What Makes a Practice Good?

My children get the opportunity to live in a neighborhood with people of various racial and ethnic descents: African American, Haitian, Philippine, Caucasian, Puerto Rican, Russian, Indian, and others. What a joy that is. All of this is on one street in one neighborhood, in a relatively rural town. If the preaching of the church they go to is to reach even their single street, it will need to find ways to address a diverse context in a singular place. Certainly, a beautiful opportunity for the preaching life today is the intermingling of cultures all over the world. This opportunity also presents a question for how to preach well and how to know when we have preached well. Where do we find the standards for preaching to such diverse contexts when standards differ from place to place, community to community, and culture to culture? How do we guide preachers who will not only preach to contexts that are diverse but also need to preach in a diversity of contexts over their preaching ministry? In short, we have some difficult questions to ask of preaching, or any practice, in this season of human history.

Who gets to decide what makes preaching better? And who is it better for once the definition of "better" is decided? If you are reading a preaching book you most likely want to be a good preacher, not just craft one good sermon. That requires a practice of preaching that meets diverse contexts with consistent goodness. What makes the practice of preaching truly good across cultures and contexts? Answering the question well requires more than learning seventeen culturally specific ways to preach. Learning to preach to different but discrete cultures is important. Yet, all seventeen of those cultures may be present in the same service.

For the sake of an analogy, imagine that you want to build a neighborhood. What goes into building a good house? There are some components that will be true of any structure we deem a house. The stability, security, shelter, and unity of the dwelling will likely all come into view. However, for a good house to be a truly good house it has to be good for those who dwell in it. A portion of that will be highly culturally determined.

Preaching is a practice, but it is also like a home, a place we have to live. A clear picture of the working parts any practice has will help us make sure the most important components are all in working order. To that end this chapter outlines the most important characteristics of practices that persist in any context: aim, functions, external versus internal goods, and virtues. Think of these as building codes for constructing your preaching house. Like building codes, this chapter may be more difficult to understand than the actual building of the thing itself (such as using a sermon form in chapter 9). Yet these codes can prevent the house from being unethically constructed, unsafe, or inhospitable in coming years. The next two chapters will gather the wisdom of the ages of homiletics to describe what it looks like when these working parts are in good order for the practice of preaching. (See appendix C for an illustration of all components working together.) For now, we need to know what a practice is and how practices are culturally modified: how does a homiletics house becomes a suitable preaching home?

Practices Defined

A violinist, a tennis player, and a chess player practice their performance. Though preachers do need to practice their skill sets in this way at times, it is not the sense of the term "practice" theologians typically intend. We are pointing toward a more holistic use of the term when we talk of practicing the preaching life. The sociological and philosophical exploration of practices and the technical meaning of the word practice was initiated primarily by two very different thinkers: Pierre Bourdieu and Alasdair MacIntyre. Both MacIntyre's After Virtue and Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice offer influential views of formation through habitual practices. Each of them offers something unique to how we understand preaching as a practice that shapes our lives.

MacIntyre helps define the aspects of practice this book prescribes for preachers: what preaching does best, how it does it well, and what kind of person is required to enjoy the preaching life. Bourdieu describes the aspects of practice against which this book warns: insensitive standards based on ignorance of class and cultural differences. Both of these poles are needed for a whole and healthy picture of the practice of preaching to emerge.

First, MacIntyre's definitions and categories help us define the important components of a well-ordered practice of preaching. MacIntyre defines a practice as a "meaningful, coherent, and complex set of actions pursued communally over time for goods internal to the practice." We pursue preaching and other practices first and foremost for the sake of the good that is possible through those practices. Though preaching can be seen in all of its complexity (performative, rhetorical, theological, exegetical, and liturgical), it is one practice pursued across the ages for the sake of the common good. The complex practice of preaching has survived for millennia because it persistently accomplishes good when we practice preaching well. Further, as we will explore below, preaching accomplishes good for preacher and listener, individual and community, through the good things that naturally emerge within and around preaching. Those good things preaching accomplishes can be divided between either internal or external goods.

Internal goods are those goods that reside within the practice itself. These goods are accomplished by pursuing the practice over time according to its appropriate standards. When we practice well, good things happen naturally and intrinsically. Part of what distinguishes practices from other activities is the shared nature of their internal goods. As MacIntyre puts it, "It is characteristic of [practices] that their achievement is a good for the whole community who participate in the practice." Inspiration toward love and good deeds through a preaching life is a communally shared good; the pastor's expense fund or paycheck is not. The opportunity to give witness to the goodness of God is an internal good; the preacher's national reputation is not. The enjoyment of God through the worshipful description of God's character is an internal good; the building of a larger church is not. The internal goods are good in an intrinsic way. There is good in receiving a paycheck, a good reputation, and a growing church if all things are...