Collaborative Preaching

01 Monday Oct 2012

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Bible and Preaching, bible study, Biblical Hermeneutics, Christianity, Church, collaborative preaching, conversation, dialogue, feedback, John S. McClure, preaching, preparation, Presbyterian, Religion, Roundtable Pulpit, sermon

I wrote a little book about “collaborative preaching” some years ago, and have been gratified by the number of folks who have adopted this method, and for all that they have taught me over the years.

Collaborative preaching is preaching that involves an intentional effort to involve others in both sermon brainstorming and feedback.

The Sermon Roundtable. As a collaborative preacher, you will form a small group of lay persons (what I call a “sermon roundtable”), including those from within and outside the church. This group meets each week with you to discuss biblical, theological, and experiential materials for the upcoming sermon.

It is important to keep the group small: usually 3-4 members. It is also important that the group changes regularly – every two to three months – so that an “in-group” dynamic doesn’t take over, and in order to add diversity to the insights that are provided to the preacher.

The Tag-Team Approach. One of the best ways to accomplish this constantly rotating group rhythm is through a “tag-team” approach. Each group member joins for a designated length of time. When a person leaves the group, it is their responsibility to “tag” someone to take their place. The goal is to seek someone who will “shake the group up a bit,” adding a new dimension to the biblical interpretation and theological ideas in the group. This might be someone younger, or older, or of another race or ethnicity, or from outside the church, or of another faith, or of no faith.

Change Group Locations. Another way to add richness to the process is to meet in different social locations so that sermon messages are not constricted by the worldview of your congregation. Sermon brainstorming might take place, for instance, in a public place such as a library or shopping mall, or at a women’s shelter or homeless shelter.

Your Task, Should You Accept It. Your primary task is to begin conversation about the biblical text, and to take careful notes. When you prepare the sermon, you will make use of aspects of both the form and message of the collaborative brainstorming process.

Face-to-Face is Important. Of course, collaboration could make use of technologies such as Facebook, blogs, bulletin boards, etc. But the genius of this method comes, in many respects, from its embodied, face-to-face quality. Much of what you can take into the pulpit comes from actual group dynamics, including bodily postures and attitudes: leaning in, hesitating, following, dodging, getting a footing, interrupting, re-framing, etc. I say more about this in the book.

Why Do It? The goals of this type of preaching are many: educating congregations on what sermons are and how they function in the community, increasing ownership of the ministry of proclamation in the church, teaching the Bible, widening preaching’s audience, promoting a public form of theology in the pulpit, and symbolizing a collaborative form of leadership in the church.

Beyond these goals, those who use this method testify to three surprising results:

1. Sermon preparation time is shorter. You would think just the opposite. If the groups are small and kept to about one hour, it is amazing how many new ideas for preaching can be introduced.

2. It is harder to avoid tough topics and prophetic issues. Again, you’d think just the opposite. But if you lead in a truly open-minded way, people will usually raise the tough issues. Most people want to hear their preacher deal with these topics.

3. Your “authority” in the pulpit will increase. Again, this seems counter-intuitive. But, as Jackson Carroll points out, authority in a late modern context is largely a function of relationships, and this method of preaching builds relationships around the pulpit.

A Couple of Videos. If you are interested in this method, or just want to know more, I’ve prepared a couple of small video presentations about it.

Portable Preaching

03 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by John McClure in Musings, Views from the Street

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application, Christianity, Church, focus statement, Fred Craddock, function statement, homiletics, Lucy Rose, preaching, Religion, sermon, Spirituality, Thomas G. Long

John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman, in his essay “University Preaching” said the following:

Talent, logic, learning, words, manner, voice, action, all are required for the perfection of a preacher; but ‘one thing is necessary,’ – an intense perception and appreciation of the end for which (the preacher) preaches, and that is, to be the minister of some definite spiritual good to those who hear…. (bold-face and parenthetical change added, as quoted by John Broadus in his Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, 255).

In homiletics textbooks, this idea that sermons should have a “definite spiritual end” is normally labelled the “sermon application.” And in homiletics classrooms, teachers of preaching such as myself often speak about this as the business of making sermons “portable,” giving listeners something that is not only memorable, but motivational – that leads to specific actions, behavior, or to a new persuasion. Application also refers to “bringing home” an idea. Portability means that the message “comes to roost” – – it suddenly becomes about us, in this room, in this local situation and can be taken away with us into our daily lives.

I find Newman’s words helpful – urging us to offer some “definite spiritual good” to the listener. “Definite” means unambiguous, clearly stated, and decided beforehand by the preacher. “Spiritual good” implies that the sermon influences the human spirit in some way for the better.

In a similar fashion, Thomas G. Long, in his much-used basic preaching text The Witness of Preaching encourages preachers to jot down both a “focus statement” and a “function statement” before crafting a sermon. The focus statement summarizes the preacher’s message. The function statement summarizes the preacher’s desired result. For Long, this result should be tethered as closely as possible to the literary or rhetorical thrust of the biblical text preached. He wants us to ask first of all: “What do the words of the biblical text want us to do or become as a result of this sermon? Texts don’t just “mean” things, they try to do things!

At least three aspects of this way of thinking are much debated.

1. Should the preacher always decide beforehand what spiritual good is to be brought home at the sermon’s end? Inductive homiletics, under the tutelage of Fred Craddock, questions this presupposition. Instead of moving from the exposition of a general truth to its “application,” the inductive sermon moves through a range of experiences toward a general truth. In many inductive sermons, the listener is left to complete the picture – drawing conclusions that best fit their own faith experience.

Craddock’s picture of “Inductive logic” (from As One Without Authority)

2. The persuasive element in application-oriented preaching is sometimes called into question. Lucy Rose, in her book Sharing the Word: Preaching in the Roundtable Church, argues that this persuasive and transmissive model of communication is non-dialogical and reinforces a gap between pulpit and pew. It makes the goal of preaching the business of transmitting what the preacher wants to happen into the hearts and minds of rather passive listeners. This tends to disempower listeners – even if and when they nod and articulate their consent, as in call-and-response forms of preaching. In effect, listeners learn to be passive – awaiting the portable golden nugget(s) to arrive each week.

3. Others believe that “applications,” especially when they are too specific, let some people off the hook. If the preacher is too precise in spelling out a particular “pay-off”, people may find wiggle room enough to say, in effect: “That’s not about me.”

Despite these concerns, when interviewed about preaching, sermon listeners indicate that they generally listen for some kind of portable “take home” element in sermons. The Listening to Listeners to Sermons Project, a massive empirical project funded by the Lilly Foundation, contained several findings that point directly to the desire among listeners for some kind of “portable” application in sermons. Three of these, summarized by Ronald J. Allen, who spearheaded this project, point toward sermon portability:

The sermon should center in the Bible and make the biblical material come alive for the listener
The message needs to relate in a practical way to the lives of the listening communities
Congregations are eager for sermons to help them make theological and ethical sense of the range of life‘s issues
Ministers ought to be specific in helping congregations draw out the implications of the Bible and their deepest theological convictions

I sometimes draw out the distinction between denotative “applications” of the gospel, and the connotative “implications” of the gospel. This idea is not new. The great mid-twentieth-century homiletician H. Grady Davis, in his book Design for Preaching put it this way:

“…a sermon idea of more than a bare thought. It is a thought plus its overtones and its groundswell of implication and urgency.”

Whereas an application might denote a particular sought-after behavior or attitude, an implication is not always explicitly stated. Implications surround us with images, ideas, questions, angles of vision that “implicate” us in some way. Instead of striking directly, like an arrow, implications absorb us into a sphere of gospel-influence.

Implications should not be wishy washy. They can and should be intentionally pursued by the preacher. They can be honed as carefully sought “spiritual goods” within sermons, and might include such things as being implicated in the gospel’s relentless hope, or its ethical challenge, or its unexpected offer of forgiveness. Preachers still have to decide ahead of time what such implications are, but they do not have to turn them into a highly specific sermon-takaway (or a list of such things).

In the end, it is likely that all sermons have some kind of function (even if it is to put the listener to sleep). Finding that function, whether an “application” or an “implication”, truing it up, refining it, and focusing it on the situation of one’s listeners can be crucial for making a sermon portable in the best sense of the word.