I am thinking that maybe I should stop preaching. There is something ineffective about professional ministers delivering sermons to silent congregations. My reading of John Drane’s The McDonaldization of the Church is reinforcing the feeling. He writes, “A minister wishing to empower his or her congregation to take seriously their own calling as the people of God, equipping them to make a distinctive contribution to the corporate life of the body of Christ, whether in worship or witness, simply cannot do it by preaching sermons from a pulpit.”
I know that is true, and for thirty-two years I have had this gnawing misgiving about what I was doing. Even as I prepared the sermon I was anxious about how to transfer to the worshipers the enthusiasm and conviction I was finding in my study of the Word. I dreaded the almost certain result, that following worship I would hear accolades from a few worshipers, but in reality the preached Word was not going to result in transformation.
I would go home on Sunday and console myself with the view of Martin Luther, that as he went home to enjoy his beer (his expression), the preached Word was even then working its way into the souls of the congregation. Maybe so, but it takes a lot of years of preaching to adjust the world view and practices of worshipers. Too long – because worshipers listening to sermons are largely passive, which restricts their ingestion of the Word to what they can remember hearing.
The reason pastors love to preach is because they get so much out of it, not because the congregation gets so much out of it. God’s Word really is a powerful, transformative message. Living in the Word for a few days, while mining the treasures in a passage of scripture, is very rewarding. The problem is that the pastor is getting all this benefit, not the congregation.
I need to consider redefining my role as Minister of Word and Sacrament so that I become the coach and guide to others as they prepare to deliver the Word in worship. Sermons prepared and delivered by the members, not as oral lectures but as corporately conceived, creative embodiments of the message, will likely touch far more lives than I ever will in the traditional format of preaching.
Right now what I am imagining is worship teams – lots of them. Each team is given a passage of scripture to work on a few weeks before their appointed Sunday. I work with them on exegesis and interpretation, and they decide how to present that to the congregation, using as many senses as they can, and engaging the congregation as fully as possible.
My role, then, would be (1) planning worship a few weeks in advance, by choosing the scriptures to be used each Sunday, (2) meeting with worship teams as they study and prepare, and (3) reviewing with the team afterward as to how they think they did. In other words, coach and trainer.
I want to think hard about his. Not only would the end product be more effective, but it would move us closer to the biblical model of the whole congregation actively participating in worship.
Posted in Pastor
