What Do We Want from the Sermon
I’ll start with a confession: for the better part of the last five years I’ve been losing confidence in preaching. This isn’t a commentary on the preaching I’ve been hearing, I should be clear, as I’ve been quite fortunate to worship in several congregations with engaging preachers. Rather, it’s preaching in general in which I’ve lost confidence, my own preaching included.
Why? Two main reasons. First, as I look around at the culture, the form and shape of our preaching seems increasingly out of touch. In a culture that is increasingly participatory, our preaching is still primarily a monologue. In a culture passionate about discovering meaning and crafting identity, our preaching too often draws conclusions for our hearers rather than inviting them into the questions themselves. Second, as I look around our congregations, I see any number of people largely disconnected from the preaching, appreciating a touching story, perhaps, but rarely drawing from the sermon something they will continue to think about during the rest of the week.
For this reason, lately I’ve been asking people – including last week on this site – what they want from the sermon. Perhaps not surprisingly, there has been both significant overlap in views about some aspects of preaching and some creative difference regarding others, and I’ve learned from, and want to share, both the convergence and divergence of opinions.
Overall, the thing I’ve heard most frequently from folks is their desire to be able both to follow the sermon and apply it to their daily lives. While the first half of that hope is essentially rhetorical – that the sermon is well organized and clear – the second deals more with the orientation or thrust of the sermon. In a poll I conducted as part of a Lilly Endowment-funded research project on congregational vibrancy, the number one thing people wanted was for the sermon to help them understand how the biblical passage informs their daily lives. So while background on the biblical texts may be helpful to understand a passage, for most hearers the sermon comes alive when that two-thousand year-old story helps them think more deeply and faithfully about their twenty-first century challenges, questions, and struggles.
Two other points of convergence are worth noting. First, people want to hear the Gospel of God’s love for them and the world. They want to be reminded of God’s grace and promised God’s forgiveness in order to face the opportunities and struggles ahead. Second, most hearers also want to be challenged – to think differently, yes, but to live differently as well. They want increasingly to be given help framing the questions they have and to be given tools to answer those questions rather than having answers provided. They want, in short, to be participants in connecting faith and life rather than only spectators.
Here is where the divergence came in. Overall, most people still prefer to be engaged through what we might call “passive means” – that is, when the preacher takes primary responsibility for engaging listeners. Chief among such requests is that preachers employ more stories that connect the biblical passage to every day life. Stories, as many have noted, are the common currency with which we make sense of and share our lives, and preachers can help us relate Scripture to daily life by offering us stories that illumine such connections. Another common hope was that preachers identify a single insight, question, or challenge with which to send hearers into their week, perhaps even inviting hearers to share by email or social media later in the week the substance of their reflections.
Interestingly, a small but distinct minority of people name their desire for more “active” engagement and want to share in providing, as well as receiving, the content of the sermon. Is there room for active participation and discussion, whether before, during, or after the sermon? Must sermons be monologues? Can preachers turn over greater responsibility for connecting the sermon to everyday life, creating space for hearers to move from the role of audience to participant? These are the questions this growing cadre of folks is asking.
In my career as a theologian and teacher of preachers, I’ve tried to describe this trend this way: I was taught in seminary that the chief purpose of preaching was to create faith, and I still value that aspect of preaching highly. What I wasn’t taught was that preaching also has the potential to help us see God and, having seen God, to participate in God’s ongoing work to love and bless this world. When you focus on the first function of preaching – creating faith – you tend to focus on the past and present of a biblical passage, asking what this passage meant to its original audience and what it might mean to us today. When you add this second purpose – helping us see God – you begin focusing on the future of the passage, asking where we might see this passage coming true in our own lives and inviting us to imagine how we might live into the story this passage tells.
In a culture that no longer assumes, let alone encourages, congregational participation, and for a generation that has numerous sources from which they might create their identity, I think preachers have increasingly responsibility for not only proclamation but also formation, giving us the tools by which we can imagine how this biblical story might be our story, and guiding us into a future shaped and animated by the presence and grace of the living God. A tall order, for sure, but one I believe is still blessed by the Holy Spirit.
Thank you, David. I appreciate your insights and honesty, and your points resonate with me, especially those about active engagement. A year or so ago in my parish we started monthly “Improv Sermons”. I select the lectionary text we focus on – usually the gospel – but then it is up to the congregation to pick three or four words, phrases, or ideas that speak to them, and we construct the sermon out of it. I facilitate the conversation, often asking questions but rarely making definitive statements, though if someone is truly off base I do step in, but for the most part it’s theirs. We’re a small parish, so this works better than it might in a larger congregation, and gets a fair amount of participation – a five-year-old made a good point recently. This exercise helps me to know what they are thinking about, and that’s important to me as their priest and pastor.
Thanks David for your insight but I think you have assumed that folks want more participation in their lives. The “participation” that I observe is superficial, it is not very deep. Think of the comedians of today and you still see a monologue. sure the late-night shows are full of video and audio images but at the heart of the presentation is one person standing (or sitting) and espousing a point of view.
I agree that sermons are dull and irrelevant for the most part. Yet the Good News still needs to be spread. For all our modern (post-modern or whatever today is called) the message that God loves YOU is still what most are searching for even if they cannot articulate it.
Your last line is David’s point, I think, though he can certainly speak for himself. Articulation. How does the preacher aid a congregation of hearers to not only hear but to articulate…by inviting people into this articulation with the preacher instead of only hearing it from the preacher. I think you’ve got his point exactly.
My homeletics professor taught that there are two kinds of sermons: those that want us to know something, and those that want us to DO something.
I recently retired from my last congregation and many thanked me for putting the scriptures in context. While I personally prefer interactive sermons, I had rather passive listeners. So I often used your suggestions for questions, but instead of asking for verbal responses, I would allow a period of silence for them to ponder or make a “note to self.”
I’ve been conducting an informal experiment for the last few years with our congregation. We usually enjoy fellowship after church. We visit different churches, so the experience is always different (even when it’s the same). Towards the end of fellowship, I’ll ask — in a different way each week — for some sort of take-away from the sermon we heard about an hour before. Almost always, the sermon is already forgotten, even by those who left the sanctuary commenting that they enjoyed it. If we consider the cost investment of having hundreds of congregations, each with a dedicated pastor providing a weekly 20-minute sermons to be heard by fewer than 100 people (the same fewer than 100 people each week) and remembered by almost no one the next day, we’d revise our worship expectations and practices quickly.
I attended the Festival of Homeletics a few years ago at the advice of a colleague after struggling with the issues you are expressing. It was my first introduction to you, David. I remember in your sermon you were struggling with this idea.
I remembering being frustrated at the conference that here were some of the most promient and progressive preachers struggling with similar questions in their workshops. Yet almost to a person they then stood at a pulpit delivered monologues just like we have been doing for the past eons, even many wearing the vestments of separation, and not contributing a example of something new. The exceptions were Thomas Troeger, Brian McLaren and you, who admitted, if I remember right that you we not comfortable with the current approach but weren’t sure what could be different.
Thanks for the insights and those who have responded.
I’ve met a number of passive “listener” types in my church…those who just like to go to church on Sunday and have very little to say about anything really. They’re just there and content to take up a spot on “their” pew each Sunday.
I find the whole Sunday thing to be pretty boring, and limit my contact with the church to our bible study group. Even there, I have found that most in the class prefer to listen without saying much. I get the distinct feeling that they are afraid of saying or doing something “wrong” or that will cause others to look at them askance. Heaven forbid.
Having come out of a 12-Step setting myself…where I finally connected to a sense of peace and grace and freedom and reality…I find traditional church services to be stifling and restrictive.
I’m one of those people who would appreciate a dialog or interactive experience in church which, so far, can only be found in the bible study class, where people are allowed to speak, even if they choose not to out of fear.
When I think about preaching as a monologue vs. interaction from the congregation, what springs to mind is the difference between preaching and teaching. While there is certainly overlap, I think this is the reason that both worship and bible study attendance together create the best form for faith formation. While I have tried a few different ways of making the sermon time/space interactive during worship, what seems to be working the best currently in my congregation is a Wednesday night education time (classes for kids, confirmation, high school, and adults) with teaching all based on the same Bible story from the Narrative Lectionary (from workingpreacher.org) which is the text for the following Sunday’s preaching. Lots of feedback that this is helping people make sense of the Bible, connect to their lives, and deepen their faith and understanding.
My homiletics prof always asked the same question of the class after someone preached in class. “Did you hear the Gospel?” I was in my final year of seminary when 9/11 happened and I was scheduled to preach at the seminary chapel’s eucharist service the following week. Through my tears I tried to preach the Gospel and on the way out the door my prof simply said, “I heard the Gospel.”
When I studied the Augsburg Confession not only did I come to love Article IV but I was really moved by Article V, particularly “the Holy Spirit produces faith, where and when it pleases God, in those who hear the Gospel.”
So I want a sermon, in whatever form, to proclaim the Gospel. I have no illusions that I’m any kind of gifted preacher but once in a while I’ll come up with a good one so maybe some people think I am. But no matter what else I say, I try my hardest to bring a word of Good News to people. And they may not remember what I said an hour later but I hope, and pray, and trust that the Holy Spirit will use what I’ve said to “produce faith, where and when it pleases God, in those who hear the Gospel.”
Wise words and honest conversation to be had, for sure. While I’ve heard the idea of those “passive listeners”, we’ve discovered more of a sense of consumerism in some community contexts- folks are here to check the box, make the contribution, show off their external Christian, and then leave it at the door. Doesn’t describe all, to be sure, but what it does reveal is that it is a posture to the entire context of a faith relationship and a faith community that is less consumption and observation and move to participation in more than just a worship context.
I say this because it is something we’re always working on, engaging more folks in the life of the community, of which the sermon is but a part. The sermon is a central part of that proclamation, but the ability to foster the sermon-to-life integration needs more than just a worship service ending with “Go in peace, serve the Lord” but one that continually offers ways, empowers others, trains and equips folks to do that day in and day out. 20 minutes of even the most Spirit-filled sermon can and should be supported and built upon by the rest of the faith community’s posture and activities.
One of the things I think my generation has really been focused on is in somewhat stark contrast to what one person posted – namely that “God loves YOU”. While that is very true, I think what we’re earnestly desiring to hear is that God loves the lost and forgotten, our friends and neighbors and sisters and brothers who have been told to get out, go away, and leave a faith community. So for me, the points you bring up- does the sermon stir anything up in someone, does it call someone to action- resonate very strongly with our desire to see the church not only be the people out in the community making God’s love and grace known, but having strong leaders who help craft and shape that from ‘within the walls’ as it were.
I suppose I’m in the same boat as some of the listeners- I want to be challenged to live differently, and the Spirit continues to shape the message to that end.
Someone told me long ago (so long ago that I can not remember who) that after the exigetical questions of “What did the writer mean for people to hear?” and “What would people of that time and place actually have heard?” comes the question “So what?” While the preacher might suggest possible answers, the “So what?” question can only be answered by some sort of response in the world. You can lead a community to a “So what?” response but you can’t make them drink it in. That requires the collaboration, interaction and participation of which you write.
Thanks for helping me flesh out the cooperative nature of the preaching/hearing/doing event. I always appreciate your thoughtfulness and clarity. And thank you for taking the time and effort to thank preachers for what we try to do. It means a lot to me and, I am sure, to many, many others.
I recently started a Wednesday lunchtime Bible study (immediately follows our noon Eucharist service) where a small group freely discusses the scripture lessons for the coming Sunday (we follow the RCL). Besides giving people a chance to ‘vent’ feelings and concerns or discuss ideas about the readings, it helps me get a sense as the preacher for what’s on my folks’ minds — which of course is a great way to start my study for the sermon!
Who is the Author?
Hi, Joel. My name is David Lose. I put this blog together and, unless otherwise noted I’ve written everything you find here.