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Introduction

geoffrey stevenson

What is the future of preaching? More pointedly, as many have asked, is there a future for preaching? I will not here rehearse the well-known tropes from harbingers of doom. Instead, consider what Dean Inge observed, not about preaching but about human nature: ‘Any hopefulness for the future of civilization is based on the reasonable expectation that humanity is still only beginning its course.’ This encourages me to ask, what if, far from fading away under the harsh light of European secularism, Christianity is still only beginning her course? What if she returns, as she has time and time again, to the resurrection form of her Lord? Would a resurrection in preaching be far behind? As Richard Lischer observed, ‘most every reform movement in the church whether Franciscan, Dominican, Lollard, Brethren,

Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Methodist, has meant not only a revival of preaching but a re-forming of its method of presentation’ (2002, p. xvi). Rumours of preaching’s demise may yet prove greatly exaggerated.

But who would be so foolish as to try to predict the future of preaching? Almost every form as practised in British churches today – from the three- to four-minute homily before Mass to the 50- to 60-minute thematic or expository sermon – is located in a culturally specific ecclesial context. Very few practices can claim an unbroken lineage of rhetorical form and liturgical meaning that goes back more than a couple of hundred years. Shifts happen over time. Not only do theologies but also fashion and sensibilities change, sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly. You have to ask, will the preaching of our digitally immersed younger generations migrate online, becoming a welter of tweets and text messages launched into the ‘blogosphere’? And can that still be called preaching? Time will tell. But preaching isn’t standing still.

As indicated by many of the contributors to this book, there are historical givens, without which whatever is being done with words in an act of worship or evangelism can no longer be called preaching. There are also new insights and understandings about the preaching act that result from theology being done afresh in our time and culture. This can result in tension and uncertainty. Tension can of course be enormously creative, and uncertainty is not always a bad thing for a pilgrim people. It also gives a real provisionality to predictions and prescriptions. At base, however, a discussion about the future of preaching is implicitly an invitation to engage in preaching that is ‘forward-looking’ even while it acknowledges its roots and respects its heritage. Taken together, I think the contributors to this volume strongly assert that forward-looking preaching will hang on to three things (there may be more). It will engage faithfully with the Bible, it will engage directly with its listeners, and it will engage prophetically with the world.1

Forward-looking preaching engages faithfully with the Bible (and, by extension, with church tradition, doctrine and practice), to present and explain Jesus, the ‘hope that is set before us’. Forward-looking preaching engages directly with the congregation, to connect with their hopes and seeking persuasively to apply itself to the future corporate life and that of each listener. Forward-looking preaching engages prophetically with the world, bringing the liberating, releasing, healing word of God to a society so often bound by the chains of the past, too slow to challenge injustice, too blinded by wealth or by poverty to see a Saviour. We will look at these three areas in turn.

Forward-looking biblical preaching

Isn’t the Bible fixed in its canonical form, a narrative of God’s past dealings with his peoples? Isn’t it, moreover, a culturally bound text, locked into primitive agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean basin? Tribal warfare, law codes, songs without the music, wandering Aramaeans and temple disputes, itinerant religious teachers and their disciples: it’s hard enough bringing the Bible into the present, never mind applying it to the future. And yet it is, and claims to be, profoundly about the future, setting out God’s plans and purposes beneath a grand meta-narrative.

The various smaller narratives are parables and paradigms for us as individuals, as a Church and as a society. Its principal subject is the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, who shares a nature that is time bound, earthly and human, with a nature that is timeless, transcendent and divine. This means our hermeneutical/interpretative task is never easy, of course, and many are the theological differences over the detail, but if we are not at a very deep level passionately fired by the divine salvation economy of creation, redemption, restoration and re-creation, then we will surely be unable to preach in a forward-looking way from the Bible. 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 be expected to be about holiness and piety, and, while these will be a part of preaching’s future as much as its past, she proposes an important and unorthodox way of integrating the God-given humanity of the preacher with the sermons she or he is called to preach. Finally, in a chapter on forming future preachers, I propose a model for understanding what it is to learn to preach. I consider a range of what I consider to be vital factors in the trajectory of life-long learning that comprises a preacher’s walk with God in the awesome calling and unparalleled privilege that is preaching.

I am delighted that the esteemed American homiletician David Schlafer agreed to write the Afterword, for he brings to his task great wisdom and an infectious enthusiasm for preaching, based on a confidence that if God wants preaching to have a future, then it will be unstoppable, and as glorious as anything seen in the past.

So what is the future of preaching? I would not dare to predict but, to return to my theme, I want to suggest that the question of whether preaching even has a future will be decisively influenced by the extent to which preaching in our churches becomes forward-looking preaching. The Church and the world alike need preaching that looks to the future, proclaiming, to the glory of God and in the power of the spirit, Jesus Christ as Lord of all space and time. May we find the strength, vision and courage to undertake that charge now and on into the future.

Notes

1. This is taken from The College of Preacher’s Commitment to Preaching in 2010, its Jubilee year.

2. Pat Robertson (1930–), 700 Club, 2 December 1981.

Reference

Richard Lischer, 2002, The Company of Preachers: Wisdom on Preaching, Augustine to the Present, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.