Alive to the Word. Stephen I. Wright

this does not mean that we can write off the preachers, famous and unknown, who over the Christendom years have faithfully striven to explain and expound the Gospel to crowds great and small. There have been many preachers, from Augustine and Chrysostom via Luther and Calvin down to the distinguished representatives of ‘established’ churches in our own day, such as Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, who have put heart and soul into the task of proclaiming and teaching Christ not only for a gathered community, but for the wider population.

      The huge advantage of preaching within a ‘Christendom’ situation is that it can encourage one to give full voice to the hopeful and inclusive nature of the gospel. When Christians do not have their backs to the wall, when they have not been pressed into an ‘us and them’ mentality (as, sadly, they often have been, especially by each other), their words can be outgoing, as water to the thirsty in heart, as well as fibre for the weak in body, mind or morals. They can use the favourable position of their faith within society as a sign and means of the progressive transformation of that society by God, who in Christ has begun a new creation. They can welcome hearers of all kinds as those within the scope of God’s gracious purposes, rather than dividing them mentally (if not actually verbally) into those who are ‘in’ and those who are automatically excluded by belief, lifestyle, background or family identity.

      In Britain, this is an opportunity afforded not only in that last vestige of Christendom, the Church of England, but also in most of the other churches too. Though some may indeed, on many occasions (and with perfectly good reason) focus on interpreting the faith for the gathered community, most benefit from the fact that Christendom is at once dying and yet still hugely influential. There is little detectable nationwide predisposition in favour of the established church rather than any other, yet the fact that Christianity has been central to the life of our islands for so long makes ‘church’ – of whatever kind – still a safe and attractive place for many, at least on some occasions. This gives the preacher the challenge and opportunity of making every preaching occasion one where the ‘outsider’ who chooses to come in will hear genuine good news.

In the USA the situation is subtly but markedly different (a difference which perhaps largely accounts, more than linguistic reasons, for the necessity of some ‘translation’ when some American books on preaching are applied to the British context). No US church is ‘established’; thus the American churches remain more distanced from the centres of state power than those in Britain.[22] However, churchgoing is far more popular and socially acceptable in the USA than in Britain.

This highlights twin advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of the British situation is that in principle the channels remain open from the Church and its preachers into society as a whole. The disadvantage is that the Church may still be perceived as over-entwined with official structures (structures which maybe, like the House of Lords, enjoy questionable status in the nation at large), or indeed with ‘authority’ as such. The advantage of the American situation is that it is probably much easier to go to church or invite others to do so; attending a church of one’s free choice is, after all, the original expression of that freedom which is foundational to the American ideal. The disadvantage is that it is perhaps less ‘instinctive’ for preachers to address directly the structures of their society, or their congregations as potential transformers of that society; it is too easy to retreat into a ‘safe’ community of like-minded believers, and effectively to ‘baptize’ the existing social order.[23]

      Of course huge generalizations are at work here. On the last point, for example, great exceptions can be named. The ‘black’ preaching tradition, of which the best-known representative was Martin Luther King, stands out in its refusal to separate a ‘private’ church from the ‘public’ ordering of the nation – to separate spiritual from physical freedom. Today also, white preaching voices such as that of Walter Brueggemann speak out powerfully and subversively against prevailing cultural mores. Nonetheless, highlighting the basic differences between Britain and the USA in this respect helps to sharpen the sense of the preacher’s situation in both places.

The great risk of any ‘Christendom’ or ‘Christendom-like’ situation for preaching is that the openness, welcome and outgoing spirit which I have been emphasizing as a great potential strength is replaced by authoritarian domineering, exclusion and, at worst, collusion in naked and worldly power-play. Thus, we must recognize, particularly, the appalling anti-Jewish rhetoric of some ‘Christendom’ preachers – so much more damaging and destructive from the mouth of Chrysostom and Luther than from Melito of Sardis, not because of the words they used but because of the public platform they enjoyed.[24] Worst of all in the annals of preaching, perhaps, were the sermons in support of the Crusades.[25] More commonplace has been lower-key but nonetheless dangerously uncritical validation of the contemporary order, seen for instance in the way that Eusebius eulogized Constantine in almost Messianic terms.[26] In the case of Christian power-play against other Christians, the sometimes poisonous preaching voices of ‘establishment’ lead easily and naturally to the equally poisonous preaching voices of ‘anti-establishment’ (one could substitute here various other oppositions, such as ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’). Public preaching carries power, and that power is the more dangerous when the Church itself, or individual churches, carry power.

      The word beyond walls

      The third setting of preaching encompasses those movements in which the gospel has been taken, publicly, beyond the confines of the Christian gathering altogether. At no time, of course, has the gospel itself been confined to that gathering, for Christian people live and speak it day by day. But only at certain times has it been publicly proclaimed outside the Church. The first two models had this in common, that they were addressed to a Christian gathering – whether demarcated from the wider society, in the first, or open to influencing it and being influenced by it, in the second. But throughout the last two thousand years there have been times and places where the gospel has burst out in public beyond the limitations of any Christian gathering and any physical walls in which it might be enclosed.

It is hardly surprising if not as much of this kind of preaching survives today as of the other kind; in the nature of the case it may often be more spontaneous, less thoroughly prepared beforehand, and with fewer hearers taking notes! However, it has surely existed in all periods. One may assume that it continued to take place in the early period alongside the in-church ‘community interpretation’ that we have identified – in the kind of debating fora where Paul and the apostles found a hearing, if not always a response. After the Constantinian settlement, evangelization continued to be important; it is a misleading stereotype of Christendom to think that it ushered in the cessation of outgoing mission or an era of ‘automatic’ Christians. In North Africa, for instance, where Augustine was based, the task of evangelization continued to be much larger than it was in Rome.[27] In Britain, though the gospel came quite early on with the Roman conquerors, the task had to be carried out all over again after they had left, as the work of both Celtic missionaries like Aidan, Cuthbert and Patrick, and the Roman emissaries from Gregory, attest.[28] Again, the fact that the task was often incomplete, and sometimes employed dubious methods, does not invalidate all the vital public sharing of the gospel that went on – regularly in the open air, in places where people gathered. The monastic communities often formed a base for the activities of outreach, a model that some are finding attractive again today.[29]

A similar pattern is seen in later periods too. The friars took the gospel to the people where they were, on the streets and lanes, at a time when a divorce had opened up between the few educated, powerful clergy and the majority of the population, who were dependent on their ministrations but largely untaught. This became a popular,