Preaching

Over the last nearly ten years I have had the privilege of writing more than forty “For Pastor” columns in this space. But with Reformed Worship’s transition to an online-only format, this will be the last such column.In my first column, way back in RW 117, I wrote:Very often when talking to students about their upcoming preaching careers, I remind them that no single sermon is remembered for very long. Even sermons that go over well and that garner lots of wonderful comments at the narthex door sooner or later—and it’s very often sooner—fade from people’s memories. What sticks for people is the pattern of any given preacher’s sermons. What are the themes that get hit again and again, week to week and month after month? What words, phrases, emphases, and priorities build up in the congregation like a lovely residue over time? Those are the things—far more than individual sermons—that shape the congregation’s lived-out theology.—Scott Hoezee, “Missional Preaching for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany,” Reformed Worship 117, © September 2015, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Used by permission.Looping back to that in my final column seems fitting. Beyond whatever specific thoughts on preaching I conveyed in any given issue of RW, what I hope has stuck with you is the overarching theme of how vital I deem preaching to be in Christ’s church. The first thing that happened after the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost was a sermon, and subsequently in the book of Acts there are about as many sermons as there are chapters in the book. There has never been an era in the history of the Christian church when preaching was not a central part of worship. Lengths, formats, and styles of preaching have varied from time to time and from tradition to tradition, but there has never been a time or place where someone concluded, “I think we can do without preaching.” Preaching has endured across the millennia, and the reason seems plain enough: the Holy Spirit likes to work through the sermon. It was how the Spirit got things rolling on Pentecost, and nothing about the Spirit’s work has changed since that day. Preaching has persisted not because the majority of sermons in history have been so stellar. Indeed, the church has always had to contend with preaching that may qualify as weak or dull. But somehow the Spirit gets things done even in those situations because, as Neal Plantinga often observes, when the Holy Spirit of God is blowing in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning as the sermon is being proclaimed, you never know what might happen. Rev. Fred Rogers—better known as children’s television host Mister Rogers—once related the anecdote of having sat through a sermon one Sunday morning that he deemed less than effective. Rogers turned to the person sitting next to him to convey as much when he was stopped in his tracks: his neighbor in the pew had tears streaming down her face, having been moved and comforted by that very same sermon.Experienced preachers also know that a preacher will somewhat regularly be thanked by someone for something the preacher did not say. There is a sense in which no sermon ever delivers only one message. By the Spirit, people hear as many different versions of the sermon as there are people listening to it in the sanctuary. Preaching matters, and the church has survived centuries’ worth of subpar sermons because somehow this is the vehicle through which the Spirit builds up faith and thickens our union with Christ. Preaching challenges us, preaching consoles us, preaching teaches us, preaching comforts us, preaching convicts us. Preaching keeps the good news of the gospel in front of a world desperate for something to hold on to.Preaching is particularly needed in this season of fierce divisions and conflicts around the world. Preaching has never been easy, and perhaps it’s not supposed to be. But many pastors say they are navigating some especially difficult sociopolitical and cultural shoals of late. Yet I contend that the very things that make preaching a bit perilous today are exactly why preaching remains so vitally important for the church. In a world where everything seems up for grabs, in a time when so much is shifting beneath our feet, people everywhere need to hear over and over that old, old story of Jesus and his love. In these disorienting times, we desperately need the reorientation that can come when we encounter afresh the living word of God in preaching.One of the themes of this final print issue of Reformed Worship is crossing thresholds. Indeed, we seem to be living in a liminal moment. Following the COVID pandemic and in a time of great political turmoil, we have this sense of leaving behind a world we once knew and crossing a threshold into a future whose exact contours are by no means clear. We may never get back to how things once were. The disruptions we have experienced in the last decade will (we hope and pray) eventually even out. But what the new world we pass into will look like is not clear.Our primary hope is that what will endure from one time period to the next is the holy word of God. The gospel has survived times of persecution as far back as the Roman Empire. The gospel has survived the era of the catacombs. The gospel has survived the bubonic plague, world wars, holocausts, slavery, racism, tyranny, communism, socialism, and every other thing you could name as a historical epoch. The faithful preaching of God’s word and Christ’s gospel is not the only reason the truth of God and the hope of Christ Jesus our Lord have survived. But preaching certainly has played a big role in keeping the bright and beautiful things of God before the watching eyes of an oft-weary world. This “For Pastors” column is coming to an end, but Reformed Worship will continue to find ways to support preaching because the need for faithful heralds of the word will never end until such time as the knowledge of the Lord covers the earth the way the waters cover the seas, until that time when no one will have to teach their neighbor about Jesus Christ because every knee will already be bowing to and every tongue will already be confessing Jesus as Lord. Especially as we cross thresholds into new worlds, we will continue to declare in public worship, “The word of the Lord,” and God’s people will always respond, “Thanks be to God.”

As I write this column, the 2024 presidential election in the United States is just over three weeks away, and by the time you read this, you will know what happened and what the aftermath has been, one way or the other. Your congregation might not be located in the United States, but I am sure you can relate to a situation in which your congregation, or at least your community, is of two very different minds—a situation in which friends might begin to view each other as adversaries. How does such a taut atmosphere affect preaching? Like the proverbial coin with two sides, that question can be asked in two different ways: How does this environment influence how preachers write their sermons, and, on the flipside, how does this environment affect how people hear sermons? If I could satisfactorily answer these questions, I would write a best-selling book and retire! Instead I will only venture a few tentative thoughts. First, all of us who preach know that in recent years being a preacher has been a very lonely experience. And preachers have professed to me in various encounters that they feel not just lonely, but vulnerable and afraid. Many preachers have a keen sense that they could be one verbal misstep away from being shown the door—or at least be subject to withering criticism.The result for many is a new tentativeness. Caution seems to be the name of the game now in crafting sermons. But not a few preachers feel guilty about this. Aren’t we called to be bold proclaimers of the gospel? Aren’t we called to challenge people in their lives of discipleship, to help them see their lives bathed in a saving and renewing grace that ought to make a significant difference in most everything they do? But these days that may be just the kind of boldness that will not be received well. So preachers hedge. They come within sight of boundary lines, but they don’t dare get too close, and they surely don’t cross them.This sense of a heightened critical atmosphere is not something preachers are imagining. The exact same words and phrases and sentiments that people might have heard as a whisper thirty years ago now come across as shrill, partisan screams. This is due in part to social media. Too many people spend their weeks being ginned up by peers to watch out for triggering words or phrases that might mean the person uttering them is woke or divisive or sharpening a partisan political axe. Churchgoers may be parsing their pastor’s every word in public prayers and sermons to make sure no one gets away with smuggling in rhetoric they have been taught to reject in the echo chambers of Facebook and X.Ours is a difficult cultural and ecclesiastical moment. So what to do? A recent documentary film provides one picture of what it might look like for pastors trying to live in this fraught moment. Leap of Faith is directed by Nicholas Ma, who also directed the recent Fred Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Ma made this new movie in conjunction with The Colossian Forum.  Led by Michael Gulker—who features prominently in the film—The Colossian Forum is an organization based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that is dedicated to helping congregations and individuals speak together about divisive issues in the hopes of modeling civil dialogue that helps people respect and care for one another, even across fierce political, theological, and ecclesial divides. Leap of Faith documents the organization’s efforts across one year to help twelve pastors from the Grand Rapids area talk to one another and try to come to care about one another despite big differences of opinion. Ma collected three hundred hours of footage from interviews and from multiple four-day retreats attended by the dozen pastors and Colossian Forum staff. The pastors no doubt discussed many topics, but for the sake of the film, issues relating to LGBTQ+ discussions became the focus. Since one of the pastors is a woman who is in a same-sex marriage, the conversations were frequently fraught, deeply emotional, and frankly quite painful for all of the pastors in the group. If you are a preacher reading this column and have not seen the film, I highly recommend you do so.So far as I can tell, in that group of twelve pastors no one significantly changed their views. But by listening well to one another, they got closer to the goal of seeing the person with whom they disagree as a real human being made in the image of God. The person with whom you disagree is not just a walking aggregate of opinions, but a flesh-and-blood person with a beating heart and with feelings as real as your own.In our congregations, can we talk with one another in ways that help congregants see their pastor as not just the sum of varying ideas and opinions, but as a fellow disciple of Jesus who loves the Lord as much as anyone and is seeking to be faithful to their calling to serve that Savior? Can pastors in turn see even those whom they deem to be the most suspicious members of the congregation as disciples of Christ trying to do their best for the God and Savior they also love? This is something the church needs to be praying about. We need to be praying together about this. Could preachers and congregants also find creative ways to widen the circle of sermon preparation? Perhaps discussion groups could be convened to generate ideas for a given sermon ahead of its being written. Similarly, after a sermon is delivered, various people could come together with the preacher to talk about what went well, how a sermon was heard or perceived, and how going forward the preacher could articulate certain ideas in ways that will reach more people instead of fewer, thus heading off unnecessary misunderstandings.None of this is free of peril. While ideally groups like this could become a place of constructive understanding and healing, on the other hand they could become places where a different spirit takes over and damage gets done. But if there is one thing recent years have proven to many preachers it is that not addressing such things head on produces nothing positive. Over the years of my writing these columns in Reformed Worship, I hope I have made it clear how much I esteem the preaching craft and care deeply for all who engage in it every week. Most regular subscribers to this journal know that this is my second-to-last column before the magazine transitions to a new online format. Thus, I hope you receive this column as a kind of “Before I go . . .” plea for the church to find ways to live together as preachers and congregants such that preaching is strengthened and God receives glory. The proclaimed word of God is in a measure of peril just now. We look to the Spirit of God to lead us to a better moment.