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No tweet too small
I have commented before on the digital noise which is the accompaniment to my day. Whilst some might find it distracting, for the most part it keeps me in touch with the world. Across my computer screen as I prepare a sermon or plan a programme for the church comes information about everything from the sublime to the ridiculous. This morning was a good example. At 10.15am, I received the following Tweet:
Hoping for the guttering/roofing people to come and do their stuff
Scrolling a little further down, I found this Tweet, sent one minute earlier from the International Space Station:
Up on the nose! Discovery’s close-up photo from ISS, approaching.
It was accompanied by a photo:
- Image: NASA
Like it or not, this is the borderless, instantly communicating world in which we live. In it a man mending the gutter and a spacecraft mending the space station sit side by side. As those committed to excellence in communication, we need to keep up.
It is important, though, that we keep up with both ends of the communication – namely the majestic and the ordinary. Earlier this morning Jonny Rose published an excellent post on why he asks people about what they have for breakfast. Basically – its all about community.
For the past thirteen years it has been my privilege to serve in a church whose stated mission is ‘bringing Christ to the community and the community to Christ’.
How big is the community, though?
Looking around
Jack- in- the- pulpit is a woodland flower native to North America, where the ‘pulpit’ protects the central shaft of male & female flowers. Also known in French as the ‘petit precheur’ (little preacher), or as the bog onion!
Image: CreativeCommons
One of many rocks around the world known as ‘pulpit rock’ on account of its shape. This one is at Portland Bill in England.
Image: CreativeCommons
The pulpit, or pulpit rail, on the bow of a sailing boat. Named after its similarity to its church cousin.
- Image: mortimerfabs.co.uk
The word ‘pulpit’ in Polish refers to the desktop on your computer. Food for thought for those involved in ‘digital church’, surely?
Whatever kind of pulpit you use today -may you use it well and bring blessing to others.
Like this:
A sufferer speaks out
As a preacher I suffer from a disease known to many of my colleagues – compulsive illustration acquisition syndrome. It’s all Martin Luther’s fault really – since he taught his students to draw their sermon illustrations from life all about them. My case has grown worse since I started to work on the Pause for Thought team – and find myself looking out for illustrations all around about me. I have been known to pull into a lay-by and break my little notebook out to jot down a potential gem there and then.
Once in a while, though, its nice to know that you are not the worst afflicted. Last Sunday I was due to preach on one of our 50 Biblefresh memory verses, and somebody presented me with the photo below. The owner of this camera shop in Singapore had gone one better, and actually named his shop after a Bible verse in order to provoke conversation!
And they say preachers are the ones who treat life as one big illustration!
A camera shop with a clear focus
Like this:
Delving into the archives
After a lively and broad-ranging discussion on buses, advertising et al, it seemed like a good moment today for a commercial break. Back in the days before Building Societies were banks and ‘bank’ became a dirty word, the advert below was often to be seen on our television screens. There is a kind of simple charm to it, brought about by everything from the vintage Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young soundtrack to the theatrical ‘staging’. Not only that, but there’s something about it that wouldn’t be a bad advert for the collaborative venture which we call church, too.
Ticked off
Not sure whether I should be alarmed, puzzled, or pleased – but I find myself agreeing with the British Humanist Association, at least to a certain extent. I found their previous advertising campaign on the side of buses mildly amusing and mildly offensive in equal measure. Their current campaign, though, set to launch in advance of the UK Census next month, makes a reasonable point.
The BHA are concerned that people may tick a box on the question below indicating a historical or inherited religious affiliation rather than an active participation.
- Image: BBC
In the light of this, they are set to run another bus advertising campaign with the slogan “If you’re not religious then for God’s sake say so.”
Whilst I might query the exact wording, I have to applaud the sentiment. It seems to me that I spend much of my time both in and out of the pulpit arguing the case for active participation in faith rather than historical affiliation with religion. I would far rather that someone who never enters a church ticked “no religion”, than that they ticked “Christian” out of some sense of nostalgic loyalty to the traditions of their forebears. Out of such honesty a clean platform for preaching the Gospel is hewn.
Of course there are many complex issues here, and the shades of meaning in this question may be felt differently by Christians in different traditions. However, an honest appraisal of the religious landscape in the United Kingdom could be helpful to all those of us who seek to contribute to it.
My trouble with buses is that I’m rarely certain about exactly which route goes where – all the while assuming that the driver knows exactly where he or she is going. Where is this advert going, do you think?
Like this:
The curse of the mobile
If you had to think of the worst possible moment for your mobile phone to ring – I wonder what it would be? Every time I record a radio broadcast, I live in dread of forgetting to turn my mobile off. Equally, it would be seriously embarrassing to have it go off during a prayer meeting or whilst preaching. Can you imagine, though, the awkwardness if it went off during a funeral?
Mourners at St Margaret’s Church, Rottingdean, don’t have to imagine. At a funeral service last week somebody had forgotten to switch their mobile off. That would have been bad enough, but would you care to hazard a guess as to the offending ring-tone? Whilst many tracks spring to mind, the Bee Gees’ ‘staying alive’ is definitely not the best!
Confession is, apparently, good for the soul – so what have been your most awkward mobile moments? Time to share…
A time for theodicy?
A century or so ago, the minister was often the most educated person in the congregation. As often as not, the preacher was the only person with ability, money or inclination to read the newspapers. This meant that the preacher often had to both tell people what was going on in the world and make some kind of “God-sense” of it. The first half of that sentence no longer applies. Two weeks ago there were protesters tweeting live from Tahrir Square , there is mobile phone footage coming out of Benghazi and I am receiving updates even as I type from those with family and friends in Christchurch, New Zealand. Guerilla reporting is here to stay. However, the need for spiritual articulation of these geological and geopolitical earthquakes is as acute as ever, surely?
Speaking not long after 9/11, Craig Barnes, of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, wrote that:
What we do best, and better than anyone else in town;is to climb behind a pulpit and speak into the fear and chaos with a sacred word.
Stirring words – but do we, I wonder? Rushing to premature judgement helps no-one, and simply airing our own perplexity in the pulpit is an abnegation of our responsibility. As biblical workmen and women our responsibility is to drill down into the bedrock of scripture and find what it says about the nature of God and the path of history. Now is not a time for half-baked prophetic pronouncements, but for fully risen statements of the sovereignty and compassion of God.
As a hapless Brit the full impact of the statement “step up to the plate” is lost on me, since I have never watched nor participated in a baseball game. However, the sense of responsibility and the desire to strike home with conviction and accuracy translates across many cultures.
God bless you, fellow preachers, as you ‘step up to the plate’.
Photo: Peter Griffin
Who Preaching Is Really For
By now, everyone should know the rules. Or I should say “the rule,” singular, since there is only one: Preaching books are written for preachers by people in the field of preaching, period. Except some of us preachers know there have been violations of the rule. A couple of years ago, T. David Gordon wrote Why Johnny Can’t Preach (P and R Publishing, 2009), only the author is a layperson. Who does he think he is? Before that, David Schlafer wrote Surviving the Sermon: A Guide to Preaching for Those Who Have to Listen (Cowley, 1992). We preachers will pretend that “surviving” and “have to” are poor word choices, but that’s not the point anyway. The point is it’s a book about preaching written for folks other than preachers. Who is the author kidding?
If as a preacher you are not alarmed, you should be. Since when does preaching belong to anyone but us preachers? If this trend keeps up, before long people in the pews will start to think the Bible belongs to them as well, that somehow they are a real part of the church. Sure, forty years ago when Fred Craddock, the dean of contemporary preaching theory, penned his now famous As One without Authority, he based it on the role listeners should play. He said in previous generations that listeners were on the team as “javelin catchers.” But don’t you think he was exaggerating? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, who knows if it makes a sound. Who cares? But sermons are different, right? What was it our parents used to remind us in church when we were little? “Be still and be quiet.” We need listeners in the pew but mostly as part of the landscape, right? I mean, if lay folks want to be active in church, there is an offering.
And now there are all sorts of homiletical titles being published about how we preachers should pay closer attention to listeners. Mark Allan Powell’s What Do They Hear? (Abingdon, 2007) and Ronald J. Allen’s Hearing the Sermon (Chalice, 2004) come to mind. Maybe we should call a business meeting of the Order of Preachers and someone make a motion about what’s to be done with these traitors. Flogging? Caning? Solitary confinement? Only that last suggestion won’t work since that’s ideal for sermon preparation, not punishment.
The homileticians doing this should know better; they are in the preaching business after all. I suppose we could cut David Gordon some slack for writing a book addressed to us. He’s a layperson; what does he know? He says in the preface of his work that he wrote about preaching when he learned he had cancer. He claims he didn’t think it would be responsible as a church person to leave this world without doing something to address the poor state of preaching these days.
Still, there is the rule, right? Am I right, or what?
Mike Graves
William K. McElvaney Professor of Preaching
Saint Paul School of Theology
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas style
On Monday, I shall be delighted to welcome a guest post on this blog from Professor Mike Graves, Wm. K. McElvaney Professor of Preaching and Director of Continuing Education at the Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas.
Mike combines a keenly incisive mind with a wonderful acerbic sense of humour, as you can probably tell from the following quotes:
“A sermon is only 26 letters strategically arranged”
- Foreword to Preacher’s A to Z by Richard Littledale
“if preaching intended to enliven the church – why is it killing so many ministers?”
- from The Fully Alive Preacher by Mike graves
Watch this space for more from Mike on Monday
Preparing to preach off the reservation
Some years ago now, I paid a visit to a small church on the South Coast to preach at the conclusion of their week-long evangelistic mission. The church was an unremarkable building and it sat in a pretty nondescript town. On the Sunday afternoon the Pastor said to me “let me show you my secret”. He took me away just out of the town, up a side road, and we climbed and climbed to the very top of the Iron Age hill fort which was there. Wow! What a transformation. From up there he could see the little church in its community, the countryside spreading out beyond it, and the sparkling ocean in the distance. What a place to prepare for preaching!
Professor Mike Graves, who will be writing on this blog next week, advocates an occasional change of scene when preparing sermons. Not only that, but he positively recommends preparing them occasionally in busy places, so that the sermon is not an aural act prepared in silence. What do you think? On the occasions I have tried it, I have found it to be a rich source of inspiration. Maybe, like Kore.Uk, I should chart my study spaces during the year, as they are doing with their office spaces.
My study space yesterday, though, represented a particular challenge. For various reasons I found myself spending nearly seven hours in a hospital waiting room. After I had read the post in my case, and scribbled some notes on some pages for editing, there was really no further excuse not to start on preparing my sermon. So, I sat there preparing this week’s sermon on the next of our Biblefresh memory verses – John 3 v.16. A strange thing happened though. As I sat there writing about the love of God surrounded by sick and distressed people, I felt overwhelmingly obliged to shift my computer screen so that others could not read what I was writing. This really troubled me.
If this was the natural reticence we all feel about letting others see anything less than the finished product, that is one thing. However, what if I felt my theology somehow couldn’t stand scrutiny in that troubled place? What if I felt that a clear statement about the love of God would be unpalatable amongst the very sick? If our sermons are fragile things which cannot stand up outside the rarefied air of the church, then maybe we shouldn’t preach them.
The sermon’s not finished yet, but I’m hoping that when I preach it, I will retain some of that positive unease, and that I shall advocate the love of God in such a way that it will stand up outside the church’s walls.
What experience do others have of preparing to preach away from the study?
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