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"On Preaching" by Scott Hoezee
Reflections on Preaching from the Center for Excellence in Preaching.
Pulpit Talk (Posted on April 24, 2006)
(Note: This article originally appeared in “Perspectives” magazine and is used here with permission.)
Preachers should at times befuddle their hearers. At least that is what Richard Baxter wrote in The Reformed Pastor. No, this befuddlement ought not to result from poor presentation or the preacher's use of words like perichoresis. Rather, according to Baxter, congregants need occasional stretching and challenging as a reminder that faith and theology contain matters that are deep and mysterious and subtle. Worshipers should not be permitted to believe that they have the faith all figured out or that they need never reflect any more on discipleship.
Needless to say, Richard Baxter is not a hero of the church growth movement. Today preachers are repeatedly told to keep things simple. Seekers, we are told, are turned off by theology. Neighborhood surveys often reveal that "boring doctrines" are precisely what has kept some people away from church. Thus the move toward dramas and five-minute homilies instead of traditional sermons.
But not only seekers are asking for a "sound-bite gospel." Many well-established Christians are also not much moved by anything requiring fully-firing synapses on a Sunday morning. To succeed today a church must be fluent in the language of the culture and then use that language to package a simple message for (increasingly) simple folk. Asking people to think long and hard about something works no better in church than it would on, say, the Donahue show.
If we cannot speak or think theologically in church, then where can we speak or think in these ways? Those of us who preach must confess that at least part of the reason "doctrinal preaching" gets a bad rap is because we have not always been at our creative, energetic best when preaching doctrinally. In my own tradition some have plodded through the Heidelberg Catechism with about as much verve as a child memorizing multiplication tables.
But must the solution to this scandalous preaching be the complete elimination of "theological talk" and the more subtle areas of the Christian faith? Is "good doctrinal preaching" merely oxymoronic (like "elementary Greek")? While not every sermon should be strictly doctrinal, there is some merit to Baxter's encouragement of sometimes presenting sermons that prod listeners (and preachers!) to their mental limits.
In Peculiar Speech William Willimon asserts that preaching is finally speech for the baptized. Preaching ought not to be a type of speech that could be understood anywhere; rather preaching should make sense only within the community of believers. The implication is that those who make up that community need to be sufficiently "in the know" so as to understand preaching's "peculiar" speech.
Indeed, as baptized people engaged in a lifelong process of becoming Christ-like, believers should be insatiably curious about God, creation, and their relation. Unhappily, today many people show a deplorable lack of curiosity. This lack of curiosity causes people to disdain any sermon that aims as much to educate as to inspire.
All preaching is a kind of translation: taking one form of speech (a biblical story or epistle, for instance) and carefully searching for apt and creative ways to translate it into contemporary speech. The facet of preaching is nowhere better seen than in doctrinal preaching. Preachers must take the language of theology (learned, one hopes, to some degree of fluency while in seminary) and then find equivalent words and phrases in common parlance. This delicate task requires a fair amount of work and forethought. For this reason some merely skirt doctrines altogether. But such avoidance impoverishes listeners.
Since today we are awash in a sea of information and of conflicting opinions, people need to be lashed to some firm theological moorings. For instance, many young people now face the allures of the New Age movement. A strong grounding in the doctrine of creation can make them properly suspicious of references to the earth as "our goddess mother" as well as to monistic tendencies to locate "the god within." Likewise, intelligent preaching in the area of soteriology can help make people wary of how some TV preachers package salvation. It might also keep them from buying shares in popular self-help schemas that tend to shipwreck grace on the shoals of individualism.
Increasingly it seems that many Americans are adopting a kind of mindless syncretism nourished by a concurrent rise in tolerance and a decline in reading, study, and reflection. Christians who have only vague ideas about what they believe, Christians who cannot speak intelligently about any line in the Apostles' Creed, are simply ill-equipped to provide a distinctive witness to our time. That many people even in churches no longer have patience for mind-expanding preaching may itself be a symptom of this contemporary malaise. As theologians-in-residence, preachers have an obligation to pass on the theology they've learned so as to enable the congregation to "add to their faith, knowledge."