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Mediated Preaching
Homiletics in Contemporary British Culture
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The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish. (John 1.14, The Message)
As Eugene Peterson wrestles with the prologue of John’s Gospel and the mystery of the incarnation the mind-boggling reality that defines the whole of the Christian faith tumbles out. The one through whom everything was created became a flesh-and-blood person at a specific place and time. There was a locality, a neighbourhood, which was his. There were people that he lived next door to, a community that he was a part of, events that he was caught up into – this is real life as we know it.
Context has always affected preaching. It is no surprise that, when Jesus preached he spoke about what people knew, and used that as a means to open up the truth of God to his hearers. Scan the Gospels and you will find Jesus deploying insights from agriculture (Matt. 9.35–8; 13.1–43), the countryside (Matt. 5.25–34), the construction industry (Matt. 7.24–9) and familial rites of passage (Matt. 22.1–14) as he addresses those who have come to listen to him.
There is no pure, culture-free, gospel. The apostle Peter’s encounter with the Roman centurion Cornelius, with its accompanying heavenly vision, had woken him up to the issue (Acts 10 and 11), while Paul was clearly aware of it too as is evident from his time in Athens. Attracting the curiosity of certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers he was invited to the Areopagus to give a full account of his ‘new teaching’. Drawing on the poetry of Epimenides, Aratus and Cleanthes his preaching takes on a decidedly Greek feel, while the gospel themes of judgement and resurrection are the focus of his message (Acts 17.16–34).
Writing later to the church at Corinth he explains this gospel principle that informs his whole life as a missionary disciple, not just his preaching. ‘I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some’ (1 Cor. 9.22b). This is more than an evangelist’s strategy. When Jesus commanded the twelve to make disciples of all nations, he was thinking more of culturally distinct groups than nation states (Matt. 28.18). Similarly, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit affirmed the cultural diversity of the crowd as they each heard the ‘wonders of God’ in their own language (Acts 2.5–12). This reversal of Babel goes to the heart of cultural identity and expression. Indeed, the climax of John’s vision of the heavenly city is of a place where ethnic distinctiveness is retained as ‘the glory and honour of the nations’ are brought into it (Rev. 21.26).
If this principle has been at the heart of God’s self-revelation from the beginning, it poses a challenging question to every preacher. In what culture does the gospel we preach live? Is it held in a biblical time capsule? Is it embodied in the culture of a denominational tradition or the history and context of our own personal experience of faith? Or, following the incarnational example of the gospel itself, is it shaped by the culture and context of those who are to receive the message?
There are dangers here. To fail to clothe the gospel we preach in the culture of those who are to receive it is to risk it being heard as irrelevant. By contrast, culture cannot be embraced uncritically as that will only swiftly lead to a syncretistic compromise of the message itself. There are no easy answers and no simple shortcuts.
So, what are the elements of contemporary culture that the preacher must engage with in twenty-first-century Britain? What are the issues to be negotiated and the pitfalls to be avoided if the twin errors of dogmatic irrelevance and cultural surrender are to be avoided? In this regard ecclesial expectations and the homiletical objective will always need to interact with contemporary culture to establish an appropriate balance in the preaching task. A weekly sermon for a well-established and historic congregation will be shaped differently from an evangelistic preaching opportunity in a university mission. The task of this chapter is to map the current cultural landscape as it affects preaching, to note its implications and to look for signs that might help us shape the task to hand.
Contemporary British culture
What does it mean to be British? From Norman Tebbit’s notorious ‘cricket test’ to determine immigrant integration into the UK to Gordon Brown’s call to celebrate national identity and embrace the Union flag in the wake of the 7 July bombing in London in 2005, there have been repeated attempts to define ‘Britishness’. The difficulty of the task is cast in high relief by the lack of success of all those who have attempted it.
While many lament the passing of an overarching ‘British culture’ and the increasing fragmentation of wider society, it would be a mistake to assume that there was nothing to be said. There are a range of common themes that run through our shared life. They may not be of the quirky ‘stiff-upper-lip’ variety that was supposedly illustrative of our national stoicism, but they are integral components of our wider cultural experience. They may lack the ability to restore a substantive social cohesion, yet they form a part of the tapestry of our shared life that it is important for any preacher to have in view. More than that, they form the contours of the landscape we inhabit, the cultural environment in which we live.
There are any number of trends and observations that it would be interesting to explore, but outlined below are those which might be of particular concern to those charged with preaching God’s Word.
Entertainment
Back in 1985 Neil Postman wrote his classic text, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In it he charts how the ‘age of exposition’ has given way to an ‘age of entertainment’. Gone, now, are the days when public political debates could go on for hours in an orderly fashion as a series of speeches and rebuttals. Similarly, in the Church the day of the great revivalists like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney had passed. These were men of learning whose sermons were laced with theology and doctrine. Edwards, for example, read his tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions, not trusting himself to extemporaneous utterance. If his hearers were to be moved by what he said, they had to understand him first.
The developments in technology that led to the arrival of television overwhelmed the expositional age that was rooted in the printed word. Rationality and substance were supplanted by the seductive nature of visual images and thus the nature of public debate was redefined by the ‘supra-ideology’ of TV as entertainment. Indeed, communication and debate were now mediated by, and subject to, a technology defined by show business. As Postman shrewdly observed, if television is our culture’s principle mode of knowing about itself, ‘television is the command center of the new epistemology’ (1985, p. 78).
It is sobering to realize that estimates indicate people between the ages of 30 and 50 have watched an average of 40–50,000 hours of TV and some 300,000 advertisements.
The advent of 24-hour television news is illustrative of the demands of communicating content within the constraints of a medium defined by entertainment. A story only lasts as long as it can remain interesting or evoke an emotional response on the part of the audience. New angles can be explored and the speculation by commentators and pundits that precedes, accompanies and follows after events is constantly refashioned to maintain interest. When interest wanes, stories are dropped before ratings fall. This bears no relation to the substance and significance of a story, only to its ability to keep the attention of the viewers (Davies, 2009; Rosenberg and Feldman, 2008).
Narrative
If television has been the dominating medium of the last generation and it has embedded entertainment as the key component of communicating ideas within contemporary western culture, then it needs to be remembered that the staple diet of TV is story, and the narrative form heavily influences the whole viewing experience.
Narratives are impossible to escape. Like the air we breathe they are all around us. Most obviously in novels, films and TV programmes narratives actually inhabit the full range of human experience from our historic myths and legends, through conversational anecdotes to our own personal histories with their dreams and nightmares. Some have argued that narrative is so widespread that it must be one of the ‘deep structures’ of our makeup, somehow genetically ‘hard-wired’ into our minds (Abbot, 2002, p. 3). Certainly the early indicators of narrative ability begin to appear in children in their third or fourth year. You only have to witness their sheer delight at having a story read to them or their appetite to watch and re-watch a favourite film or TV programme to appreciate that narrative is fundamental to our human makeup. Indeed, without the ability to construct and understand stories it would be very difficult to order and communicate our experience of time.
The power of storytelling is in the way that the unfolding plot of a story mimics our own experience of life and the way reality unfolds sequentially for us as people. As such, narrative produces the feeling of events happening in time and evokes a personal and often emotional response from those listening to it. Whether true or false in what it depicts, it appears to replicate life. This is the reason for its penetration of our collective imagination and its dominance as a means of communication over against more analytical approaches. For the journalist Robert Fulford this is ‘the triumph of narrative’ (1999, pp. 15–16).
Narrative is so all-pervasive that it is impossible to ignore. Indeed, it would be unwise to do so.
Consumerism
It was the Christmas Eve edition of the Chicago Tribune in 1986 that provided the first recorded use of ‘retail therapy’.
We’ve become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy. Freely and enthusiastically embraced by shoppers around the world, it is the explanation of choice to account for the trip to the shopping centre to buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have. But it makes us feel better!
There can be no doubt that one of the most significant developments of the second half of the twentieth century, if not the most significant, was the rise of consumerism. Historically the patterns of consumption and commerce within the life of a culture were expressions of the core values of the society. At some point within living memory this relationship flipped. As Craig Bartholomew points out, the idea of consumerism points to a culture in which the core values of the culture derive from consumption rather than the other way around (Bartholomew and Moritz, 2000, p. 6).
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman identifies three key elements in contemporary consumerism (2007b, pp. 82–116). The first has to do with identity. What we consume defines who we are by association with a particular reference group. It is a sobering exercise to sit down and ask ourselves what our clothes, our car, our house, the possessions that we value highly actually say about us. More telling are the things that other people see and associate us with. Bauman makes the point that consumer goods come with a ‘built-in’ identity, they are rarely value-free. Of course, the possibility of redefining ourselves and becoming someone else is always there. He sees this as a present-day substitute of the older ideas of salvation and redemption. Second, he observes that consumerism has increasingly built-in obsolescence to the products it sells. While this is clearly a requirement of keeping the marketplace alive, a consequence is to liberate the present from the past and the future ‘that might have impeached the concentration and spoiled the exhilaration of free choice’ (2007b, p. 84). Of course, the freedom to choose has increasingly become adopted as the defining characteristic of contemporary ethics. The third element of consumerism that he identifies flows on from this idea of free choice. In it he demonstrates how consumerism both appears to affirm choice while at the same time limiting it. Consumerism is a forced choice from the available options that have been provided. However, it is important to recognize that freedom is identified with choices made in private life.
Choosing . . . is not at issue, since this is what you must do, and can resist and avoid doing only at peril of exclusion. Nor are you free to influence the set of options available to choose from: there are no other options left as all realistic and advisable possibilities have been already preselected, pre-scripted and prescribed. (2007b, pp. 84–5)
Ethos and atmosphere
Commentators often talk about ‘the spirit of the age’, the overarching ‘feel’ of a particular point in history. The importance of such observations is that they identify the broad themes and sensibilities of time and place. They are significant for preachers in that they indicate where the gospel message has deep resonances with the surrounding culture and where, by contrast, it is profoundly counter-cultural. Where there is commonality between Christian discipleship and the context it inhabits, clearly it is right for the Church in general, and preachers in particular, to embrace it fully. Indeed, where contemporary culture is genuinely indifferent to biblical teaching and neither affirms nor contradicts it, it is wholly appropriate for our proclamation to inhabit that world too. It is only those things that are inimical to Christian faith that should be resisted.
So, what are the elements of the ethos and atmosphere of contemporary Britain that preachers have to have in mind? What are the broader trends in attitudes that impact the homiletical task? Perhaps the most critical for the pulpit is the suspicion of motives of those in authority and a tendency to entertain the most damning interpretation. This has been fed in no little part by the sceptical interrogation of those in positions of responsibility by certain sections of the media and catastrophic breaches of trust in public and commercial life. The Christian community has not been beyond this with abuses of position that range from the scandalous financial dealings of televangelists to the predatory abuse of paedophile priests.
This has left those in leadership in a much weakened position. Trust has to be earned rather than just given as a mark of deference. Leaders have to prove themselves to those they lead through their practice of leadership. If it is seen as manipulative, bullying or self-serving, what trust there is will quickly evaporate. Christian leadership should be open in style, consultative in process, transparent in practice and accountable.
A second identifiable trend is the evolution of ‘soft’ levels of commitment. Membership of political parties, trades unions and churches are at an all-time low. Only the National Trust seems to buck the trend, but even there it can be argued that there is a consumer dimension as members flock to historic buildings on the basis of the ‘free’ admission that membership brings.
People want to be selective in their participation. If they feel motivated they will join a demonstration, sign a petition or put on an event to raise money for ‘Children in Need’. However, they will not want to do it every week. Rather they choose to ‘dip in’ to things when they choose. Reality TV becomes the model of engagement, with a low-cost, low-commitment way to participate and play a part in influencing the outcome.
This ‘soft’ expression of commitment is also carried over to issues of social and political concern. There is no doubt that global warming, people trafficking, third world debt and issues of social justice register as high concerns in the public mind. However, the concern diminishes as it impacts personal preference and behaviour. BBC2’s Newsnight explored issues of sustainable lifestyles through its ‘Ethical Man’ feature in 2007–8. One of the sobering observations was the reluctance of members of the public to consider dropping their overseas holiday, even when the impact of the accompanying air flight wiped out all their other attempts to reduce their carbon footprint for the rest of the year.
Virtual relationships
There can be no doubting the fact that recent years have seen an explosion of communications technology and, through the World Wide Web, the growth of social networking. We are more connected now than at any other time in history: Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, Second Life, internet gaming, email, texting, the impact of technology in shaping how we communicate together is breathtaking. Yet how far is the quantity of communication representative of a depth of relationship? Is it legitimate to call a social network a community?
If ‘virtual reality’ is a computer-simulated environment that gives the impression of actually being somewhere where we are not, then there are virtual dimensions in our technologically generated communications and networking realities. While we might have a large number of ‘friends’ on Facebook, the capacity of any of us to hold and maintain relationships of substance remains the same as it always did.1 And face-to-face, real-time engagement is a non-negotiable part of that. Likewise, that Stephen Fry has 1.4 million followers on Twitter is merely confirmation of his popularity as a celebrity and his ability to maintain an interesting narrative in 140-character Tweets.
Of course, in so far as time is invested in maintaining our online presence and interaction, this erodes our available time for pursuing real-time relationships in real-time communities. Back in December 2009, the pop songstress Lily Allen spoke about her conversion to becoming a ‘neo-Luddite’.
So I put my BlackBerry, my laptop, my iPod in a box and that’s the end. I won’t use email, I play records on vinyl, I don’t blog. I’ve got more time, more privacy. We’ve ended up in this world of unreal communications and I don’t want that. I want real life back.2
Allen’s observations are not unique and express the sentiments of other commentators like Steve Tuttle of Newsweek and Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times.3
The consequence of the growth of virtual relationships is almost inevitably going to result in social atrophy. Our ability to form and develop substantial friendships and build those friendships into communities will be diminished.
Celebrity
In many ways the growth of celebrity in western cultures is a direct corollary of the rise and rise of entertainment as the basis of contemporary media. While societies have always had heroes, the basis of their acclaim was in their heroic exploits on the battlefield or in some other distinguished service or accomplishment in the wider life of the country. It has only been relatively recently that popular mass celebrity in its present-day form has emerged. First with the music halls and then the movies, sport and the broadcast media celebrity has grown. Fuelling its reach and cultural impact has been the growing amount of available leisure time and disposable income of an ever-increasing proportion of the population to access and consume celebrity.
Thus the culture of celebrity was born and established itself among us. The success of publications like Hello and OK magazines along with the gossip columns and 24-hour TV following their every move is indicative of how deeply embedded this has become within our society. The power of celebrity endorsement is not lost on organizations like the United Nations as they appoint high-profile figures as ‘Goodwill Ambassadors’ to increase publicity and interest in their good causes. The role of Bono and other musicians in the Make Poverty History and Drop the Debt campaigns is further evidence of this phenomenon, as is the Alpha Course’s endorsement by Bear Grylls.
To the identification of individuals as ‘A list’, ‘B list’ or minor celebs, relatively recent developments in Reality TV have brought a further category into play, namely, those who are famous for being famous. Such is the infamy and then tragedy of a character like Jade Goody, one-time anti-hero in the Big Brother house and then transformed by her battle with cancer into a national heroine: Reality TV brings celebrity within reach of ordinary people. The storming success of franchises like Big Brother, The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and the rest are testimony of the significance of celebrity in validating reality. For all that most people happily live ordinary lives, the culture of celebrity constantly whispers a different story.
Liquid modernity
We live in changing times and the present looks very different from the past. In trying to understand the reality that confronts us and the future that lies ahead, many have turned to the conversation regarding postmodernism for help. Along the way almost every change and trend in contemporary life has been used as an illustration of the postmodern advance. For some this is a deeply unsettling dialogue as old certainties are swept away: others want to embrace this new context enthusiastically and so to enable the gospel to contextualize itself into the new cultural reality. Scholars like Stanley Grenz have attempted to sum up these influences and demonstrate that the future will be defined by the postmodern impetus to pessimism, holism, communitarianism, relativism, pluralism and subjectivism (1996, pp. 14–15). Other voices hold that the Christian community needs to take seriously the deconstruction of Derrida, Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ and Foucault’s work on the relationship between knowledge and power.
There is no doubt that these are important thinkers who have significantly influenced contemporary ideas. However, Christians often have either been overly fearful or, conversely, have over-interpreted this debate. James K. A. Smith in his Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? looks to exorcize the fear while giving a more accurate account of the ideas of postmodern theorists (Smith, 2006, see also White, 2006). For example, Smith outlines how Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ addresses a distinctly modern phenomenon where the grand stories were legitimated by an appeal to universal reason. What he had in view were the scientific narratives told by modern rationalism, scientific naturalism and sociobiology insofar as they claimed to be demonstrable by reason alone. By contrast, while the biblical narrative is grand in scope, it does not make an appeal to a supposed universal, scientific reason. Rather, it is a pre-modern matter of proclamation and requires a response of faith. By Lyotard’s definition, it is not a metanarrative (Smith, 2006, pp. 64–5).
While most commentators will make clear that in talking about postmodernism the subject of the conversation is about this time of transition and flux at the end of the modern era, the very term itself can be deceptive. It is often misunderstood as implying that the whole of life is now being lived after the modern era, which is patently not so. In many ways contemporary western society remains thoroughly modern as both our individualism and scientific rationalism clearly demonstrate.
An early writer on the advent of postmodernism, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman began to publish his series of books on liquid modernity in the year 2000, seeking to reframe the conversation. In short, Bauman’s thesis is that one of the most significant and formative dimensions of our late modern culture is the speed of change. It ‘is a society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines’ (Bauman, 2005, p. 1). He goes on to observe that it is increasingly difficult for elements of culture to hold their shape or stay on course for long, and that predicting the future on an extrapolation of past events is an increasingly risky and potentially misleading thing to do. He charts the five key challenges of liquid modernity as:
1 The inability of social forms to keep their shape for long.
2 Power and politics separating as power flows beyond national boundaries in a globalized world.
3 The loss of community with the increase of a randomized network of relationships.
4 The collapse of long-term thinking, planning and acting.
5 The responsibility for resolving life’s problems and challenges shifting onto the shoulders of individuals.
Christianity and British society
There is no escaping the fact that the place of Christianity significantly changed over the second half of the twentieth century. A seemingly inexorable decline in attendance at Sunday worship and increasingly strong calls for the secularization of public life and its implied demand for the disestablishment of the Church of England are all evidence of this trend.
Many writers have begun to explore the idea of a post-Christian Britain and have concluded that it might not be as bad a context in which to engage with the missio Dei as some might have feared. Stuart Murray defines this period of Post-Christendom as,
the culture that emerges as the Christian faith loses coherence within a society that has been definitively shaped by the Christian story and as the institutions that have been developed to express Christian convictions decline in influence. (2004, p. 19)
Once again the designator ‘post’ can be deceptive by implying to the casual observer that Christendom has already been consigned to history. This would be a mistake as Murray himself points out, as he identifies a range of ecclesiastical and social vestiges of Christendom in the life of both the Church and wider society (pp. 189–93).
There can be no mistake that the place of Christianity in British society is changing. But what is its present form and what might the future hold? The best empirical data that is presently available indicates that on any given Sunday between 6 and 7 per cent of the population attend services of worship, rising to 15 per cent on any given month and 25 per cent, if it is once or more each year (Brierley, 2006, and Tear Fund, 2007). Indeed, if attendance at a Christian service for a christening, wedding or funeral is taken into account, it is 80 per cent. Or again, according to the 2001 census 71.75 per cent of people in England and Wales considered their faith identity to be Christian.
The uncoupling of the formal relationships between Church and state seems irreversible. While Rowan Williams may have admitted to the New Statesman in an interview on 18 December 2008 that he could ‘see that it’s by no means the end of the world if the Establishment disappears’, he confessed to a ‘bloody mindedness’ that would resist a push to the privatization of faith by that route. While the old Christendom settlement may be passing, some have speculated on the arrival of a new expression of Christian social influence through the growth of Christianity in the global South. In Africa, Asia and Latin America the churches saw spectacular growth during the twentieth century. Many admit that the centre of gravity for Christianity has already shifted away from the West, and commentators like Philip Jenkins have observed that through social, economic and politically driven migration, not to mention missionary endeavour, the Church of the South will re-evangelize the first world. This is ‘The Next Christendom’ (Jenkins, 2007). With 44 per cent of worshippers in inner London being drawn from the black and ethnic minority communities, this is already a reality in the capital (Brierley, 2006, p. 99).
Mediated preaching
So, what does this all mean for the future of preaching? Some are convinced that it spells the end of an out-of-date, six-foot-above-contradiction monologue that is both educationally flawed and culturally anachronistic as a means of communication. Such critiques more often than not interact with exaggerated stereotypes that do not bear scrutiny, or they extrapolate from the experience of sub-standard preaching an overly pessimistic assessment of the whole. There is no doubt that bad preaching is boring and that cultural change has the potential to make a more traditional approach to preaching appear dated and out of touch. However, there is much more to be said.
It has always been true that preaching is a mediated discipline. Incarnational theology has taught us that the Word of God must always be clothed in the specific culture of place and time. In addition, as the Word of God is proclaimed it is not a pure distillation of divine revelation, but rather it has to take shape in the thoughts, words and ideas of the preacher and then be mediated through their experience, character and personality. Our contemporary context adds additional layers to a view of ‘media-ted’ preaching through both the all-pervasive nature of ‘the media’ alongside the ever-more sophisticated technological tools of communications multimedia.
If preaching must be mediated through its surrounding culture, and we live at a time of significant cultural change, it is inevitable that preaching will change too. Not to allow for this would place the proclamation of the word of God over against the surrounding culture and require it to take a step away from such a dangerous influence. Such a view might be admissible for those dimensions of culture that are antithetical to the gospel, but it would be a serious mistake to adopt with regard to preaching as a whole. Indeed, because of the mediated nature of preaching, it would only result in the continued embrace of the cultural embodiment of homiletics from another time and place.
Many of the voices calling for change in the practice of preaching, consciously or unconsciously draw on that movement in the second half of the twentieth century that became known as ‘the new homiletic’. With Craddock’s call for a move from deductive to inductive preaching (Craddock, 1978) and the work of others like Lowry with his advocacy of the narrative plot and his infamous graphic ‘loop’ (Lowry, 1980) the sermon was shifted towards the emerging cultural trends like the growing pervasiveness of storytelling in the entertainment industry and suspicion of the motives of those attempting to make authoritative pronouncements. McClure (1995, 2001), for example, argues for a collaborative approach that sees the preacher preparing in a ‘roundtable’ context with other members of the congregation, where shared insights and concerns are established to form the substance of the following week’s sermon.
Underlining the importance of an inductive approach for postmodern people, Graham Johnston (2001) also stresses the significance of storytelling alongside the inclusion of drama, art, audiovisual aids and the use of humour. Appealing for a creative ‘remixing’ of preaching, Jonny Baker advocates a similar range of strategies that keeps the ‘unleashing of the power of Scripture’ in a sermon fresh. Team working ensures a mixture of ideas and styles that can be integrated into an inductive approach that surprises and, at times, ‘pulls the rug out from underneath’ the listeners’ expectations (Baker, 2009, p. 86). In this way preaching is accommodated to contemporary culture that enables an expression of the gospel that connects and is accessible to its audience.
This, of course, is only part of the story of contemporary culture. Talk of the death of the ‘monologue’ is premature. In a number of significant contexts it is alive and well and continues to thrive. First there is the ‘After Dinner Speaker’ circuit. Bill Clinton reputedly earned £15 million in his first four years after leaving office, while in December 2007 Tony Blair was commanding up to £200 k for each speaking engagement.4 Clearly Clinton and Blair are at the top end of this particular marketplace, but it is evidence of a thriving industry and of people’s willingness to pay to hear a good speaker. JLA is the UK’s largest agency for ‘Keynote, motivational and after-dinner speakers’. Established in 1990 they carry a list of over 6,000 speakers. This is not a dying industry.
Second, the arrival of Barack Obama onto the American political scene when he spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention brought another dimension of public speaking into ‘high relief’: its power to inspire. Drawing on the classical skills of oratory Obama embodied the truth that personal, face-to-face, communication can have a quality and depth to touch the human heart and lift the human spirit. In a very different context on 19 March 2003, Colonel Tim Collins addressed the First Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment as they prepared to enter Iraq from Kuwait,
We go to liberate not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.5
These are high-profile examples of the power of inspirational addresses. In public and private spheres, in business and the voluntary sector, from campaigning organizations to sports teams, the ability of individuals to speak and inspire those around them has not been lost.
Third, and perhaps a little out of left field, is stand-up comedy. Theo Hobson, writing in The Guardian, makes the link between it and the ‘essential performance-art of our Protestant past: preaching’.6 One voice holds hundreds captive by the power of their speech and creates a sense of unity in the crowd by establishing common points of reference and insight. From the left-wing polemicists of the 1990s to the eclectic themed shows of the Edinburgh Fringe, these contemporary folk heroes among the young are compelling communicators. As Joe Moran observes, also in The Guardian, ‘Great comedy clarifies reality in some way. It changes our perceptions rather than simply confirming them.’7
While there is a gulf between the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the anecdotes of the after-dinner speaker and the ironies of life laid bare by the incisive wit of a comedian, the preaching of Christ fulfils that to which these contemporary expressions of communication aspire. Truth is expressed, the heart is inspired and the will is engaged.
Deploying technology and utilizing contemporary communications solutions are also increasingly popular in seeking to enable preaching to engage with its twenty-first-century context. From the introduction of the printing press the Church has always been an early adopter of such technology, seeking ways to deploy it in more effectively communicating the good news of Jesus.
From Microsoft’s first offering of its new PowerPoint software that it acquired with its purchase of Forethought Inc. in the late 1980s, its use has burgeoned within the preaching community. While Jonny Baker astutely observes that most of this usage is about ‘recreating the old world’ by posting the three points or alliterated observations of the sermon on a screen behind the preacher, rather than exploiting the creative opportunities the medium offers, still it is evidence of the life and vitality within preaching as it struggles to engage with a changing context. Movie clips, locally produced ‘vox pops’ and illustrative graphics have all begun to play their part. It is interesting to note that evidence seems to suggest that in the experience of the listening congregation these developments were neither as radical nor as controversial as they were thought to be. Indeed, in rating a sermon, substance always triumphed over presentation and issues of spiritual growth over contemporary relevance (Standing, 2002, p. 58).
Others have begun to explore the possibilities of interactive preaching through texting, Twitter and email. While in some congregations live feeds display questions and comments, in others they are gathered for introduction following the conclusion of the sermon. Reactions are mixed and dilemmas arise. With live feeds, should they be moderated to ensure nothing inappropriate is projected for all to see? Others see it as a dynamic new departure that puts a preacher more fully in touch with their listeners. Then there are questions of inclusion and exclusion, with the ‘techno-literate’ gaining an advantage over against the ‘techno-challenged’ (Charles, 2010, pp. 39–40).
The internet is the other significant technological development of the last 15 years. Large numbers of church websites now routinely post each week’s sermon for download, and many have experimented with live webcasts of their worship services. Mainly servicing their own members who are unable to be present in person, these developments fall into Baker’s category of recreating the old world.
There are also rather more creative online experiments. The virtual congregations of Saint Pixels, Church of Fools, i-Church and the various Christian communities in the virtual world of Second Life all have to wrestle with whether to include a sermon in services and, if so, how. At Saint Pixels, during their real-time services, a separate window appears at sermon time providing a virtual pulpit.
The congregation can take part, and see others taking part, and heckling during the sermon is not unusual. At the same time, everyone can read what is being said ‘from the front,’ which helps to stop large meetings descending into anarchy. In terms of authority, the pulpit also confers a ‘first among equals’ status to the speaker, without in any way censoring other participants. (Howe, 2007, p. 15)
If traditional technology enables us to envisage ‘broad-casting’, the World Wide Web opens up the opportunity to ‘narrow-cast’, to grasp the opportunity to preach to a highly selective community. The Baptist Minister Peter Laws set up the website www.theflicksthatchurchforgot.com/. Using podcasts he has now produced two seasons of gospel presentations to fans of horror movies. His highly targeted preaching presentations include a review and comment on a selected movie and an exploration of the theological themes that it raises. Forums and message boards then allow for interaction and an ongoing conversation. Ministering within a relatively small church, his online community has nearly 600 subscribers with the downloads and streams of his podcasts running into the thousands (Laws, 2010).
It is, in part, paradoxical that in embracing the best of present-day communications technology and therefore seeking what might be considered a more ‘incarnational’ approach to preaching, the preached Word of God loses rather than gains ‘flesh’. The sermon augmented with PowerPoint and video clips reduces the real-life voice of the preacher by complementing it with audiovisual support, while, over the internet, the strength of preaching and worship to build relationships and a sense of community is diminished as they are, in both senses of the word, ‘virtual’.
Yet preaching is more than just adapting to cultural style or tone, identifying contemporary models of monologic communication to fight a rearguard action that stands against the forces of change, or pressing into service the latest technology and gadgety gizmos to give our sermons a sense of pizzazz. If preaching is truly a mediated discipline, then what is conveyed through its mediation must not be lost sight of. It is the Word of God. In and of itself it is neither passive nor inert. Rather, as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews makes clear, it has a life and active vitality of its own. It is penetrative into the very essence of what it means to be human (Heb. 4.12–13).
Monologues may prove to be a poor method of conveying information and an even poorer strategy for delivering education. But it is a mistaken assumption to believe that preaching is primarily about either of these. Neither is it merely about the uplifting experience of spiritual inspiration. As Stephen Holmes observed in his 2009 George Beasley-Murray lecture, ‘preaching that inspires is not enough: we need preaching that transforms, enlivens, converts’ (Holmes, 2009, p. 7). This is the work of the Holy Spirit who took what even appeared to be foolishness in the apostolic era and through it was pleased to bring salvation to believers (1 Cor. 1.21). Yet the Holy Spirit does not work alone, and herein lies the mystery of preaching and the secret of its transformational power, the interplay between the human and the divine, between the sovereignty of God and human freedom. As Holmes so deftly observes, ‘we must be careful to steer the right course: human acts do not cause divine action – of course not! – but nor are they irrelevant to it. God has chosen to use our words in his sovereign work of salvation’ (2009, p. 7).
Conclusion
Preaching is a demanding discipline. The preacher is called not only to wrestle with the Scriptures so as to understand them more adequately but also to wrestle with their contemporary cultural context to determine how the gospel message is to be appropriately formed and communicated. None of this is simple, straightforward or static. Culture is continually shifting and presenting new faces to us, while our own theological perceptions are shaped and reshaped by our ongoing interaction with the Scriptures and the ever-unfolding narrative of our personal experience. It is truly mediated preaching, as it is within this dynamic, three-dimensional interaction between the preacher, their culture and the Bible, that God chooses to give life to his Word.
Notes
1. Anthropologists suggest that a healthy number is around 150 in concentric circles of closeness of 5, 10, 35 and 100. See Dunbar, 2010.
2. Daily Telegraph, 22 December 2009, ‘Lily Allen describes quitting Facebook and Twitter’.
3. Steve Tuttle, 4 February 2009, ‘You Can’t Friend Me, I Quit! On Facebook’s fifth anniversary, a not-so-fond farewell’, Newsweek; Virginia Heffernan, 26 August 2009, ‘Facebook Exodus’, New York Times.
5. http://thenightingaleinstitute.com.au/wpress/?p=1367.
6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/aug/10/religion-comedy.
7. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/07/tv-comedy-humour-mockery.
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