You know when you’re preaching, ask a question not expecting an answer, and get one anyway?
One of my favourite ministry moments was the weirdly heated mid-talk debate as two people loudly worked out where Princess Diaries was filmed. Hannah (my wife and the preacher that morning) used it as a passing analogy. But that was enough to kick it off. I don’t think I’ve ever awkward laughed so much watching as Hannah tried to bring it back to Jesus. She did, it was amazing!
I learnt how to preach in a fairly middle class church where everyone understood the rules of engagement. Engagement used loosely. Preaching is a 25 – 30 minute lecture style monologue where everyone sits nicely, listens politely, takes notes, learns how the passage applies to them and goes home. Information transferred. How much actually goes in is anyone’s guess.
I am so grateful our community doesn’t play by those rules.
I am so grateful our community doesn’t play by those rules. The majority of our congregation have started coming to church over the past couple of years and live in our neighbourhoods.
Pete Greig says, ‘when you see sparks, get the jerry cans out’. The classic ‘see what God is doing and join in’ idea from Canadian pastor, Henry Blackaby. What we found when we moved from South East London to Blackpool was a community who, both inside and outside of the church, love a chat and to share life. It’s authentic, honest, unpolished and yet, beautiful. What if these were the sparks we were meant to be noticing?
Honestly, when I first started preaching at Beacon I had hoped that after a while the heckling would stop, I’d stop losing my train of thought mid-talk (again) and the rules of engagement I knew would become the norm. Except that wasn’t what God was doing. Rather than shutting down, we started engaging. Dialogical Preaching (the fancy name for creating space for conversations in sermons) gave us the framework to get the jerry cans out. Interruptions have been turned into intentional and directed conversation. Discussion questions are plotted throughout talks moving us from point to point. Application of passages is working out together. Engagement over information transfer is the goal. We learn and deepen faith together as we listen for the Spirit speaking through each other.
Research into adult learning suggests that the most effective way for adults to learn is by doing.
Research into adult learning suggests that the most effective way for adults to learn is by doing. Interesting when we think about discipleship as movement toward and after Jesus. Ironically, the least effective is being talked at.
After doing, the second most effective way to learn is discussing. The Saducees hung out in the temple, but the Pharisees set up the synagogues as places of worship and learning. Literally sat in the round, the men (and women in the Christian community) sat and discussed biblical texts, midrashing. Rabbis would hold the space while everyone worked out together what God was saying. Interpretation was communal.
Like many in our neighbourhoods, school and the education system comes with a fair degree of trauma. Anything that feels like school can be a real challenge. Frequently too, in neighbourhoods like ours, power is often abused through not enabling people to understand the decisions that impact them. Excluding people from the table because ‘they won’t understand’. Freire and Gutierrez, two South American thinkers, challenged the oppression of the people in their communities through flipping the tables on how education worked. Their aims were: 1, to help people realise that they were oppressed, 2, identify who their oppressors were, and 3, to challenge and fight for change. Education was a tool for revolution. What if the ways we preached, not just the messages, could empower our communities to be lifted out of spiritual oppression and into lives of freedom in Jesus?
The inevitable challenge is that the power still rests with the one holding the microphone.
You know when you go to a conference and the speaker says, ‘I want to honour the wisdom in the room, you guys, you’re the experts’. You know the ones! In a sense they’re not wrong. The expertise comes from the coalface. The inevitable challenge is that the power still rests with the one holding the microphone. That’s not necessarily wrong, but how we choose to use power matters. If the best wisdom in our church gatherings is not solely from us but from the people in the seats, I wonder how do we hear it?
I was preaching one Sunday morning a couple of years ago. I sat down on the Wednesday morning, made my coffee, prayed, read the passage a couple of times, prayed, read some commentaries, prayed, and started to write. In theory I’d done everything I needed for a cracking talk (if I do say so myself). But I couldn’t work out the application for our community. I stood up that Sunday with a ‘…’ under the ‘application’ section of my notes. The … moment came. Rather than trying to make something up, I took and breath and said, ‘I’ve said a lot, what difference does this make to you?’. The power switched. I really wanted to know what God was saying. And it came from a bloke who’d been following Jesus for a couple of months. He was shy and struggled in school. I can’t remember the passage, and I can’t remember the quote, but it was something like, ‘when we folla Jesus we’re gonna mess up ain’t we? But he brings us back and puts us on the right path again’. I had overcomplicated it. God had filled the … and taught my soul afresh the wonder if His grace through the unlikely pastor.
Freire argued that true learning happens when, ‘the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students’ (p. 53). This has been my experience as we’ve started using dialogical preaching. We are growing and learning more by creating space and being expectant that God is going to speak, by His Holy Spirit, though all of His people gathered, not just the one with the microphone.
Here’s two practical things we do now:
- Ask questions, expect answers. Talks are prepared with questions plotted throughout. Space is left for questions, statements and feedback. The challenge is that in order to move with the conversation you, as the preacher: need to know the passage really well, be attentive to what is the Spirit and what is a tangent or unhelpful, and humbly know when to change tact or stay the course.
- Create space for discussion and feedback. We aim for a 15 minute talk with 5 minutes for discussion in small groups and a few minutes after to wrap up before prayer. The questions we ask might be super specific or they may be ‘what stood out to you? What difference does this make this week?’. Just a couple is good. The general ones are a good place to start.
I’m not an expert in this, but I am up for conversation about it. I reckon it’s a good way we can learn together!
Lord, teach us your ways.
As we read your word that points us to the Living Word, Jesus, move us by your Spirit, to speak, and listen, to your still small voice in and through each other. Make us more like Jesus.
Amen
Resources:
Dr Edward Kent — ‘Speaking with people: Dialogical Preaching’
Dr Dan White — ‘The art of dialogical preaching’