lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
-
Archive of "preaching/teaching" Category
Missional Preaching Part 3: Preaching as a Call for Response
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?
Missional Preaching Part 2: Preaching as the Proclamation of Biblical Truth
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.
Missional Preaching Part 1: Preaching as a Communal Activity
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 of Eastern Mennonite University. 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?
Transitioning Traditional Churches into Missional Ones
A little over a week ago, my cousin-in-law Josh, asked how one might go about transitioning traditional churches into “something more missional at its core.” Since I have banged my head against this wall for years in several different churches, my response will be a mixture of, “here’s where I failed,” and “here’s what I think is most helpful.” For anyone who might have missed them, my posts on, “The Move: The Journey from Attractional to Missional,” and “What is Missional?” would be really helpful in understanding where I am coming from.
I should say a few things at the beginning to help frame my thoughts.
1) This is a wine skins issue (Mt. 9:17). Anyone considering this topic who thinks (whether they realize it or not) that this is basically about getting new wine into old wine skins is destined for frustration and failure – I speak from experience! Missional churches represent brand new wine skins, not just new wine.
2) This takes a long time. The most experienced people will tell you 8-10 years minimum. When we are talking about changing the core identity of, not just a person, but a community, we have to expect a long hard road. An apt analogy – God got Israel out of Egypt in pretty short order, but it took another 40 years to get Egypt out of Israel.
3) No one person is capable of maneuvering this transition. Solo pastors are dead in the water in this regard. And this isn’t to say that the better way is having a team of top-down leaders – this will end up being damaging as well. One of the keys to instilling missional DNA in a church community is inspiring and encouraging new imagination from the bottom.
Those things being said, what does it take? What might the process look like?
My short answer is,
A Spirit-guided intermingling of communal practices, teaching, and prayerful reflection.
Here’s my slightly-longer expansion on those three things.
I take for granted that fundamental to the distinctions of “traditional” and “missional” is a vision of what it means to be the church in Post-Christendom vs. Christendom. My personal opinion (others may disagree) is that there is no point in talking about what it means to be a missional church until Christendom has been rejected as a cultural value. Thus, transitioning traditional churches to missional ones is a non-linear process of deconstruction and reconstruction. Communal practices, teaching, and reflection are the tools which assist in this ongoing task. It would be a (classically modern) mistake to think of this as a mainly intellectual enterprise. Instead, in the integration of these things, deconstruction and reconstruction happen alongside one another.
Since there is no universal model to apply to this topic, we are better served by asking general questions that need to be answered in specific contexts. Here are some questions which I think would serve us well in maneuvering this sort of transition.
– In both small numbers as well as large, what are the practices we can engage in as a community that will shape us into people and “a people” who think and act like Jesus?
– As we try to be honest with ourselves, what things are we doing as a community that don’t seem to be contributing to our spiritual formation?
– How do we incorporate space in our times together (in homes, in meetings, in gatherings) to intentionally reflect on and respond to what we sense God is speaking and doing in our community?
– Who are those in our community who seem most gifted to teach (identified by the fruit of their teaching helping people become more like Jesus)? How can we encourage these people to engage with authors and speakers who are dealing with the subject of missional ecclesiology on our behalf?
– How do we make incremental yet strategic changes in the percentage of money that goes to those things which ensure our security as opposed to those things which necessitate faith in the midst of great risk?
Over and above questions like these, I would also suggest these sort of biblical principles for those who shoulder the responsibility for a transition like this:
– Find people of peace who can be trusted and are willing to commit to the journey. Ask for their help.
– Demonstrate servant leadership by being open, transparent, and broken.
– Commit to structures of biblical conflict resolution. Entrust to God’s care those who choose to leave (there will be many and this is not necessarily a sign of poor leadership).
OK, there’s some initial thoughts. I’m sure I’ll have more so I hope to continue the discussion by way of comments.
Preaching in the Missional Church
I get a huge amount of joy out of teaching & preaching. I once took a spiritually oriented personality profile test sort of thing that articulated my bent toward preaching like this:The Teacher leader focuses on the integration of truth into the personal and social elements of the community.
I’m thinking about this today because I just finished reading a brilliant paper, “Preaching in the Missional Church” by Ervin R. Stutzman, a professor of homiletics at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.
Quick Aside: If you want to get a truly helpful understanding of what missional is all about, listen to Anabaptists!
In the paper he unpacks a number of distinctives of a missionally-shaped (Post-Christendom) vision of preaching and also addresses the need for new methods of training these sorts of preachers which just happens to relate perfectly to this series I am doing on a missional vision of theological education.
Check out the article here and feel free to drop a comment if you have a thought or question.
Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: Character Formation
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness
In my last post I tried to make a case for the necessity of theological education of missional leaders being rooted in missional community. With this as a contextual prerequisite, I would further suggest that the ultimate aim of a missionally oriented process of leadership training is the formation of Christlike character.
more of this artist’s amazing photography here
It is too naive to suggest that Christendom was wholly uncritical of the character of Christian leaders. It is more accurate to say that there’s an inherent assumption within Christendom that if we can only ensure that our leaders believe all the right things, their character will follow suit. This has turned out to be a deeply lamentable mistake.
It may be necessary for me to reiterate at this point that I am no anti-intellectual. You would never find me downplaying the importance of continuing study, exposure to new perspectives and ideas, or deep, thoughtful reflection. Instead, I would suggest that a missional vision of theological education will only value intellectual dimensions of training inasmuch as they contribute to the formation of Christlike character in missional leaders. Therefore, we might expect a missional vision of theological education to…
1) Train leaders how to think as opposed to telling them what to think. This is only possible when we humbly buy into the reality that our systems of truth are all fallible and trust that encouraging leaders to follow Jesus is preferable to warning them of the dangers of venturing outside of a particular theological grid. Thus, through books, articles, media, speakers, discussions, conferences, etc., we may freely (and wisely!) expose leaders to various biblical/theological traditions and perspectives. Where the rubber meets the (missional) road, so to speak, is in the questions we encourage students to ask of what they are being exposed to. I won’t go into them here,* but I submit that a missional vision of what it means to be the Body of Christ inclines us to ask different questions of all that we learn than that of Christendom.**
2) Conjoin all intellectual study with missional practice. Only given the assumptions of Christendom could we have divorced religious study from community based missional practice and witness. A missional vision of the church and theological education is characteristically and relentlessly incarnational. Missional theology is nothing if not that which we come to know about God as we participate in God’s mission in the world through the Body of Christ. In this light, I would suggest that each and every aspect of intellectual study find its place within a structure of missional practice which includes both personal and corporate spiritual disciplines.
3) Develop a community based assessment of a leaders process of character development. When character formation is the central issue in the equipping of missional leaders, time frames are perfunctory. It’s not one’s ability to make it through a process that qualifies them as a leader, but the manner in which they participate and their holistic development from start to finish. It takes a community to discern these things. As valuable as having the commitment and support of a community is to a leader in training, their willingness to speak the truth in love regarding their development is every bit as essential. Incorporating various means of mentorship and scheduling regular checkpoints between leaders and communities are key components of a missional vision of theological education.
What we know and what we can do as leaders isn’t just meaningless w/o Christlike character, it’s actually negative, destroying the very nature of what it means to follow Jesus and participate in God’s mission in the world. As Jesus was only worth following inasmuch as he said and did as God said and did, so too are his disciples w/o power and authority if they are not leading out of this sort of Christlike character.
This is all relates to the subject of my next post, the shaping of convictions. Hope to have some helpful dialogue before then though, so let’s have at it!
*You can find a very helpful article on this subject here.
**In proposing this I readily (and happily) admit that we will always be coming from a particular (hermeneutical) vantage point. I will explore this further in a future post, but the notion of some completely objective posture in the formation of leaders is neither possible nor desirable.
Hi There…
Hey, I'm JR - welcome to the blog.
I'm just an average guy trying to shape his identity around God's dream for the world and his place in it. This blog is a place for me (and you!) to reflect on and discuss all that might mean. Looking for a bit more on me? Check out the about me. Peace.
tweets
- Mid-March baby, mid-March !! http://twitpic.com/190132 2 hrs ago
- shared this: The church’s role within the Missio Dei – Yes we still need the church.: A group of us have been play... http://bit.ly/9CW4ct 5 hrs ago
- via the lifeasmission ARCHIVES: Martin Luther King Jr. Vigil http://bit.ly/ahUtID #FB 16 hrs ago
- Beautiful 3BR/2BA home w/ fireplace & lake view for sale in Canton, OH. Near Malone University, CAK, & "The Strip." http://bit.ly/bSFmln 22 hrs ago
- shared this: Do Not Pledge Allegiance to a Political Party: “(We can) understand why the apostles were subjected t... http://bit.ly/aXFrmt 23 hrs ago
- More updates...
