• Archive of "liturgy" Category

    Missional Preaching Part 3: Preaching as a Call for Response

    February 21, 2010 // 8 Comments »

    This is the third and final post in a brief series on the practice of preaching in missional communities.  I’ve already argued that preaching in missional churches is a communal activity and that it aims at the proclamation of biblical truth.  Lastly, I want to suggest that missional preaching calls for and invites a real response from its hearers.

    It is a travesty of (quite literally) biblical proportions that we would gather as the Body of Christ, hear from the Scriptures, and not be called – in a meaningful and accountable way – to respond. This is where the theological rubber meets the ecclesial road.  When the theological vision of a church is adapted to meet an individualistic and consumer-driven society, the practice of preaching is bound to the fate illustrated by the cartoon above.  However, where and when a church embraces a missional theology, it sees little point in the practice of preaching if it doesn’t lead to a meaningful and accountable means of response. By this I don’t mean that we have some nugget of wisdom to try and apply to our lives once we leave, I mean right then and there, we respond.  All of us.  Not, “Respond if you want to get saved,” but “Here’s God’s truth for all of us to which we are all called to respond.  Do it!

    Typically, at Life on the Vine, we do this through spoken prayer.  The preacher will guide us in a way to respond to the truth and everyone has an opportunity to do so.  For instance, this summer I preached from Genesis 49 and proclaimed the truth that, “Our hope in the promises of God rests on God’s character, not ours.  We all responded to this by praying, “Lord, though I am/have _________, you are/have ___________ and so I pray, __________.”  Those who pray conclude with the words, “Lord, in your mercy,” and the entire congregation, if they can, affirms the prayer by saying, “Amen!”

    Because our community is an accessible and sustainable size, these responses are quite public, making them all the more meaningful.

    Responding to the truth of the text for the morning doesn’t end on Sunday.  At the center of our community are what we call “Missional Orders,” groups of couples and singles who are trying to share life and serve together.  These missional orders carry the truth with them throughout the week and when we gather we continue to respond to one another by noting the effect the sermon is having on us.

    Any thoughts on this?  Are there aspects to the way preaching is practices in your church community that get at this vision or embody something different?  Are there implications of a missional theology/ecclesiology for preaching that you’re thinking of that I haven’t mentioned here?

    Posted in church, community, corporate worship, liturgy, LOV, post-christendom, preaching/teaching, theology

    Missional Preaching Part 2: Preaching as the Proclamation of Biblical Truth

    February 12, 2010 // No Comments »

    In my last post I was making the claim that given a missional ecclesiology, the practice of preaching is a communal activity.  On top of this, I would like to suggest that preaching in missional churches seeks to proclaim biblical truth.

    Now, don’t miss this. I don’t mean “proclaim biblical truth” in the fundamentalist, “The Bible says it, so that’s the end of discussion and you’re stupid if you don’t see it” sort of way that’s maddeningly common, but in the, “In faith, we proclaim this to be true about God and life in God’s Kingdom,” sort of way.

    Because missional churches seek to shape a people for mission in a Post-Christendom world, every activity of the community, including preaching, is meant to be a formative practice in this regard.  As Stutzman says in the paper mentioned previously,

    Missional preaching deliberately draws contrasts between the gospel message and the practices and values of American civil religion, aiming for conversion from habits shaped by participation in American democracy to habits formed through Christian discipleship.

    In preaching, missional churches seek to proclaim the truth of the reality of God’s Kingdom in the midst of every other competing reality.  The point of preaching for missional churches is not anthropocentric/therapeutic - meant to make people feel emotionally better.  Nor does it seek primarily to be relevant in order to captivate or entertain an audience.  It is not even so concerned with being exegetical or expository – patently cerebral types of communication.  Missional preaching is theocentric – it is a practice in which we look for God’s reality to intersect with ours and DO something in us and in our midst.

    So, for instance, each and every sermon preached at Life on the Vine features a rhetorical phrase of some sort.  This is a simple way to articulate the truth that is being proclaimed from the morning’s text.  The rest of the sermon, normally about 20-25 minutes since it’s not seen as more central than any other part of the liturgy, is spent, not unpacking a text, but proclaiming a biblical truth from that text that addresses us and calls us all to some response.

    For instance, this summer I preached from Genesis 49 and proclaimed the truth that,

    Our hope in the promises of God rests on God’s character, not ours.

    The aim in my preaching of this sermon wasn’t mainly to explain the text so that people could understand and try to apply it to their lives, but to proclaim the truthfulness of the text by calling out what it was DOING, namely, calling its hearers to believe, not believe by intellectual assent, but believe by ordering their lives around, this biblical truth.

    And the only way to get at this, is to call for a real response.  That’s our topic for next time.

    Posted in church, community, corporate worship, liturgy, LOV, missional, post-christendom, preaching/teaching, theology, truth

    Missional Preaching Part 1: Preaching as a Communal Activity

    February 9, 2010 // 10 Comments »

    Not too long ago I offered a post on, “Preaching in the Missional Church.”  Basically it was an excuse to pimp this awesome paper by Ervin Stutzman.  Apparently that wasn’t enough for my good friend Wess, who asked what missional preaching looks like ;)

    To try and do justice to Wess’ question, the importance of the topic and to make space for better discussion, I’ve decided to divy this up into three posts.  I’ve got in mind to describe three unique attributes of preaching in missional churches and then illustrating them by way of examples from Life on the Vine, the missional community Amy and I are a part of. (Dave Fitch, one of the co-pastors of LOV, offers some reflections on this same topic here.)

    In missional communities, preaching is a communal activity which seeks to proclaim biblical truth that calls for and invites a real response.

    In most churches, the task of preaching is the responsibility of one individual – 9 times out of 10, a man.  Not only does the task of preaching often remain unshared, but the scope of preaching does as well.  This reality conflicts with the communal nature of missional theology and ecclesiology.

    In missional communities, one of the central aims would be for a team of teachers, whose giftedness is affirmed by the congregation, to share responsibility not only for preaching and teaching, but for giving their time and attention to identifying and equipping other gifted teachers in the body.

    Life on the Vine is shepherded by a 3-person team of bi-vocational pastors.  Not only do they share teaching and preaching responsibilities, but they also facilitate what we call a “College of Preachers,” every summer.  This gives those who have (or at least want to discover if they have) the gift of teaching, the opportunity to use and explore this gift in a guided way.

    In addition, we follow the church calendar.  This means that we are all aware, well ahead of time, of those texts which will be preached each Sunday.  Whoever is responsible for the preaching portion of our liturgical service also facilitates a time of teaching and dialogue for an hour or so before the worship service.  This time gives the entire body the opportunity to speak to the text for the morning and it gives the preacher the opportunity to (re)shape their sermon in light of the insights, questions, and concerns of the body.

    I’ll speak to the issue of missional preaching proclaiming biblical truth next time.  For now, what are your thoughts on preaching as a communal activity?  Is this important to you?  Why or why not?  What might be other ways to achieve the same goal in different ways?

    Posted in church, community, corporate worship, liturgy, LOV, missional, post-christendom, preaching/teaching, theology, truth

    Life on the Vine

    May 6, 2009 // 6 Comments »

    As of last Thursday, I live in Chicago!  Not quite Chicago-proper, but in the area nonetheless.  I have been staying with my cousin and her husband for the last few days and am in the process of moving into my finace’s place while she stays with some friends for the rest of the month.  The apartment and job hunts are in full swing!

    Life on the Vine is a church community that I nearly moved just to be a part of about a year and a half ago before I accepted the invitation to pastor young adults at Living Hope in Memphis and Sunday was my first opportunity to attend a worship gathering with Amy.  It may have been one of the most meaningful worship gatherings I have ever been a part of.

    Once a month the community gathers an hour before their regular meeting for a corporate time of celebrating the Lord’s Supper.  People gathered in the lobby area to meet and catch up.  An order of service was personally handed to each person as we were asked to prepare ourselves before entering the sanctuary.  Upon entering, each person recited, “He is risen” to one of the pastors who was handing out matches for each person to light a candle on their way in symbolizing the presence of Christ.  The service was a combination of prayer, silence, Scripture reading, and reflection.  Finally, we served communion to one another, offering the elements in a communal fashion as opposed to taking them individually.

    There was a little bit of time inbetween the communion service and the regular worship gathering to meet some people.

    What was most striking about the gathering of the LOV community was how intentional and theological all the elements of the gathering were.  Here were some of the most meaningful elements of the worship gathering.

    To communicate our unity as a body and the communal nature of gathering, we sat in concentric circles, thus able to face one another rather staring at the back of peoples heads.  As opposed to people, the candles symbolizing the presence of Christ as well as the communion elements were intentionally placed at the center.  When people spoke, it was always from a side.

    We were joined by all the children for the beginning of the service and when they were dismissed/blessed to their time together, not by a pastor, but by the entire community, they in turn blessed us in ours.

    Scripture was read by both men and women, young and old from the four “corners” of the circle – surrounding us with the Word of God.

    A weekly part of the gatherings at LOV is someone sharing a “story of wonder.”  A story of something God is doing in the life of a member or members of the community.

    David Fitch offered the message for the morning.  Because the community gathers together at the same time, and because they understand the formational purpose of the gathered church, he was better able to bring the text for the morning into a direct intersection with the life of the community.

    Prayers were offered at different times in the service and we were invited to personalize them out loud with our own thoughts and longings as the Spirit led.

    The musicians stood in a corner of the room so as to help people devote their full attention to the words we were singing.  Songs were placed strategically within different elements of the service to serve either as preparation or response to something.

    Perhaps the most meaningful part of the gathering came at the end.  As we sang a final song of joy and celebration, some children, a few with disabilities, spontaneously began to dance in a circle around the candles and communion elements at the center of the room.  They led as a few adults joined in with them. Truly beautiful.

    I can’t even begin to tell you about all the various artistic elements that enhanced the space we met in or the service we participated in.  Really, the whole thing was like living art, not the sort that can only be enjoyed by overtly artistic people (hello?!), but the sort that connects with the creative part of God’s image in which we’re made.

    The fact that Life on the Vine embraces a more participatory form of gathering as a community really contributes to their identification as a missional church community and after finishing up another year as a pastor on staff at a church, I am really looking forward to rediscovering my identity as a “normal” part of a church community.

    Posted in Amy, chicago, church, community, liturgy, living hope, LOV, missional, preaching/teaching, spiritual formation

    A Word on Liturgy

    September 19, 2008 // 5 Comments »

    Quote from Christianity Today article, “A Deeper Relevance“…

    It is precisely the point of the liturgy to take people out of their worlds and usher them into a strange, new world—to show them that, despite appearances, the last thing in the world they need is more of the world out of which they’ve come. The world the liturgy reveals does not seem relevant at first glance, but it turns out that the world it reveals is more real than the one we inhabit day by day.

    This statement about liturgy, a term we could easily replace with, “corporate worship,” is perhaps a perfect remedy to arguments we so often hear over cultural relevance.  Churches who seek to be “culturally relevant” in their worship (as opposed to incarnational in their lives and witness) have flipped the gospel on its head by beginning with the world the gospel addresses rather than the world the gospel call us to.  This is a call for the corporate worship gathering to be first and foremost a means of formation and discipleship for those who comprise the body of Christ as followers of Jesus.

    Posted in corporate worship, discipleship, liturgy, spiritual formation