5. Ensuring that preaching connects with culture and everyday life
The death-knell for preaching is to place it in a self-contained world of the spiritual or the ‘Christian’ detached from everyday life. It is a theological imperative to make it engage with and draw from the day to day world of its listeners and speakers. This is why humour matters, and why I almost always begin my sermons with a practical question. (Doesn’t all preaching, all theology, actually start from a presenting question? Jesus is the answer…). This raises questions about our worship (does it connect with life?) but also about the preacher’s own life. Does it connect with the experiences of the congregation from day to day?
4. Preaching ‘as one without authority’, inviting testing and questioning
Bill Hybels argues that we need to build in an experiential apologetic to our use of Scripture, showing that it offers insights that make a difference in everyday life, and the same is true of our preaching. We need to be willing to invite questioning, and have a robust but flexible sense of the authority of what God is saying…too much of our authority is brittle….
I have been thinking about this subject for a while. I attend a parish where the preaching is excellent. What is different? I believe that good preaching involves proclamation, exhortation, teaching and homily. Most mainline teaching is only about the latter. Scripture is not the beginning point but rather a movie, book or popular song. As someone said, the preacher gave new meaning to the movie. And then there is the brutal fact that you cannot give away something that you do not have or are unable to share.