Preaching Re-Imagined – Book Review
I just finished Doug Pagitt’s Preaching Reimagined – The Role of the Sermon in Communities of Faith, a book we’ve been assigned to read for Senior Staff at the INN which evaluates the current standard for preaching in most churches. Overall it was a pretty easy read with a few challenging ideas.
Pagitt claims that the role of preaching has been taken over by what he calls "speaching" in many church settings. This act of "speaching" involves well-prepared sermons, created behind closed doors, with little or no input from the church community, by the resident theological expert (aka: the pastor). Because the sermon has devolved into a lecture-based presentation form, our communities are held back from engaging in dialoguing the sermon and engaging the ideas for themselves by being able to ask questions, use their own knowledge, and contribute to the teaching and learning going on at church. Instead of "pastor as loudspeaker", Pagitt argues that a dialogue can take place in our worship settings that helps us engage the topic as a group and discover the implications of the Word in life.
What does this look like? Basically, the argument is that by allowing members of the congregation to have a voice in the service, we allow a deeper learning to take place. What if it were possible to approach a topic by hearing a prepared piece by our pastor and then have time set aside to ask questions, voice disagreements, and respond vocally to what we’ve just heard? Instead of sitting quietly and listening each week, the idea here is to jump on the ideas while they are fresh in our minds and respond to their implications and meanings for our community.
Stacy and I talk about one of the education techniques she employs a lot in her classroom: turn and talk. Students read something as a class or get a question and then turn to their neighbor and talk about what they think about it. This allows them to hear each other’s opinions, actively engage what they are learning, and put words to their thoughts. If teachers are using this to help kids learn more effectively, why aren’t we using it in church, where we claim the lessons to be more eternal significance than reading, writing, and arithmetic?
A diversity of opinions can be daunting to engage in a church setting, but I think there is room to open up further dialogue than a single loudspeaker "speacher" up front. I think this can play out with a coordinated small group program, if it doesn’t work in the normal Sunday service. It can work in community sermon preparation, an idea Pagitt engages in each week as he meets with members of the church to talk about ideas for the sermon in the days leading up to it’s "presentation" (oh, I think I hate to use that word now).
I think a good example I’ve seen in my life of the progressional dialogue approach is at the Sound Community. Each week, Ryan and members of the church meet to do exegesis on the chosen passage for the week. Coming with multiple translations of the Bible, concordances, dictionaries, etc., members of the community talk about what the passage is saying to them, how it resounds, what it might mean, all in hopes of engaging the topic in the mind of the community early in the week, in preparation for Sunday. I’ve visited one such exegesis and I really enjoyed the feeling that I was a part of the creation of Sunday’s message. It wasn’t just Ryan preparing a sermon in an office somewhere. It was people actively engaging a topic together as the Holy Spirit led them. It was exciting.
The question posed now is how we make this a part of the INN community.
How do we allow students to dialogue the topics we bring up on Tuesday
nights? Do we allow for a discussion time following the "talk"? Do we
offer more times throughout the week for students to engage in
conversations about what we’re covering, topically? I’m open to flexibility on form if it means we engage what God is teaching the community in a more effective way.
I’ll pose a couple questions: What would it look like for your church service to not only listen to a sermon, but engage in a dialogue on the teachings together each week? Would it work? What forms of the service might need to be changed to allow this to work?
Related to education, Stacy will tell you that the phsical environment of the classroom can make a dramatic impact on this type of engaged learning and thinking. It occurs to me that our churches today look like the classrooms of yesterday-nice neat rows with faithful “students” facing the holder of all knowledge (the pastor). So this environment is not very conducive to dialoguel, reflection, and actively engaged critical thinking and learning.
I read once that if rip van winkle came back to life that the only thing that would look the same would be schools and classrooms. I would have to add churches to that short list.
I guess the fundamental question is “what are the purposes for church services”? If one of them is to “educate” then I think you’re on to something, and would suggest that church staffs study the growing research on how people learn best. As you said, some or much of this can take place in small groups and other settings as well.
Interesting topic!
I can’t agree more. I often criticize the american educational system for lacking relevance, application, and dialogue. I’ve forgotten most of the specifics of what I learned throughout my academic life. How true is this also in the christian sphere. The normal church service is centered around listening, which often translates to very little retention and very little growing. I campaign for a shift to an atmosphere of relevance, dialogue, and application.