The Future of Preaching. Geoffrey Stevenson

Our homiletical hermeneutic is never about settling on a meaning, fixed for all time, squeezed or distilled or gouged out of the text with the help of an army of scholars and commentators. Instead it involves prayerful, imaginative and faithful listening to catch and pass on, through the preacher, inspired by the Spirit, the meaning that the biblical text has to say to this particular congregation, in this particular place, at this particular time. And to say this is to take them on into their future.

      Forward-looking congregational preaching

      Every listener and every congregation has a future, and they invariably bring to the ‘sermon listening event’ their hopes and fears – whether latent or fully present – about their futures. Forward-looking preaching gently names those desires and terrors, compassionately holding up a mirror to allow recognition. It is personal, it is direct, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes deeply reassuring, but never irrelevant and yawn inducing.

      Forward-looking preaching places those hopes and fears into context, bringing God’s perspective through appeal to Scripture, tradition, reason and experience (to invoke the Wesleyan Quadrilateral). Interpreting the present through these lenses from the past can reshape our hopes and reduce our fears as we go into the future.

      Forward-looking prophetic preaching

      Prophetic preaching would be ill advised to try to be predictive preaching. Remember the American TV-evangelist Pat Robertson. In 1981 he was asked, ‘Does the Bible specifically tell us what is going to happen in the future?’ His reply: ‘It specifically clearly, unequivocally says that Russia and other countries will enter into war and God will destroy Russia through earthquakes, volcanoes.’2 Well, perhaps time will prove him right (although the exegesis seems a little suspicious to me).

      Nor is there much scope in forward-looking preaching for castigating society, Amos-like, with threats of divine wrath. The lambasting and criticizing of society from the pulpit is too easy and one suspects achieves very little but letting off steam. A preacher’s fulminations may bind a group together in some ways, but do little to empower them to be God’s agents of change. Such handwringing also allows Christianity’s ‘cultured despisers’ to pigeonhole and sideline us once again as impotent moaning minnies.

      Instead of predicting doom or thunderously complaining, prophetic preaching should be attempting to bring witness of God’s word to the world. And even then only rarely do we see a prophet/witness in the line of a Mandela or a Martin Luther King. More commonly, but still with humility and baited breath, forward-looking preachers are called to represent to the surrounding culture both the standards of God and the merciful grace of God. Prophetic preaching tells it like it is, refusing to ignore the elephant in the corner that is our hoarded wealth, our dispirited apathy, our lack of compassion, our blind eye or our ability to walk by on the other side. But instead of reducing us to guilt-ridden wrecks, prophetic preaching also leads people, to use Walter Brueggemann’s marvellous phrase, into an ‘imaginative “or”’. This preaching tells new stories and recasts old narratives to help people to re-imagine the future as one that is suffused with God’s grace in the midst of failure, and marked by redemptive purpose. Prophetic preaching does not claim that the Church is right and society is wrong, nor that faith has all the answers. Prophetic preaching questions and even challenges the world to bring all to God, to bring to God its questions, its sufferings, its lack of peace and its inability to heal itself. And these can be brought to God with the expectation that moving forward with hope in God’s mercy is viable and altogether desirable through faith in Jesus Christ.

      The shape of this book

      The 15 contributors to this book have possibly 15 (or even more) different approaches to preaching, and they present a wide range of views of the future of preaching in the UK church. In editing this book, I have not sought, still less tried, to impose a uniformity of theology, doctrine or style. I did not ask the writers to strike a balance between predictive and prescriptive. They are united in a belief that preaching has a future, and have been both bold and gracious, in my view, in suggesting what that future may look like, or what needs to be understood in order for preaching to reach for the future. Their contributions are grouped into three sections. The first part, ‘Contexts’, examines the location of preaching from a range of angles. The authors work from the recognition that preaching is inextricably linked with – even as it seeks to change – the culture, both sacred and secular, in which it operates. The second part, ‘Practices’, considers homiletical futures, in other words, the classic concerns of the art and craft of preaching such as sermonic form and language, use and misuse of Scripture, and doing theology through preaching. The last part, ‘People’, discusses psychology, inner resources and life-long development.

      Roger Standing begins Part One, ‘Contexts’, by examining the cultural context for preaching in the UK Church. His analysis is perceptive and wide ranging, and he names the significant cultural forces that act powerfully upon preachers and their listeners, such as entertainment, consumerism, the cult of celebrity, and the ethos and atmosphere of our societies. This is important material to grapple with if we are to fulfil preaching’s prophetic calling, and he lays important foundations for the writers of the next section. Similarly the next three writers present important historical and theoretical perspectives for understanding the future of preaching as located in specific denominations and traditions. In a sense, these writers have to stand in for a dozen more, at least, who could have been included (albeit in a much longer and different book). Duncan Macpherson reminds us of the historical trajectory of preaching in the Roman Catholic Church, while Roger Spiller tackles the same thing from an Anglican perspective. Ian Stackhouse explores what that part of the Church sometimes called ‘charismatic’ has to offer the rest of the Church in its view of preaching. He calls for preaching to be prophetic, without conflating preaching and prophecy, and for preaching to be understood and practised as a spiritual gift, truly charismatic. Finally, Ruthlyn Bradshaw engages us with the distinctive culture of black preaching, helping to ease open the door through which mutual and highly fulfilling interchanges can take place. Such dialogue will surely be a part of the future of preaching, and these authors are to be commended for showing us some of the different sides of what will undoubtedly be the multi-faceted jewel of preaching in the future.

      Part Two, ‘Practices’, contains work on some of the classic subjects of homiletics, with authors painstakingly crafting visions of the future of preaching. Trevor Pitt asserts that preaching is a primary form of theological reflection, and challenges preachers of the future to be theologically rigorous and tough-minded about how they develop the content of their preaching. Stephen Wright focuses a lens on what it will mean to base preaching on scriptural texts when there are important challenges both to the authority of Scripture as well as to the very idea of what constitutes a text in the ‘information age’. Paul Johns reminds us that a future world immersed in 24/7/52 news coverage will require theologically nimble and courageously prophetic preachers, but presents important opportunities to do theology, to echo Trevor Pitt, at the preaching interface between Church, world and Scripture. Returning to questions of culture and communication, Margaret Withers, writing on preaching to all ages, reminds us that every service presents a challenge to communicate with the wide range of backgrounds, personality types and, yes, ages present, not just when children are present. Ian Paul looks at the Church’s cultural linguistic context, and urges a fresh understanding of persuasive, metaphorical speech based on biblical rhetoric, to enable preachers to connect with their heritage in order to preach in the future. Finally, Richard Littledale helpfully and practically tackles the form of preaching in the future as the Church come to grips with the communications revolution.

      The person of the preacher is the title and subject of the last section, ‘People’. This begins with a kind of straddling chapter, since Leslie Francis’s work on the SIFT method of preaching is concerned equally with reaching listeners and with understanding the psychological orientations of the preacher. It is based on psychological type theory, and I expect will be quite challenging, or frown inducing, for some readers, and tremendously liberating or energizing for others. A chapter on the preacher’s inner life, by Susan Durber, might