The Future of Preaching. Geoffrey Stevenson

      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.

      So, what are the elements of contemporary culture that the preacher must engage with in twenty-first-century Britain? What are the issues to be negotiated and the pitfalls to be avoided if the twin errors of dogmatic irrelevance and cultural surrender are to be avoided? In this regard ecclesial expectations and the homiletical objective will always need to interact with contemporary culture to establish an appropriate balance in the preaching task. A weekly sermon for a well-established and historic congregation will be shaped differently from an evangelistic preaching opportunity in a university mission. The task of this chapter is to map the current cultural landscape as it affects preaching, to note its implications and to look for signs that might help us shape the task to hand.

      Contemporary British culture

      What does it mean to be British? From Norman Tebbit’s notorious ‘cricket test’ to determine immigrant integration into the UK to Gordon Brown’s call to celebrate national identity and embrace the Union flag in the wake of the 7 July bombing in London in 2005, there have been repeated attempts to define ‘Britishness’. The difficulty of the task is cast in high relief by the lack of success of all those who have attempted it.

      While many lament the passing of an overarching ‘British culture’ and the increasing fragmentation of wider society, it would be a mistake to assume that there was nothing to be said. There are a range of common themes that run through our shared life. They may not be of the quirky ‘stiff-upper-lip’ variety that was supposedly illustrative of our national stoicism, but they are integral components of our wider cultural experience. They may lack the ability to restore a substantive social cohesion, yet they form a part of the tapestry of our shared life that it is important for any preacher to have in view. More than that, they form the contours of the landscape we inhabit, the cultural environment in which we live.

      There are any number of trends and observations that it would be interesting to explore, but outlined below are those which might be of particular concern to those charged with preaching God’s Word.

      Entertainment

      Back in 1985 Neil Postman wrote his classic text, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In it he charts how the ‘age of exposition’ has given way to an ‘age of entertainment’. Gone, now, are the days when public political debates could go on for hours in an orderly fashion as a series of speeches and rebuttals. Similarly, in the Church the day of the great revivalists like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney had passed. These were men of learning whose sermons were laced with theology and doctrine. Edwards, for example, read his tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions, not trusting himself to extemporaneous utterance. If his hearers were to be moved by what he said, they had to understand him first.

      The developments in