Alive to the Word. Stephen I. Wright

that is equivalent to motivational management.

      The relationship of preaching to pastoral care is intimately linked to its relationship to theology. It is the pastoring impulse which motivates and directs the preacher to articulate not necessarily what the congregation wants to hear, but what it is able to hear of the gospel vision the preacher has received. It is this same impulse which drives the preacher to utter not just a resumé of their own beliefs, but whatever from Scripture and Christian tradition will most helpfully enlarge, redirect and engage with the various beliefs and perspectives already held by the congregation. The reality is that people will be adjusting those beliefs and perspectives all the time – notwithstanding the periods of resistance to change which we all live through. The pastoral preacher fulfils an important function contributing to that process.

      Questions for the local church

       In what ways is the preaching you experience, whether as preacher or hearer, fulfilling or seeking to fulfil these functions?

       Does it fulfil one or more of them better than others, and if so, why?

       Are there other functions which preaching is fulfilling, or could or should fulfil?

      Areas for research

      The way in which preaching in fact fulfils any of the four functions identified in this chapter is an important topic for empirical research. For example, one could build on the foundations being laid in the study of ‘ordinary hermeneutics’ to study the way in which preaching in fact contributes to the worshipping life and theological development of a congregation.

      Further reading

      Martyn D. Atkins, 2001, Preaching in a Cultural Context, Peterborough: Foundery Press.

      Neville Clark, 1991, Preaching in Context: Word, Worship and the People of God, Bury St Edmunds: Kevin Mayhew.

      G. Lee Ramsey Jr, 2000, Care-full Preaching: From Sermon to Caring Community, St Louis: Chalice Press.

      William H. Willimon, 2005, Proclamation and Theology, Nashville: Abingdon.

[1] We will consider this further in Chapter 9.

[2] For an attempt at a representative survey, with examples, of what preaching looks and sounds like in the range of worship settings in Britain today, see Geoffrey Stevenson and Stephen Wright, 2008, Preaching with Humanity: A Practical Guide for Today’s Church, London: Church House Publishing, pp. 12–28. Seminal influences on my thinking on this subject have been Neville Clark, 1991, Preaching in Context: Word, Worship and the People of God, Bury St Edmunds: Kevin Mayhew; Ian Paton, 2004, ‘Preaching in Worship’, in Geoffrey Hunter, Gethin Thomas and Stephen Wright (eds), A Preacher’s Companion: Essays from the College of Preachers, Oxford: Bible Reading Fellowship, pp. 114–17, and the longer lecture on which it was based. See also Carol M. Norén, ‘The Word of God in Worship: Preaching in Relationship to Liturgy’, in Cheslyn Jones et al. (eds), 1992, The Study of Liturgy, rev. edn, London: SPCK, pp. 31–49.

[3] See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘The Proclaimed Word’, in Richard Lischer (ed.), 2002, The Company of Preachers: Wisdom on Preaching from Augustine to the Present, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, pp. 31–7, here p. 37. On the combination of grace and judgement in preaching see Paul Scott Wilson, 2004, Preaching and Homiletical Theory, St Louis: Chalice Press, pp. 73–115; 1999, The Four Pages of the Sermon: A Guide to Biblical Preaching, Nashville: Abingdon. Wilson here develops an approach to preaching based on the recognition of ‘trouble’ in the world and the text, and the announcement of ‘grace’ in the world and the text.

[4] For a penetrating account of how important it is that worship and preaching should usher worshippers into the sphere of the kingdom, in which God’s grace is found, see Clark, Preaching, pp. 35–8.

[5] See H. Richard Niebuhr, 1951, Christ and Culture, New York: Harper & Row, pp. 190–229.

[6] For examples of the positive effect of preaching in transforming cultures we might look to the effect of Augustine’s preaching in the fourth and fifth centuries on a decaying imperial culture, the social effects of Wesleyan preaching in the eighteenth, or those of Spurgeon or the Salvation Army in the nineteenth. On Augustine see the important work by Ronald Boyd-Macmillan, 2009, ‘The Transforming Sermon: A study of the preaching of St. Augustine, with special reference to the Sermones ad populum, and the transformation theory of James Loder’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen. Preaching, of course, was not the sole vehicle of such transformations, nor were they, naturally, complete and without negative aspects. The negative influence of preaching is seen in its use in warmongering, as in the Crusades.

[7] This is, I am aware, a complex and contested matter. See Duncan Maclaren, 2004, Mission Implausible: Restoring Credibility to the Church, Carlisle: Paternoster, pp. 57–93, for a fascinating discussion of the persistence of religion in what is often called a ‘secularized’ society, and the openings this offers for a gospel that will transform individuals.

[8]Roger Standing, 2010, ‘Mediated Preaching: Homiletics in Contemporary British Culture’, in Geoffrey Stevenson (ed.), 2010, The Future of Preaching, London: SCM, pp. 9–26.

[9] She comments that this culture owes much not only to the Western philosophical emphasis on disputation and formal logic, but also to the militaristic language and ethos of the Christendom atmosphere of the universities, in which modern science came to birth: Deborah Tannen, 1998, The Argument Culture: Changing the Way we Argue and Debate, London: Virago, pp. 264–6, drawing on David Noble, 1992, A World without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[10] Tannen, Argument Culture, p. 4 (my italics).

[11] See Joseph M. Webb, 2001, Preaching without Notes, Nashville: Abingdon; also his ‘Without Notes’, in Paul Scott Wilson (ed.), 2008, The New Interpreter’s Handbook of Preaching, Nashville: Abingdon, pp. 429–31.

[12] Tannen, Argument Culture, pp. 247–9.

[13] On this topic I am indebted especially to Stuart Blythe, 2009, ‘Open-Air Preaching as Radical Street Performance’ unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh.

[14] See Dave Tomlinson, 2008, Re-enchanting Christianity: Faith in an Emerging Culture, Norwich: Canterbury Press, pp. 15–33; Maggi Dawn, 1997, ‘You Have to Change to Stay the Same’, in Graham Cray et al., The Post-evangelical Debate, London: SPCK, pp. 35–56.

[15] For theological reflection on this subject see, for example, Peter Selby, 2009, Grace and Mortgage: The Language of Grace and the Debt of the World, 2nd edn, London: Darton, Longman & Todd.

[16] Michael Pasquarello III, 2005, Sacred Rhetoric: Preaching as a Theological and Pastoral