Preacher or Jester?

from the Telegraph:

According to new research, churchgoers would far rather clergy stick to serious topics and leave the jokes to the comedians.

A survey of Christians found that they ranked weighty explanations of the Bible as 27 times as important in a sermon as humour and “practical application”, 42 times more highly than personal anecdote.

The findings come from research commission by the Christian resources Exhibition, a trade fair for all things clerical taking place at the ExCel centre in London next week. For the first time, organisers are running a “sermon of the year competition”.

A poll of almost 1,400 regular churchgoers commissioned for the event found a perhaps surprising appetite for longer sermons, with less than one per cent favouring a talk of under five minutes but 36 per cent favouring a monologue of between 20 and 30 minutes.

When asked to choose the most important element in a sermon from a list of choices, 44.3 per cent favoured “Biblical exposition” and only 1.6 per cent opted for a “sense of humour”.

Similarly, “practical application” was the second most popular choice – garnering 40 per cent of support – compared with just under one per cent for “personal anecdotes”.

There's nothing at the moment on the Christian Resources Exhibition website - it would be interesting to see the full survey results. The poll is heartening on one level - unpacking the Bible and applying it to everyday life would be my top two aims in a sermon. However there's a danger that 'people who like this sort of thing will find this sort of thing is what they like' - there may be very different results from people who have left the church.

There's also the question of whether delivering the sermon that people want is the best thing anyway. Jesus used a range of teaching styles: Q&A, storytelling, sermons, settling arguments, commenting on everyday things. If the goal of Sunday teaching is that people grow in Christian discipleship, in character, understanding and lifestyle, then the sermon is but one means to that end.

And sometimes the best points are made by a joke, rather than a monologue. For example:
Freely I confess my sins
for God has poured his grace in
But when another points them out
I want to smash his face in (Adrian Plass)

Which makes a point about taking criticism better than any exposition. A big piece of research on church growth found that the factor which most correlated with a growing church was 'we laugh a lot'. Last year the CRE press release before the event flagged up a 'comedy for clergy' workshop. What last year and this have in common is a desire to promote good communication - whether as preachers we tell jokes, tell stories, ask questions, or whatever, we just need to be really good at it, and continually learning our craft.

Update: Giles Fraser thinks vicars should stop telling jokes full stop, because church is a serious place. I disagree - there are several standup comics who can deal seriously with a serious subject and have the audience on the floor at the same time: Adam Hills current tour is about death and cancer, and Mark Steele, Marcus Brigstocke, Stewart Lee, Jeremy Hardy etc. etc. there are plenty of comics out there who, because they are one of the few people that the rest of us will listen to for more than 30 seconds, actually have the chance to develop an argument at length. Sure, a rubbish joke, badly delivered, for the sake of it, has no place in sermons, or indeed any form of communication. But that doesn't mean none at all.

Preaching/Communication - not 1 thing but 5 things.

"It is one thing to say something
quite another to have it listened to
a distinct third to have it understood
a different matter again to have it remembered
and a frequently unattainable fifth to have it put into practice"
(Paul Edwards 'The Practical Preacher')

Fresh Expressions of Vicar 3: One Message, or 3000 Sermons?

3120 sermons. That's how many sermons a person will hear if they go to church every Sunday for 60 years. More, if they take the God Channel. What do vicars talk about for all that time? What do we really need to talk about? Andy Griffiths continues as guest blogger...

FROM INCUMBENT AS MANAGER TO INCUMBENT AS VOICE OF GRACE

My second post may have given the impression that the incumbent’s job is primarily that of being a manager of volunteers. 

If so, it is perhaps a surprise that Titus’ role is primarily focussed on what he is to say.  He is not to manage every part of church life, but he is to be a voice for what really matters.  “Keeping the main thing the main thing” is going to be crucial, because there will be so many distractions, and his method to keep the main thing the main thing is primarily rhetorical.  At Crete, the “disruptions” (1.11) centre on the promotion of circumcision and the telling of mythical stories (1.10-16); in 3.9 we hear that foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law are unprofitable and useless.

Some people are “divisive” (3.10), and it seems to be Titus’ role, not that of the ministry team, to

warn a divisive person once, and then warn them a second time. After that, have nothing to do with them.

“When the church needs hard work and generous action”, comments Tom Wright with reference to this passage, “it’s interesting how some people, perhaps as an avoidance technique, suddenly discover that there are all sorts of theological and biblical disputes that they need to hide behind”.  In the face of these disrupting alternative narratives, and of a bent towards Law (whether this is to be understood as Torah-based boundary markers or a more Gentile legalism), Titus is to be a single-minded champion of a message of “grace” followed by “zeal”.  

Here is that message in Titus 2.12-14 and 3.4-8:

Grace teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, zealous to do what is good.

But when the kindness and love of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Saviour, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life. This is a trustworthy saying. And I want you to stress these things, so that those who have trusted in God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good.

The pattern repeats several times in these verses: the Saviour delivers by grace, and that grace, given quite apart from any worth in our actions, leads us to devotion, zeal, doing good, saying no to ungodliness, etc.  John Stott expresses the message of these verses with customary thoroughness: “Salvation’s need is our sin, guilt and slavery; its source is God’s gracious loving kindness; its ground is not our merit but God’s mercy in the cross; its means is the regenerating and renewing work of the Holy Spirit, signified in baptism; its goal is our final inheritance of eternal life; and its evidence is our diligent practice of good works… The past is justification and regeneration.  The present is a new life of good works in the power of the Spirit.  The future is the inheritance of eternal life.”  

This goes beyond a Reformation commitment to sola gratia (by grace alone) – it may suggest sola gratitudine (living by gratitude alone), in which a life eager to do good is motivated not by pride (you’re better than this), threat (you’d better do this) or guilt (if only you’d done this) but simply by unforced, confident, cheerful gratitude.  If your zeal for good works is slipping, don’t look to the law, look to the grace of salvation.

The incumbent is to be a voice for grace that leads to zeal to do good.  “The dominant theme in Titus is good works for the sake of outsiders”, says Gordon Fee, but the way to stimulate these is to help church members appreciate the wonder of salvation.  Without such a voice, a church will slip into legalism and distraction, and ironically the end result will be not only a depressed, defeated church, but a demotivated church not engaged in active love.  

This rings true to my experience – lay preaching teams seem to have a tendency to need bringing back to the rhythm of grace that leads to action for the community.  The answer to this natural slippage is not for the incumbent to once again take on the mantle of “the preacher”, delivering all the sermons and leading all the midweek groups, but for her to use every rhetorical advice at her disposal to help the ministry team exemplify this rhythm – and if necessary to make sure legalists and distractors do not have a microphone at their disposal. 

And if we can move incumbents to the margins of the church, there is some hope that they will be able to bring grace to bear on the structures of the community, pioneer new projects, and be active in creative evangelism.  Of course, this is not guaranteed.  But if incumbents are still having to chair the PCCs, pacify the flower-arrangers, raise money for the spire and visit two housebound church members a day, the scope for this fruitful, grace-voicing marginal ministry is almost nil.

The final reflection will be posted here tomorrow

Andy Griffiths is a dad, a husband, a Vicar in Essex and the “Warden of Ministers” of a Mission and Ministry Unit Team – he’s talked about the appointment process for this in his earlier posts,  I've invited Andy to guest blog four posts about incumbent ministry, originally written for the church of Essex. Because it's the only way. This is the third post – in his first two posts he spoke of incumbents as team members and enablers. Follow the Titus Series link below for the other posts. 

Comedy Vicar

I've just signed up for a Comedy for Clergy workshop at next months Christian Resources Exhibition. Don't laugh. Actually, let me rephrase that...

Current bedtime reading is Saturday Night Peter, the 2nd part of Peter Kays autobiography, it's fascinating to read about another professional communicator, and the attention to detail which goes into his craft. The dynamics of a sermon are different to that of stand-up comedy, and not many of us preachers just have one talk which we take on a national tour each year (though sometimes it can feel like it). But there's a lot to learn - comedians are one of the few people we'll happily listen to for any length of time, up to and including the length of time it takes to develop a reasoned argument.

Comedy can be serious. There was a time not long ago when the only effective opposition to the New Labour government was Bremner, Bird and Fortune. The dog days of Thatcherism gave rise to a generation of political comedians including Ben Elton and Alexi Sayle. More recently Russell Brand, Mark Thomas, Mark Steel, Marcus Brigstocke, Jeremy Hardy, Adam Hills, etc. etc. all deliver a bit of the same. In the Christian 'world', Adrian Plass and J John, in very different ways, can deliver comedy and serious comment in the same sentence.

I'm surprised the workshop isn't called Stand Up Stand Up for Jesus. With jokes like that, you can see now why I need it...

Not a postman

"The congregation assumes that we mean what we say and seldom asks us, 'do you actually believe that stuff or are you just paid to say it?' ...what we are ought to match what we proclaim and we are uneasy when it doesn't.. Standing in the pulpit takes us directly into questions of personal integrity, authenticity, holiness and transparency. We want to be WYSIWYG preachers where what the congregation sees is what it gets. It was said of John Chrysostom that he 'gesticulated with his whole existence.' "

If you're delivering a message that you're not personally committed to, that makes you a postman, not a preacher.

(David Day, Embodying the Word)

Same goes if you're 'just' a plain old follower of Jesus.

How to sort out the preaching rota

Ht The Church Sofa

2 useful lists: what the vicar says, and what to say to your vicar

A couple of lovely lists:

Biblical Preaching is offering 50 'preaching tweaks' - small experiments and one-degree shifts in preaching which can make a big difference for anyone aspiring to be an effective preacher. One of the few things I remember clear as day from training college is one lecturer saying she always tried 1 new thing whenever she preached. The 'preaching tweaks' lists reminds me that my preaching is still a work in progress, and there's a lot I can do to improve and stay fresh.

John Martin has posted on the Fulcrum site '10 things a Vicar needs to hear - often'. There's probably a companion piece to be done on 10 things any church member needs to hear often, but it's an excellent list. 'Is everything ok?' 'enjoy your time away' 'how can I help?' are things some of us rarely hear, and I know some clergy who get the message - both spoken and unspoken - that they aren't allowed not to be ok, and that time off is something clergy should always feel guilty about. Andy yes, sometimes we contribute to our own downfall - if you wont accept offers of help, don't be surprised if they dry up.

...and on the topic of lists and vicars, Jeremy Fletchers 'Rules for Reverends', which originally appeared on his blog, (e.g. 103: no, the compilers of the lectionary didn't know what they were doing; 87. Being on the committee of another organisation is a good way of realising that perhaps the PCC isn’t so bad after all. Or recognising that, actually, it is.)  is now published with added Dave Walker cartoons. 

How to Encourage Your Congregation

Two of our church members told me today they were encouraged by something I'd said in my sermon yesterday. My ears pricked up, my encouragement-o-meter revved into gear, I prepared myself for the life-changing revelation that my inspired words had brought about.

It turned out that the most encouraging part of yesterday morning was the bit where I talked about my struggles to pray: my prayer routines falling apart during the summer holidays, and that often I couldn't remember what I'd been reading in the Bible within 5 minutes of putting the book down.

Many years ago I heard someone preaching on 'fellowship in weakness', and he observed that it's very hard to get close to someone who's good at everything. It's actually our weaknesses that open us up to each other, make us human and approachable. Sometimes our best role models are people who fail well.

Lecture Church, Seminar Church, Tutorial Church

Just finished reading George Lings latest 'Encounters on the Edge' about Crossnet in Bristol. These are always worth reading, and there was one section which particularly leapt out at me. Here's an abridged version of what Lings says:

One source of education is the lecture, a presentation made by an expert in their field, disclosing prior learning...it assumes that giving information, but a motivated and able teacher, leads to positive change in students. There are obvious links to the sermon and the role of preaching. The results, in both contexts, seem to me to be extraordinarily variable. A few are deeply inspired and changed, some love the system while others merely endure it, and some even skip it. However in the church there is litle structured equivalent to the required reading that supports the lecture method, much less producing an essay demonstrating learning and engagement with the topic.

I am then not suprised that lecture church may breed preachers, but it is long doubted that by itself if produces disciples

In recent years, this has been supplemented by seminar church. At worst these are simply groups of passive participants who hear more lectures, perhaps further enlivened with visuals or story. At best this includes dialogue, group work, Q&A with the seminar leader etc. Alpha and many other process evangelism courses are positive examples of this.

Once again, weaknesses can include almost total lack of prior preparation by the 'students'. Information can trump transformation.

The pattern in Crossnet is most akin to tutorial church. In Oxbridge this system requires prior engagement by the student, followed by presentation of that learning. which is then dissected and evaluated by the tutor on a 1 to 1 basis. There is nowhere to hide. It is the most labour intensive and searching of the threee methods and (deemed to) produce higher quality results. It is not possible to do that with very large numbers. Itis a trajectory of high investment in the small because of its power to transform and to send out.

Thought: how many of us 'preachers' would like to get away from 'lecture church' models, but believe that either our congregations, our inherited practices, or our diaries won't let us?

Gutsy Faith

The BBC has a piece today about the role of the stomach in emotions and mood

all those neurons lining our digestive system allow it to keep in close contact with the brain in your skull, via the vagus nerves, which often influence our emotional state.

For instance when we experience "butterflies in the stomach", this really is the brain in the stomach talking to the brain in your head. As we get nervous or fearful, blood gets diverted from our gut to our muscles and this is the stomach's way of protesting.

Which suggests that the Greeks were right to locate the emotions in the bowels. About the only word I stil remember from learning New Testament Greek at college is splanchnathizomai (or something like that), meaning 'his bowels turned over'. It's translated as 'moved with compassion' in modern Bibles, but that's a pale shadow of the visceral and literally gut-wrenching emotions experienced by Jesus, among others.

Thinking more about sport and peak performance, the stomach seems more and more important: control of diet and of mood are vital. And I'm now thinking back over large parts of my Christian formation which seemed to assume that the brain was the only organ we had. Enough knowledge, enough truth, and behavioural change and Christlikeness would automatically follow. That now seems like the pastoral equivalent of Quantitative Easing. The Bank of England's pumping of money into the economy to stimulate growth has been described as 'pushing string' - yes you're doing something, but the link between cause and effect is very weak.

Legend speaks of a new vicar, who preached a very good sermon on his first foray into the pulpit. The congregation made approving noises afterwards. The following week he preached....exactly the same sermon. And again the week after that. Finally someone plucked up the courage to ask him why he was preaching the same sermon every week and he replied "as soon as people start doing the things I encouraged them to do in this sermon, I'll come up with something else." Our knowledge is way out of proportion to our obedience, and obedience is what counts: "we know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands...this is how we know we are in him: whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did." (1 John 2:3-6)

One of our biggest local discipleship groups is Weight Watchers, a fellowship which meets to learn, encourage, hold one another to account, and be motivated to fight the good fight against the flab. It works. Why? because it pays close attention to behaviour, to the body, to how people feel about their bodies, and assumes that people are there because they want to change. The accountability is also key.

So maybe our preaching team needs a few weeks observing Weight Watchers, to see if there's a better route to discipleship and obedience than simply 'exhorting', and speaking only to the brain. Talk to the bowels, 'cause the brain's full.

How To Preach and Watch the Olympics at the Same Time

Hot on the heels of the Holy Water Bucket, another corker from Kevin Mayhew

Yes, with the Digital Lectern you can 'look at your notes' without ever losing pesky bits of paper on the floor, and catch the beach volleyball at the same time. Why spend a couple of hundred quid on a basic notebook when you can splash £1345 on a nice wooden stand with one built in? The portability is a bit tricky -  I'm not sure the other folk in the cafe will take too well to your 'laptop', and it's a bit bulky for carrying around. But hey, this is the reason why people in church sacrificially give, so that the preacher can have an autocue.

The marketing for this is that it gives 'hassle free, paperless services'. Though of course, it's always worth printing out your sermon in full, just in case the screen crashes.....

Own up folks, who's thinking to themselves, in the immortal words of Will Smith 'I have got to get me one of these!' ???

Easter Preaching tip

Easter is not a time to get fancy. The goal of the Easter sermon is not to impress people with your oratory skills, your Greek syntax expertise, or your clever cultural insight. Easter is a time to boldly, loudly, passionately, gladly, and publicly proclaim the resurrection of Jesus Christ!

So, keep your Easter sermon simple. Hearing the good news of Jesus is something your people will delight in if the Holy Spirit resides in them, so make it plain. They know you will tell them Jesus is alive, they are coming to hear it, and it sounds good every time, much like a wife whose husband often tells her he loves her and is devoted to her—she never tires of hearing it and rejoices every time.

(Mark Driscoll)

The Sermon Burp

Excellent post by Steve Tilley on how to avoid indigestion in teaching settings:

A colleague of mine used to say that discussion groups after a talk were a good opportunity for people to 'burp'. He drew the analogy of a baby being fed - after a while the infant needs to be winded and then some more food can be inserted into the gap. Without being winded a small child will feel full before it is.

It said a lot about that teaching style. The speaker has the food and people need feeding; almost force-feeding.

I have always been a great enthusiast for teaching in a dialogue. I am not anti-input. I do have some resources, training and skills which equip me with stuff to pass on. But the assumption about dialogue (Greek: dia logos = through word(s)) is that I will be as helped by the listener as the listener by me.

Worth reading the whole piece. I find it very challenging as a preacher/teacher: there's usually far more material for a sermon/teaching slot than I've actually time to deliver, and it's hard enough sacrificing chunks of a sermon to trim things down to the usual 20 minutes. But maybe we need to be a bit more joined up, and instead of the traditional launch straight into the Nicene Creed, or whatever, to think about the 5-10 minutes after the sermon as processing time. Or even to split it into several chunks throughout the service, all-age style .

Whatever (,) He Said

'its not enough to question authority, you've got to speak with it too'
Ht Michael Hyatt

Bad Preacher

' "That reminds me of a story" 6 words that strike terror into the heart of a congregation.'



didn't have anything profound to blog today, so this will do. To start with I thought it was just taking the mick out of American preachers, but then.....

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us....

Pete at Postmodern Bible has blogged some more on the CODEC survey on sermons, and what people expected, and got, through the preaching in their church:

Respondents were asked what they wanted a sermon to do and also what they thought preachers actually did. The top results across all denominations for what congregations want were:
Challenge 77.4%
Encourage 74.2%
Motivate 66.8%
Educate 44.7%
Entertain 12.1%

When we asked them what preachers actually did the numbers shifted a little:
Challenge 67.9%
Encourage 76.1%
Motivate 52.2%
Educate 53.8%
Entertain 25.5%

What's going on here? Apparently, three quarters of respondents felt that preachers manage to encourage their congregations, with a similar number challenging them. However, despite 2/3rd of respondents expecting sermons to motivate them, only about half think that this is achieved.

So the message is: fewer jokes and Greek verbs, more challenge and motivation. Which all begs the question of what the sermon is actually for in the first place, and whether people's views of what to expect have been formed by being in a certain context, or by thinking through issues of communication, discipleship, and Christian teaching.

more at Pete's blog. He summarises: What is absolutely clear is that people across the denominations want challenging, provocative preaching that encourages them and moves them on. If they can be entertained as they receive this, then all the best.

I've been meaning for a while to devise a brief response form for sermons at our church. It's probably a question of courage, more than anything else....

More on those much-anticipated sermons

Following the brief flurry in the blogosphere earlier this week, which greeted the news that over 96% of churchgoers looked forward to the sermon, (Times report here), Pete from CODEC (the research body which published the findings) has blogged at greater length about what the survey did and didn't say. He notes, after reading the comments on the Times piece:

There seems little surprise - even to the ridiculously high 96.6% approval rating. Actually the figure is not quite accurate (it should be 96.9%) or as good as this suggests because the actual report says that 63.7% 'frequently' look forward to the sermon, with another 33.2% 'sometimes' looking forward to the sermon. So, if you feel among the 4% (or rather the 3.1%) who don't look forward to your regular sermon slot and that lots of your friends don't either, then it might be that you and your friends identify more with that 33.2% who look forward to the odd highlight or special occasion - 'sometimes' looking forward. Startingly, the other 3.2% (rounding up issues?) 'seldom' look forward with absolutely no one (0.0%) saying that they never looked forward to the sermon.

My first thought on reading this that the figures might be down to many of the sample being in the Durham area, and therefore looking forward to the sermon on the off-chance that it might be Tom Wright guest preaching this week. More seriously, the research notes that sermons don't seem to have much impact on those who hear them. Moreover more of the impact seems to be introverted (e.g. sensing the love of God) rather than having an impact in how people live their lives or treat others.

Pete comments:
the survey does give us some questions:
Why aren't sermons changing people's lives?
Why are people happier to reflect internally than to change their behaviour in response to a sermon?
What's the interplay between contemporary events and issues and the pulpit - and whyever has the church not got this right yet?
How come so many people seem to like preaching when the anecdotal evidence says that people find preaching boring?

My thoughts at the moment:
1. What is preaching trying to achieve? The primary task of the church is to make disciples (Matthew 28), but Jesus uses a number of means to do that, not simply teaching. If churches are relying simply on monologues to bring about life change then, short of an Obama or MLK in the pulpit, how much is really going to happen?

2. The revival of stand-up comedy as a popular public form of entertainment is a sign of where the sermon is perhaps going. The likes of Jeremy Hardy and Ricky Gervais can hold the attention of an audience for a couple of hours whilst developing an argument -it's the monologue form, a sermon if you like, but delivered in an entertaining way. The survey finds that Anglicans more than anyone else look to be 'entertained' by a sermon. Maybe we watch too much comedy on TV.....

3. It's a great opportunity for preachers, but easily squandered. You can almost hear the hiss of a deflating congregation when the preacher goes off into the clouds, or starts telling them off, or retreats into cosy phrases. Each sermon is an opportunity. I imagine the figures are also skewed by the fact that people stop going to church. How many people would carry on going to a church where they never looked forward to the sermon?

I've been reading a few books on 'home church' and base communities recently, where the sermon seems to be replaced with something much more interactive and applied. The danger of preaching a prepared text is that it never connects with the real lives of the people who are listening. Having said that, that's what I do most weeks, so I might have questions about the efficacy of preaching but perhaps I don't have the nerve to follow those questions through in practice to their logical conclusion.

Strange but true? 96% of churchgoers 'look forward to the sermon'.

From the Times today

...some ember still seems to burn in Britain’s 3.6 million regular churchgoers, for almost all of them feel a sense of expectation for the Sunday sermon, according to researchers at Durham University.

Fully 96.6 per cent of those surveyed “look forward” to the sermon, with 60 per cent saying it gave them a sense of God’s love.

At a time when churches are agonising about how to move to a “digital” from an “analog” age, the results suggest that there is life in the old forms yet.

The College of Preachers of Durham University admits that the results are “counter-intuitive” — particularly in an age where “sermonising” is seen as a deadly sin. The college plans to carry out a larger study to discover why people like sermons so much.

The most recent survey, carried out by Durham’s Codec research centre to mark the 50th anniversary of the College of Preachers, offers preliminary suggestions.

Nothing obvious on the CODEC site, there's a brief mention of it on the College of Preachers site but no obvious link to the research itself. Without knowing a bit more about the sample size, questions asked etc., I'd be reluctant to draw any firm conclusions...

Update: the Director of Research at CODEC comments below:-
The research was carried out by CODEC at St John's College on behalf of the College of Preachers. You can obtain a copy for only £5 from St John's College - theresa.phillips@durham.ac.uk - sadly we can't publish the complete copy online as research costs money and we need to recoup some of the costs. By the way, its a PILOT survey - small scale .

Are Megachurches Christian?

Journalist Will Braun took a random Sunday, and downloaded the sermons from the 10 biggest churches in the US, and the 10 biggest in Canada, to see if there were any common threads in the messages preached.

Here's a bit of his commentary:

...with sermon titles like “Thirty Days to a No-Regret Life” and “I Want More . . . Self-control” as well as emphases on overcoming difficulties and attaining goals, many of the preachers covered terrain similar to Oprah.

Of course the preachers add a Christian discipleship dimension, but it’s still a smiley, energetic approach to making your life better and more meaningful. Just look at the glowing face of Lakewood pastor Joel Olsteen (who wasn’t preaching on April 13) on the cover of his book, Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day.

The point here is not that self-improvement is inherently problematic but rather that it is, by definition, self-centred. It’s about you and your happiness and your success. Fifteen of the 20 sermons would fall in the category of “improving your life by the power of God,” without ever expanding beyond a sort of me-and-my-Jesus world view. Three made brief forays outside the gates of self-help land (mentioning creation care and sensitivity to the poor) and two placed church solidly in the context of a global community.

The issue is about what wasn’t said. What was not said in any but two of the sermons was anything like: The church is in a better position than anyone to stop the genocide in Darfur. When we participate in an economy dependent on exploitation, we erode our souls in the process. The indigenous people in the Arctic, whose way of life is melting away beneath them, are our neighbours.

For most of the preachers, the church is not cast as a collective force of compassion and change in a violent, warming world, but rather as a vehicle for individual betterment and eternal bliss, with care for the needy sometimes tacked on as a religious duty.

Emphasis mine. Braun concludes:

While these mega-churches are undoubtedly meeting certain needs, they are not, for the most part, geared toward the needs of the greater world. If you would have walked in the door of one of the 20 largest churches in Canada or the U.S. on April 13, 2008 you would have most likely walked into an other-worldly realm – something removed from the warming, starving, self-destructing world out there. And in that way it would have been kind of like walking into an amusement park

Our church has no pretensions to being a mega church. But the same infection lurks - the temptation to appeal to people's selfishness, to preach a gospel that 'meets my needs', to make church entertaining, fun, joyful, stimulating without crossing over the line into mere entertainment. Maybe this comes back to the problem with 'event' church over against 'community' church: if the life of the church is centred around a building and an event which you're trying to populate, then there's always a temptation to go for what will be popular rather than what will be authentic.

There's an even deeper question here: have preachers of self-improvement ceased to be Christian? We're so used to the old litmus tests - the bodily resurrection of Jesus, gay sex (?), who's allowed to pray at communion - that things like this seem to pass by without anyone noticing. But the fact is that a God who's prime purpose in sending Jesus was to aid human self-improvement is not God, it is an idol. A gospel of self-improvement, no matter how many times you quote John 10:10 , is a false gospel.

Ht Danielle Strickland via Sheepspeak.

Update: Tim Chesterton, from across the pond, has some more reflections on this.

The Preachers New Clothes

Jonny Baker 's provocative thoughts on preaching, "Throwing a hand grenade in the fruitbowl", has just been published as a Grove booklet. The pdf has been up for a while, but I've only just got round to reading it! Here's a snippet from the first page:

Since I was asked to write this chapter on preaching I have been asking a lot of people when the last sermon was that really inspired or challenged or changed them. The responses have been interesting. A lot of the people have pulled a face and laughed as if to say 'are you serious?' - it's as though they can't even imagine the possibility of being inspired or hearing a brilliant sermon. Others have remembered a transforming preach but a typical answer has been that it was one or two years ago....

Something has got to change. Maybe it’s time to think the unthinkable. For too long we have behaved like the 'well adjusted' courtiers in the famous story of the Emperor's New Clothes saying nothing, propping up the status quo, smiling politely with our vested interests in tact (whether as preachers or as listeners), or simply too embarrassed to say anything.

Allow me to be the antisocial brat (as Marshall Mcluhan puts it in his retelling of the story) - the Emperor 'ain't got nothin' on!'i. Preaching is invariably dull. It is boring. People are sick of three point sermons beginning with P. People aren't listening. People don't want to be preached at. They don’t want to be told what to think. Like so many other areas of church life we're stuck in a time warp. It isn't working. Maybe it's time for a rethink.

Comments
- We have confused means and ends. Baker is right: we need to go back to what we're trying to achieve by preaching, and then ask whether a) that's what we want to achieve and b) whether traditional preaching is the best way to achieve it.

- I think the last paragraph above overstates things. There is still a place for public speaking - look at Obamas speeches, or the ever-increasing popularity of standup comedians. However, it's important to be clear about what these examples are trying to achieve, and in neither case is it purely teaching/education.

- What did Jesus do? There was a mixture of teaching and practice, because he was interested in disciples, rather than students. The church leans heavily towards 'students' - catechism, a verbal statement of faith (creeds) which is basically doctrinal and cerebral, lecture/theatre-style buildlings and presentation, and a rhythm of life centred around a weekly event where people gather, watch/listen, drink coffee, and then disperse again.

- It's hard to challenge preaching because many of us leaders have so much invested in it. If you've been preparing and delivering sermons for 10, 20, 30 years, the last thing you want to hear is that there is a better way of doing it. But we have to lay our egos down long enough to ask the question and listen to the answers.

There's a lot here to get people thinking. Might print the whole thing out for all our preachers to discuss over a pint (or equivalent).