I have contributed a guest post to the Wycliffe College blog entitled “Naked Preaching.” You can read the full blog post here: https://www.wycliffecollege.ca/blog/naked-preaching-guest-post-robert-dean.
I have contributed a guest post to the Wycliffe College blog entitled “Naked Preaching.” You can read the full blog post here: https://www.wycliffecollege.ca/blog/naked-preaching-guest-post-robert-dean.
At the outset, let me try to describe in a sentence what I understand preaching to be (forgive me for the incompleteness of this description!): a person giving an account of God’s love and action in this world as witnessed to by scripture and experienced/hoped for in their own personal lives.
Now, to your blog post. You describe your hope for your book in this way:
“Leaps of Faith is my attempt to contribute, in some small way, to the recovery of the practice of preaching to its place at the heart of congregational life.”
I have had experiences in Christian gatherings where the role of preaching “at the heart of congregational life” is good, and experiences where this is bad. Various Christian traditions hold preaching in either high or low regard, or somewhere in between. Often Anglican gatherings have a number of activities that are at the heart of congregational life, such as the Eucharist, Prayers of the People and such other things, which de-emphasize preaching, or at least put it alongside other things. Quaker gatherings typically have no sermon whatsoever, and highlight, instead, both silence and congregational dialogue, neither of which resembles “preaching” in any kind of traditional way. In my own Christian faith gathering, Spring Garden Church in North York, the sermon does play a prominent role (as is typical in any baptist-style gathering), which has very often been an important formational experience for many people week over week.
However, my question could probably be expressed as such: how might a preacher exercise her gift of preaching without it being the centre of a gathering? How might a sermon play a role in a Christian gathering without taking place during a Sunday morning service? Is a sermon only really applicable in such a setting? And, while your book is great and your sermons marvelous (I still have to buy it…but people I respect really like your book!), what role would a sermon take if if lost its traditional place during a worship gathering?
Jesse,
Thanks for your questions. Let me see if I can begin to address your concerns.
It’s important to note that I didn’t say that I was out to recover preaching as the heart of congregational life. I am certainly not advocating for aridly rationalistic services of worship that orbit around some type of talking head. Preaching, to be intelligible, must be located within the nexus of a whole constellation of liturgical practices. Rather, my stated aim was to contribute “to the recovery of the practice of preaching to its place at the heart of congregational life.”
There is an implicit theological claim at play here, for the heart of congregational life is nothing other than the risen Christ present in the power of the Holy Spirit. So to say that preaching has a place at the heart of congregational life is to affirm that there is a sacramental quality to preaching. Or in other words, preaching is a means of grace through which the risen Christ has promised to meet us. If this is close to being right, then the declining significance of the sermon in contemporary services of worship can only be lamented.
That being said, we may perhaps to need to rediscover just what exactly preaching is and what it is all about. I don’t have space to elaborate upon that here, but my article on “Hauerwas and the Politics of Preaching” in Didaskalia, as well as my “Introduction” to Leaps of Faith offer some indicators of what I think is at stake.
With respect to your questions about the place of the sermon outside of the congregation’s gathering for worship, I think it would be helpful to distinguish between “sermon” and “proclamation.” (Please note these are very preliminary definitions.) At this point in time, I would be inclined to say that a “sermon” is a particular genre of discourse which finds its home in corporate worship. “Proclamation,” however, refers to the activity of declaring news. As a result, the act of “proclamation” could take various forms depending on the context. A sermon, on the other hand, would appear to be limited to the context of congregational worship. In other words, I’m not sure there are sermons outside of the gathering for worship, but there is and must be proclamation in every context. David Fitch’s chapter on “The Discipline of Proclaiming the Gospel” in his recent book Faithful Presence is suggestive for what proclamation can look like beyond the congregation’s gathering for worship.
Thanks for the engagement with my comment, Rob.
“preaching is a means of grace through which the risen Christ has promised to meet us. If this is close to being right, then the declining significance of the sermon in contemporary services of worship can only be lamented.”
This is particularly helpful, to me, especially in considering forms of communal worship of God that do not highlight the “sermon”. Perhaps there truly is much more to be discovered about the role of preaching in those gatherings of God’s people. Thanks again!