PREACHING BEYOND SPEACHING

I am sitting at a Catholic monastery in Missouri preparing to talk with a group of clergy about preaching in the Inventive Age. I'm in the final stages of reworking this book (it was previously titled Preaching Reimagined) and my head is full of wonderings. I wonder who you are. I wonder what kinds of people will read a book about preaching in the Inventive Age. I wonder if I have anything helpful to say on the topic. I wonder if I have written a single line of any value. I not only wonder but I also worry. I worry about the opinions of people who don't think a pastor and author of a book about preaching should worry about things. I worry about people reading my sometimes-uncertain thoughts on preaching. I worry about coming across as someone who thinks of himself as an expert—someone who knows more than you and will tell you how to preach. So please, as you read, keep your worried, wondering author in mind.

I am a pastor who seeks to live in a community of people who are living out the hopes and aspirations of God in the world. Like many of you, I play a particular role in my community. As the pastor I'm often referred to as "the preacher." And frankly, this is a role I no longer relish. There was a time when I did. There was a time when I felt my ability to deliver sermons was a high calling that I sought to refine but didn't need to redefine.

Those days are gone.

NOW I FIND MYSELF REGULARLY REDEFINING MY ROLE AND THE ROLE OF PREACHING.

I find myself wanting to live life with the people of my community, where I can preach—along with the other preachers of our community—but not allow that to become an act of speech making. Instead, I want it to be a living interaction of the story of God and the story of our community being connected by our truth telling, our vulnerability, and our open minds, ears, and eyes—all brought together by the active work of the Spirit of God as we "let the message of Christ dwell among [us] richly as [we] teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in [our] hearts" (Colossians 3:16).

If I had my way, this book would be a conversation about these desires. Instead of your reading something I wrote, we would talk over a meal or in my family room or at your house. We would hear from one another and build on what each other says.

While a book cannot be a full conversation, my hope is that I will at least add to the conversation on preaching you may well be already having.

Please don't let the title of the book, Preaching in the Inventive Age, throw you. I'm not prescribing a method for all churches of the future. In fact, I'm quite sure there is no one method. However, I am suggesting some deep considerations about the function and role of preaching within our communities of faith that will lead to particular practices—but these are not one-size-fits-all prescriptions. And in no way do I mean to suggest that I speak for all who choose to engage in preaching in the Inventive Age.

Throughout the book I suggest "progressional dialogue" (a phrase I made up) as a preferable alternative to "speaching" (another new word meaning "the style of preaching that's hardly distinguishable from a oneway speech"). In the spirit of dialogue, I have designed this book to be as conversational and progressional as possible.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

The book isn't structured like a typical chapter book. It all begins below, where I lay out my basic premise and provide reference links to the forty chapters that make up the bulk of the book. Each chapter is designed to provide a more comprehensive discussion about the ideas in the chapter.

This section is also loaded with statements that may cause you to say, "Hang on a minute," or, "You can't just say that without supporting it in some way." That's the intent. Much like a conversation in which the participants push one another to say more on the topics in which they have an interest, the next chapter is meant to get the conversation started. That being the case, I have included reference numbers within the text. These are not footnotes but rather signposts as to where you can find more conversation about a particular point in later chapters.

From there you can either continue reading the rest of the book from start to finish, or you can jump between the points that interest you the most. For example, you might not be interested in the story of how I became a preacher but would prefer to go right to my suggestions on rethinking the role of the pastor. If so, you can skip point number five and go right to point twenty-three.

I admit that part of my desire to structure the book in this way is to justify my own reading habits. I do this with books all the time—just skip around and read the parts that interest me in the order that seems most interesting to me. Sometimes I don't even read all of it. But I feel like I'm cheating or missing out on something by not following the prescribed order.

In this book, however, not only are you not cheating but you're also encouraged to skip around. You won't miss out on something by doing so. In fact,

I HOPE YOU'LL GAIN SOMETHING BY TAKING THE CONVERSATION WHEREVER YOU WANT IT TO GO.

The book is also designed with more open space than usual. This is to encourage you to write your thoughts, to talk back, to not just sit there and take it. Put your ideas on the paper right next to mine; they belong there. In fact, they're needed. As part of the process of writing this book, I read a number of books about preaching. Over and over, I found myself scribbling notes in the small margins—things like, "Yes, totally!" or, "No, no, no." But I felt like a vandal writing...