospel ripples out into the world as the church continues to speak in a thousand places and ways.
“A basic reality of congregational life is that we are engaged in socially acceptable (indeed, socially celebrated) patterns of mutual self-destruction.”
Furthermore, the mere presence of the story, vision, and language of the faith is no guarantee that these powerful patterns will be overcome. The patterns easily survive in congregational life, no matter how much that life may be filled with talk about sin, crucifixion, the love of God, or the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Through worship, patterns of mutual self-destruction become redemptively transformed.”5
“It comes from their God, in whose name they speak and act. After all, the commissioned and commissioning community does not want to listen to itself and project its own image of itself; it wants to hear Christ’s voice, celebrate his fellowship, and have the assurance of his commission.”7
As fully as anyone present, we have our doubts and our patterns of disobedience about the very gospel we are to proclaim.
It is good to be there in the pulpit, but we are not there because we are good.
“With Easter,” states Moltmann, “the laughter of the redeemed … begins.”
Whatever else it may mean, a dog loose in worship unmasks all pretense and undermines false dignity.
Despite the prevalent assumption that all ministers are free from the pains of shyness or the terrors of stage fright, this is simply not so.
“Sundays come toward the preacher,” quipped the well-known preacher Ernest T. Campbell, “like telephone poles by the window of a moving train.”
What it does mean is strengthening our grip on the truth that the announcing of the good news of Jesus Christ in human words is an inestimable gift from God.
It would be wrong, however, for the rest of us to envy them and theologically shortsighted to set them up as the one and only standard of effective preaching.
The church is blessed, of course, by the rare preacher of exceptional ability, but the church is sustained most of all by the kind of careful, responsible, and faithful preaching that falls within the range of most of us. In
Faithful preaching requires such gifts as sensitivity to human need, a discerning eye for the connections between faith and life, an ear attuned to hearing the voice of Scripture, compassion, a growing personal faith, and the courage to tell the truth.
Christ is present in the church, with the church, for the church, in the world, with the world, and for the world through preaching.
In the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ speaks God’s word in the human and frail words of the sermon.
God has chosen to meet us in the event of preaching, promised to be present there, and this is not because our sermons are good but because God is good.
Preaching, like all other actions of the church, is joining in on what God is already doing, and we dare to preach because we believe that Jesus Christ is already speaking to the church and to the world. Preaching in the name of Christ is possible only because Christ is already present, because Christ has already decided to be with us, because Christ has already chosen to meet us in the spoken word of preaching.
Preaching is not about the preacher; it is about the voice of God.
So the herald preacher has one clear task with two parts: to attend to the message of the Bible and to proclaim it plainly.
rhetoric.… It is not the business of the preacher to try to force [the sermon’s] result or even to speculate about it.11
What we have here is the idea that the Bible is the church’s book, preaching is the church’s ministry, and the preacher is the church’s servant, but that something happens in biblical
preaching that is not of the church’s own making or doing.
the biblical writers were quite concerned not only with what they were saying but also with how they were saying it.
It makes little sense to tell preachers that they should stick to biblical texts alone and forget matters of language, communication, and rhetoric when it is clear that those very texts attend to matters of language, communication, and rhetoric.
The only knowledge perfectly acquired is the knowledge of our limitations.
and attempting to “deliver the word” without taking the hearers into account runs contrary to the nature of the biblical word itself.
In short, the pastor aims the sermon toward the listener, expressly shaping the sermon so that something good will happen to and for the hearers.
The pastor in the pulpit must always be asking, “What is it like to hear?”
The herald starts with the Bible as source; the pastor starts with the human dilemma as experienced by the hearer and turns to the Bible as resource.
As a healer, counselor, and caretaker, the pastor must be seen by the hearers as competent, authoritative, compassionate, and trustworthy.
In short, the Bible describes people trying by the grace of God to be human, and the pastoral preacher views it as a resource for contemporary people attempting to do the same.
To think of the preacher as pastor almost inevitably views the hearers as a collection of discrete individuals who have personal problems and needs rather than as a congregation, as a church, as a community with a mission.
E.g. Hospital for sinners
Pastoral preaching can end up downsizing the gospel, giving aid to the narcissistic notion that the purpose of the Christian faith is to make us happy and comfortable, reinforcing selfishness and undermining the call of the gospel to move out of ourselves and toward others in service.
If the sermon does not speak to ‘my’ needs, what is the use of listening?”38
To use the popular phrase, a church is “a hospital for sinners,” but that is not all it is.
Whenever preaching spends all of its time solving problems, the inevitable conclusion is that the Christian faith is a completed set of answers to life’s dilemmas.
Some tragic human suffering is for the time being unintelligible and meaningless to us.
Some illnesses have no available cure, some problems contain no ready answer.
A final problem with the pastoral image is that it runs the risk of reducing theology to anthropology by presenting the gospel merely as a resource for human emotional growth.
They have become, in other words, characters in a larger story that is not primarily about them but about God.
It is instead to tell the story of the Bible so clearly that it calls into question and ultimately redefines what we think we know of reality and what we call wisdom in the first place.
We remember in stories, dream in stories, shape our values through stories.
