The Future of Preaching - Geoffrey Stevenson

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of our late modern culture is the speed of change. It ‘is a society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines’ (Bauman, 2005, p. 1). He goes on to observe that it is increasingly difficult for elements of culture to hold their shape or stay on course for long, and that predicting the future on an extrapolation of past events is an increasingly risky and potentially misleading thing to do. He charts the five key challenges of liquid modernity as:

      1 The inability of social forms to keep their shape for long.

      2 Power and politics separating as power flows beyond national boundaries in a globalized world.

      3 The loss of community with the increase of a randomized network of relationships.

      4 The collapse of long-term thinking, planning and acting.

      5 The responsibility for resolving life’s problems and challenges shifting onto the shoulders of individuals.

      Christianity and British society

      There is no escaping the fact that the place of Christianity significantly changed over the second half of the twentieth century. A seemingly inexorable decline in attendance at Sunday worship and increasingly strong calls for the secularization of public life and its implied demand for the disestablishment of the Church of England are all evidence of this trend.

      Many writers have begun to explore the idea of a post-Christian Britain and have concluded that it might not be as bad a context in which to engage with the missio Dei as some might have feared. Stuart Murray defines this period of Post-Christendom as,

      the culture that emerges as the Christian faith loses coherence within a society that has been definitively shaped by the Christian story and as the institutions that have been developed to express Christian convictions decline in influence. (2004, p. 19)

      Once again the designator ‘post’ can be deceptive by implying to the casual observer that Christendom has already been consigned to history. This would be a mistake as Murray himself points out, as he identifies a range of ecclesiastical and social vestiges of Christendom in the life of both the Church and wider society (pp. 189–93).

      There can be no mistake that the place of Christianity in British society is changing. But what is its present form and what might the future hold? The best empirical data that is presently available indicates that on any given Sunday between 6 and 7 per cent of the population attend services of worship, rising to 15 per cent on any given month and 25 per cent, if it is once or more each year (Brierley, 2006, and Tear Fund, 2007). Indeed, if attendance at a Christian service for a christening, wedding or funeral is taken into account, it is 80 per cent. Or again, according to the 2001 census 71.75 per cent of people in England and Wales considered their faith identity to be Christian.

      The uncoupling of the formal relationships between Church and state seems irreversible. While Rowan Williams may have admitted to the New Statesman in an interview on 18 December 2008 that he could ‘see that it’s by no means the end of the world if the Establishment disappears’, he confessed to a ‘bloody mindedness’ that would resist a push to the privatization of faith by that route. While the old Christendom settlement may be passing, some have speculated on the arrival of a new expression of Christian social influence through the growth of Christianity in the global South. In Africa, Asia and Latin America the churches saw spectacular growth during the twentieth century. Many admit that the centre of gravity for Christianity has already shifted away from the West, and commentators like Philip Jenkins have observed that through social, economic and politically driven migration, not to mention missionary endeavour, the Church of the South will re-evangelize the first world. This is ‘The Next Christendom’ (Jenkins, 2007). With 44 per cent of worshippers in inner London being drawn from the black and ethnic minority communities, this is already a reality in the capital (Brierley, 2006, p. 99).

      Mediated preaching

      So, what does this all mean for the future of preaching? Some are convinced that it spells the end of an out-of-date, six-foot-above-contradiction monologue that is both educationally flawed and culturally anachronistic as a means of communication. Such critiques more often than not interact with exaggerated stereotypes that do not bear scrutiny, or they extrapolate from the experience of sub-standard preaching an overly pessimistic assessment of the whole. There is no doubt that bad preaching is boring and that cultural change has the potential to make a more traditional approach to preaching appear dated and out of touch. However, there is much more to be said.

      It has always been true that preaching is a mediated discipline. Incarnational theology has taught us that the Word of God must always be clothed in the specific culture of place and time. In addition, as the Word of God is proclaimed it is not a pure distillation of divine revelation, but rather it has to take shape in the thoughts, words and ideas of the preacher and then be mediated through their experience, character and personality. Our contemporary context adds additional layers to a view of ‘media-ted’ preaching through both the all-pervasive nature of ‘the media’ alongside the ever-more sophisticated technological tools of communications multimedia.

      If preaching must be mediated through its surrounding culture, and we live at a time of significant cultural change, it is inevitable that preaching will change too. Not to allow for this would place the proclamation of the word of God over against the surrounding culture and require it to take a step away from such a dangerous influence. Such a view might be admissible for those dimensions of culture that are antithetical to the gospel, but it would be a serious mistake to adopt with regard to preaching as a whole. Indeed, because of the mediated nature of preaching, it would only result in the continued embrace of the cultural embodiment of homiletics from another time and place.

      Many of the voices calling for change in the practice of preaching, consciously or unconsciously draw on that movement in the second half of the twentieth century that became known as ‘the new homiletic’. With Craddock’s call for a move from deductive to inductive preaching (Craddock, 1978) and the work of others like Lowry with his advocacy of the narrative plot and his infamous graphic ‘loop’ (Lowry, 1980) the sermon was shifted towards the emerging cultural trends like the growing pervasiveness of storytelling in the entertainment industry and suspicion of the motives of those attempting to make authoritative pronouncements. McClure (1995, 2001), for example, argues for a collaborative approach that sees the preacher preparing in a ‘roundtable’ context with other members of the congregation, where shared insights and concerns are established to form the substance of the following week’s sermon.

      Underlining the importance of an inductive approach for postmodern people, Graham Johnston (2001) also stresses the significance of storytelling alongside the inclusion of drama, art, audiovisual aids and the use of humour. Appealing for a creative ‘remixing’ of preaching, Jonny Baker advocates a similar range of strategies that keeps the ‘unleashing of the power of Scripture’ in a sermon fresh. Team working ensures a mixture of ideas and styles that can be integrated into an inductive approach that surprises and, at times, ‘pulls the rug out from underneath’ the listeners’ expectations (Baker, 2009, p. 86). In this way preaching is accommodated to contemporary culture that enables an expression of the gospel that connects and is accessible to its audience.

      This, of course, is only part of the story of contemporary culture. Talk of the death of the ‘monologue’ is premature. In a number of

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