The Future of Preaching. Geoffrey Stevenson
Roger Spiller was born in Birmingham where he was influenced by the preaching of Canon Bryan Green, a founder of the College of Preachers. After a brief period in industry Roger read theology at Durham and Cambridge and trained for ministry at Ridley Hall. He later qualified in adult education at Nottingham University. He ministered at Bradford Cathedral, Stratford-upon-Avon and Nuneaton, before becoming Principal of a national ministerial training scheme (Aston). He has been involved nationally in developing new patterns of ministerial education as well as in training and teaching. He is currently Director of Ministry and Ordinands in Coventry diocese and a Canon of Coventry Cathedral. He is secretary of the UK network of the Ecumenical Institute, Geneva, where he spent a semester, and is tutor and council member of the College of Preachers.
Ian Stackhouse is pastoral leader of Guildford Baptist Church. He has been preaching for over 20 years in a local church context but he has also preached quite extensively overseas. Ian has hosted Preachers’ Breakfasts and Conferences over the years to encourage pastors and also those starting out in preaching for the first time. He has authored two books, of which the first, The Gospel-Driven Church, seeks to underline the importance of expository preaching.
Roger Standing is a Baptist minister and is presently the Director of Training at Spurgeon’s College in London, where he teaches mission, evangelism and pioneer ministry. With over 30 years of experience in ministry he worked as an evangelist in Liverpool before pastoring churches in Leeds and South London. Prior to taking up his present position, he was the Regional Minister/Team Leader for the Southern Counties Baptist Association. His previous publications include Preaching for the Unchurched in an Age of Entertainment (2002) and Finding the Plot: Preaching in a Narrative Style (2004).
Geoffrey Stevenson is an adjunct lecturer in preaching, communication and media studies at New College, University of Edinburgh. He recently completed a Ph.D. in homiletics at Edinburgh, and before that he was Director of the Centre for Christian Communication at St John’s College, Durham. Prior to that he worked for 20 years as an actor. A deviser and performer of his own mime theatre shows, he toured extensively throughout the UK and Europe both to churches and to small-scale theatres. He has published two books on mime theatre in the Church and two on preaching: Pulpit Journeys (2006) and Preaching with Humanity (2008), co-authored with Stephen Wright.
Margaret Withers taught music for the Open University and in several Inner London schools, before becoming Diocesan Children’s Adviser for Rochester in 1989. Her interest in liturgy led her to provide training for clergy, Readers and ordinands on involving children in services, especially all-age worship. This led to the publication by BRF of the teaching programme Welcome to the Lord’s Table in 1999, which was followed by The Gifts of Baptism in 2003. Margaret was the Archbishop’s Officer for Evangelism among Children from 2001 to 2006. Her role included providing advice and establishing training for churches wishing to develop their outreach among children. In ‘retirement’ she maintains her interest in inclusive worship as a tutor for the College of Preachers, and through church music, and writing. Recent publications include Creative Communion (2008) and Local Church, Local School (2010).
Stephen Wright has been in the Anglican ministry since 1986. He served in parishes in the north of England before taking his Ph.D. in New Testament studies from the University of Durham in 1997. From 1998 to 2006 he was Director of the College of Preachers. He is now Tutor in Biblical Studies and Practical Theology at Spurgeon’s College, London, where he continues to direct the Masters in Theology (Preaching) course. Among his publications are (with Geoffrey Stevenson) Preaching with Humanity (2008) and (with Peter Stevenson) Preaching the Atonement (2005) and Preaching the Incarnation (2010).
Introduction
geoffrey stevenson
What is the future of preaching? More pointedly, as many have asked, is there a future for preaching? I will not here rehearse the well-known tropes from harbingers of doom. Instead, consider what Dean Inge observed, not about preaching but about human nature: ‘Any hopefulness for the future of civilization is based on the reasonable expectation that humanity is still only beginning its course.’ This encourages me to ask, what if, far from fading away under the harsh light of European secularism, Christianity is still only beginning her course? What if she returns, as she has time and time again, to the resurrection form of her Lord? Would a resurrection in preaching be far behind? As Richard Lischer observed, ‘most every reform movement in the church whether Franciscan, Dominican, Lollard, Brethren,
Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Methodist, has meant not only a revival of preaching but a re-forming of its method of presentation’ (2002, p. xvi). Rumours of preaching’s demise may yet prove greatly exaggerated.
But who would be so foolish as to try to predict the future of preaching? Almost every form as practised in British churches today – from the three- to four-minute homily before Mass to the 50- to 60-minute thematic or expository sermon – is located in a culturally specific ecclesial context. Very few practices can claim an unbroken lineage of rhetorical form and liturgical meaning that goes back more than a couple of hundred years. Shifts happen over time. Not only do theologies but also fashion and sensibilities change, sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly. You have to ask, will the preaching of our digitally immersed younger generations migrate online, becoming a welter of tweets and text messages launched into the ‘blogosphere’? And can that still be called preaching? Time will tell. But preaching isn’t standing still.
As indicated by many of the contributors to this book, there are historical givens, without which whatever is being done with words in an act of worship or evangelism can no longer be called preaching. There are also new insights and understandings about the preaching act that result from theology being done afresh in our time and culture. This can result in tension and uncertainty. Tension can of course be enormously creative, and uncertainty is not always a bad thing for a pilgrim people. It also gives a real provisionality to predictions and prescriptions. At base, however, a discussion about the future of preaching is implicitly an invitation to engage in preaching that is ‘forward-looking’ even while it acknowledges its roots and respects its heritage. Taken together, I think the contributors to this volume strongly assert that forward-looking preaching will hang on to three things (there may be more). It will engage faithfully with the Bible, it will engage directly with its listeners, and it will engage prophetically with the world.1
Forward-looking preaching engages faithfully with the Bible (and, by extension, with church tradition, doctrine and practice), to present and explain Jesus, the ‘hope that is set before us’. Forward-looking preaching engages directly with the congregation, to connect with their hopes and seeking persuasively to apply itself to the future corporate life and that of each listener. Forward-looking preaching engages prophetically with the world, bringing the liberating, releasing, healing word of God to a society so often bound by the chains of the past, too slow to challenge injustice, too blinded by wealth or by poverty to see a Saviour. We will look at these three areas in turn.
Forward-looking biblical preaching
Isn’t the Bible fixed in its canonical form, a narrative of God’s past dealings with his peoples? Isn’t it, moreover, a culturally bound text, locked into primitive agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean basin? Tribal warfare, law codes, songs without the music, wandering Aramaeans and temple disputes, itinerant religious teachers and their disciples: it’s hard enough bringing the Bible into the present, never mind applying it to the future. And yet it is, and claims to be, profoundly about the future, setting out God’s plans and purposes beneath a grand meta-narrative.
The various smaller narratives are parables and paradigms for us as individuals, as a Church and as a society. Its principal subject is the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, who shares a nature that is time bound, earthly and human, with a nature that is timeless, transcendent and divine. This means our hermeneutical/interpretative task is never easy, of course, and many are the theological differences over the detail, but if we are not at a very deep level passionately fired by the divine salvation economy of creation, redemption, restoration and re-creation,