LITMIR.BIZ

      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,

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