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There have been many, including myself, who have been waiting for a homiletics text from the growing emergent publishing line. With multiple books addressing issues of worship and church, it is appropriate that the sermon be seriously taken up by this growing community of Christians seeking to rethink the purpose and practice of church. Doug Pagitt, pastor of Solomon’s Porch community in Minneapolis, offers a vision for preaching that he claims helps the church move beyond an enlightenment based understanding of the pastor, congregation, scripture and sermon.
Speaching
Pagitt begins by confidently asserting that the problem with preaching today is not the people, method, preacher or content but what he terms “speaching.” Speaching is not a particular style of preaching but a type of preaching “hardly distinguishable from a one-way speech. (12)” This understanding of a sermon goes deeper than the Sunday morning lecture as it has to do with the underlying relationship between the preacher and congregation. In the enlightenment driven act of speaching, the speaker dominates all content preparation, presentation and conclusions. The pastor becomes the main and most important player on “stage” and is perceived to have some type of direct connection with God.
This type of preaching developed at the rise of the Industrial Age and the church’s move to the tent meeting has formed structures such as professionalization of ministry and rewarding of speakers that keeps speaching en vogue. Pagitt points to serious issues with this understanding and calls the effect of speaching “relational violence. (26)” In fact, preaching in which one person has all the authority to bring the truth without question teaches listeners to “dehumanize the speaker and focus on the words” while disagreeing with the speaker is thought to be equivalent with disbelief in God (69). The power is in the hands of the one presenter and the people often learn to feel like they can only engage scripture through the sermonization of texts by that person.
While Pagitt affirms that this model can he helpful in small doses at the right situations, week after week of sitting in the pews and taking it becomes “dehumanizing. (69)” There is never any chance for the listener to engage the preacher, to offer up his or her viewpoint, to engage in discussion. The truth has been settled and the listener has been left out of the equation. Thus, speaching becomes a self-supporting system that only re-affirms the beliefs of the people who agree with the pastor while alienating those who might have questions. In essence, there is a one-way relationship between pastor and listener.
Progressional Dialogue
In light of the damage that speaching has done to the church (Pagitt calls the current situation a slight fever instead of a killing cancer), another model of preaching is offered termed “progressional dialogue.” This alternative model consists of “mutual admonition of one another in life with God. (26)” Based on a healthy relationship between preachers and hearers, this dialogue becomes a socializing force that seeks to move emphasis from application to implication.
Progressional Dialogue assumes that truth is located in the community and that each participant has valuable contributions to make to the preaching process. These assumptions about truth prompt Pagitt to call for a reimagined preparation procedure in which the community collectively forms the sermon. This implies that the pastor must have intimate relationships with the community instead of being a stranger on stage, an ethic Pagitt terms deep ecclesiology.
The formation of the sermon in community consists of “intentional interplay of multiple viewpoints that leads to unexpected and unforeseen ideas. (52)” Allaying fears of heresy or groupthink, Pagitt asserts that this process actually guides the community to a fuller understanding of truth and is in fact a historically faithful way of fending off heresy. Control shifts from one person to the community while the pastor (in light of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers) is one who is “gifted, prepared and prompted by God for the teaching and benefit of the community. (152)”
When the sermon is preached, it has grown up from the community instead of being forced down upon them. The community asks, “If this is our story, what will this mean for our lives?” instead of “how does this text apply to me? (36)” The pastor makes claims in the sermon concerning how the community does indeed fit into the story but these claims are provisional and can be challenged in community. All parties, including the preacher, enter into progressional dialogue ready to be changed and moved through encounter with others.
Pagitt writes that the point of preaching is “to help people delve into faith more fully, more deeply (102)” and the purpose of preaching is “to help people grow in their understanding of God and how we are to live as God’s people and to empower the church to live out God’s mission (162).” This “help” is much more than therapeutic prescription but prophetic speech as exemplified by Jesus Christ. In fact, this dialogical model should “destabilize and reorient” the community, continually forming its identity.
Finally, where do the Bible and Holy Spirit fit into this model? Scripture is “an authoritative member of the community” that should be free to speak for itself in this dialogue (195). While the pastor can be very helpful in giving historical background and context, it is important that participants learn to engage scripture without depending on the sermonization of texts for understanding or permission. The Sprit is “the arbiter of truth,” a vital way that Pagitt intentionally moves control from the pastor to the Divine.
Preaching, then, moves from speaching (monologue) to progressional dialogue that is built on deep relationships between members of a community. Control is moved from the pastor to God, a move that Pagitt practically advocates in sections about microphones, physical setting and tone of voice. The sermon arises out of these deep relationships and the multi-faceted community becomes implicated, destabilized and reformed by the sharing of this message.
Critique
I really appreciate the work Pagitt has done in urging a move away from a particular model of preaching that promotes authoritarian (and often male) dominance while separating the life of the pastor and congregation. This model has indeed been harmful in many respects, not the least being the ways in which churches have equated truth with the sermon and have rendered the rebuttal of a sermon unthinkable. Pagitt also importantly notes that this model has separated congregations from the text and has set up the preacher as the only means through which listeners can encounter scripture. The only tool listeners are allowed to use for interpretation is the weekly voice of the pastor who has some special relationship with God.
Pagitt offers the practice of progressional dialogue that moves the location of truth from the pastor’s study to the community’s life. Pagitt is right in asserting that the pastor must be deeply involved in the life of the community and not simply locked in a room while preparing the sermon. Provisional statements offered in community concerning the text promote an organic, bottom-up approach that promises to incorporate diverse and important viewpoints into the sermon. Encouraging discussion and feedback during or after the sermon helps the community begin to learn that their voice not only matters but is necessary in the search for a deeper faith. Throughout these encounters and discussions, the pastor must give up control to the Holy Spirit and be willing to take risks in listening to and speaking truth.
This is a beautiful picture of what the sermon can look like and Pagitt’s practical advice throughout the book that pulls from actual experience is incredibly insightful and helpful. Despite its sometimes difficult navigation, this book will encourage a new vision not only of preaching but also of church in a new world.
There are some important areas where Pagitt’s work could be strengthened and some vital questions that as of now have been left unanswered. One glaring omission is his lack of interaction with contemporary scholarship in homiletics. While Pagitt does briefly converse with Barth and Loyd-Jones, there is no engagement with scholars who have proposed similar models of conversational preaching in recent years. While this is a book written for preachers, interaction with scholarship could strengthen and enrich many of Pagitt’s arguments.
For example, critique of authoritarianism and monologue from the pulpit has been made by Fred Craddock and Lucy Rose among many others. Rose and John McClure have important works arguing for a collaborative ethic of preaching that restores truth to community. David Lose spends key time in his book on preaching arguing for the importance of provisional and penultimate truth claims. Charles Campbell’s postliberal homiletic argues for the formative social nature of preaching. Rose and Wilson offer valuable histories of how preaching came to be “speaching.” Engagement with even some of these important works would have strengthened many of Pagitt’s arguments that often seem to come directly from experience. This engagement would also help Pagitt define how his progressional dialogue fit into the broader homiletical offerings.
It also seems that the criticism of speaching in this text is directed at a particular strand of homiletical development, namely the propositional-deductive and more specifically, the evangelical expository tradition. While these traditions certainly need this critique, it would be interesting to observe how Pagitt would interact with other strands such as postliberal and testimonial proposals. What could this idea of progressional dialogue offer these trajectories that have seemingly moved past the notion of speaching?
There are also some important issues that are raised in reading this work that I look forward to Pagitt developing. What role besides “arbiter of truth” does the Holy Spirit play in communal sermon preparation? As an authoritative member of the community, is it allowable for scripture to miss attending a week or two? Are categories such as inspiration still helpful to this new model? In terms of practice, how would Pagitt describe the invitational nature of this model? How can we speak about the church moving from conversation or dialogue about a text to action? That is, how can the church be intentional about moving from the table to street? There could also be more intentionality in dealing with the issue of women in the pulpit, an important issue for many churches using the speaching model.
Preaching ReImagined will be an important work for the church, especially for those in the emergent conversation. Pagitt offers a model of preaching that will challenge many rarely critiqued notions about preaching. The work takes seriously the shifting world in which we live as well the historical nature of faith. With further conversation with contemporary work and continuing development of important issues, Pagitt will push the church to previously unimagined models and practices of preaching.
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Mark, I'm about to complete a seminary degree and have thought much about this subject as you have. I've also been a part of a rather large "emerging" type church in the Denver area. I appreciate Pagitt's comments, but even within the emerging conversations I'm not hearing much about reforming the function of preaching. Is preaching even necessary every Sunday? Could the church function in more effective ways without giving a talk on sunday morning (regardless of how "conversational" it is). Any time you are in front of 50-500 people it's going to appear in some ways to the same old monologue form. Even though the emergent stream is admirably "re-thinking" preaching it continues to be a function of the church that is elevated to unnecessary levels.
relational violence. i agree.
Preaching as relational violence? Hogwash! Pagitt needs to learn what speaking the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit really means.
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Mark, I'm about to complete a seminary degree and have thought much about this subject as you have. I've also been a part of a rather large "emerging" type church in the Denver area. I appreciate Pagitt's comments, but even within the emerging conversations I'm not hearing much about reforming the function of preaching. Is preaching even necessary every Sunday? Could the church function in more effective ways without giving a talk on sunday morning (regardless of how "conversational" it is). Any time you are in front of 50-500 people it's going to appear in some ways to the same old monologue form. Even though the emergent stream is admirably "re-thinking" preaching it continues to be a function of the church that is elevated to unnecessary levels. Posted by Ryan Taylor | Posted at 08/04/2006 9:07 AM
relational violence. i agree. Posted by tammy | Posted at 08/05/2006 7:53 AM
Preaching as relational violence? Hogwash! Pagitt needs to learn what speaking the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit really means. Posted by Anonymous | Posted at 08/09/2006 1:56 PM