be understood and practised as a spiritual gift, truly charismatic. Finally, Ruthlyn Bradshaw engages us with the distinctive culture of black preaching, helping to ease open the door through which mutual and highly fulfilling interchanges can take place. Such dialogue will surely be a part of the future of preaching, and these authors are to be commended for showing us some of the different sides of what will undoubtedly be the multi-faceted jewel of preaching in the future.
Part Two, ‘Practices’, contains work on some of the classic subjects of homiletics, with authors painstakingly crafting visions of the future of preaching. Trevor Pitt asserts that preaching is a primary form of theological reflection, and challenges preachers of the future to be theologically rigorous and tough-minded about how they develop the content of their preaching. Stephen Wright focuses a lens on what it will mean to base preaching on scriptural texts when there are important challenges both to the authority of Scripture as well as to the very idea of what constitutes a text in the ‘information age’. Paul Johns reminds us that a future world immersed in 24/7/52 news coverage will require theologically nimble and courageously prophetic preachers, but presents important opportunities to do theology, to echo Trevor Pitt, at the preaching interface between Church, world and Scripture. Returning to questions of culture and communication, Margaret Withers, writing on preaching to all ages, reminds us that every service presents a challenge to communicate with the wide range of backgrounds, personality types and, yes, ages present, not just when children are present. Ian Paul looks at the Church’s cultural linguistic context, and urges a fresh understanding of persuasive, metaphorical speech based on biblical rhetoric, to enable preachers to connect with their heritage in order to preach in the future. Finally, Richard Littledale helpfully and practically tackles the form of preaching in the future as the Church come to grips with the communications revolution.
The person of the preacher is the title and subject of the last section, ‘People’. This begins with a kind of straddling chapter, since Leslie Francis’s work on the SIFT method of preaching is concerned equally with reaching listeners and with understanding the psychological orientations of the preacher. It is based on psychological type theory, and I expect will be quite challenging, or frown inducing, for some readers, and tremendously liberating or energizing for others. A chapter on the preacher’s inner life, by Susan Durber, might be expected to be about holiness and piety, and, while these will be a part of preaching’s future as much as its past, she proposes an important and unorthodox way of integrating the God-given humanity of the preacher with the sermons she or he is called to preach. Finally, in a chapter on forming future preachers, I propose a model for understanding what it is to learn to preach. I consider a range of what I consider to be vital factors in the trajectory of life-long learning that comprises a preacher’s walk with God in the awesome calling and unparalleled privilege that is preaching.
I am delighted that the esteemed American homiletician David Schlafer agreed to write the Afterword, for he brings to his task great wisdom and an infectious enthusiasm for preaching, based on a confidence that if God wants preaching to have a future, then it will be unstoppable, and as glorious as anything seen in the past.
So what is the future of preaching? I would not dare to predict but, to return to my theme, I want to suggest that the question of whether preaching even has a future will be decisively influenced by the extent to which preaching in our churches becomes forward-looking preaching. The Church and the world alike need preaching that looks to the future, proclaiming, to the glory of God and in the power of the spirit, Jesus Christ as Lord of all space and time. May we find the strength, vision and courage to undertake that charge now and on into the future.
Notes
1. This is taken from The College of Preacher’s Commitment to Preaching in 2010, its Jubilee year.
2. Pat Robertson (1930–), 700 Club, 2 December 1981.
Reference
Richard Lischer, 2002, The Company of Preachers: Wisdom on Preaching, Augustine to the Present, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
part one
Contexts
1
Mediated Preaching
Homiletics in Contemporary British Culture
roger standing
The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish. (John 1.14, The Message)
As Eugene Peterson wrestles with the prologue of John’s Gospel and the mystery of the incarnation the mind-boggling reality that defines the whole of the Christian faith tumbles out. The one through whom everything was created became a flesh-and-blood person at a specific place and time. There was a locality, a neighbourhood, which was his. There were people that he lived next door to, a community that he was a part of, events that he was caught up into – this is real life as we know it.
Context has always affected preaching. It is no surprise that, when Jesus preached he spoke about what people knew, and used that as a means to open up the truth of God to his hearers. Scan the Gospels and you will find Jesus deploying insights from agriculture (Matt. 9.35–8; 13.1–43), the countryside (Matt. 5.25–34), the construction industry (Matt. 7.24–9) and familial rites of passage (Matt. 22.1–14) as he addresses those who have come to listen to him.
There is no pure, culture-free, gospel. The apostle Peter’s encounter with the Roman centurion Cornelius, with its accompanying heavenly vision, had woken him up to the issue (Acts 10 and 11), while Paul was clearly aware of it too as is evident from his time in Athens. Attracting the curiosity of certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers he was invited to the Areopagus to give a full account of his ‘new teaching’. Drawing on the poetry of Epimenides, Aratus and Cleanthes his preaching takes on a decidedly Greek feel, while the gospel themes of judgement and resurrection are the focus of his message (Acts 17.16–34).
Writing later to the church at Corinth he explains this gospel principle that informs his whole life as a missionary disciple, not just his preaching. ‘I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some’ (1 Cor. 9.22b). This is more than an evangelist’s strategy. When Jesus commanded the twelve to make disciples of all nations, he was thinking more of culturally distinct groups than nation states (Matt. 28.18). Similarly, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit affirmed the cultural diversity of the crowd as they each heard the ‘wonders of God’ in their own language (Acts 2.5–12). This reversal of Babel goes to the heart of cultural identity and expression. Indeed, the climax of John’s vision of the heavenly city is of a place where ethnic distinctiveness is retained as ‘the glory and honour of the nations’ are brought into it (Rev. 21.26).
If this principle has been at the heart of God’s self-revelation from the beginning, it poses a challenging question to every preacher. In what culture does the gospel we preach live? Is it held in a biblical time capsule? Is it embodied in the culture of a denominational tradition or the history and context of our own personal experience of faith? Or, following the incarnational example of the gospel itself, is it shaped by the culture and context of those who are to receive the message?
There are dangers here. To fail to clothe the gospel we preach in the culture of those who are to receive it is to risk it being heard as irrelevant. By contrast, culture cannot be embraced uncritically as that will only swiftly lead to a syncretistic compromise of the message itself. There are no easy answers and no simple shortcuts.
