Moving on from expository preaching

At The Great Giveaway, there’s some good food for thought about moving away from expository preaching towards something that lets us “explore how we might preach more faithfully in our times”. He makes four suggestions, each well fleshed out:

quit explaining and start proclaiming
come to the Bible as a drama, not a textbook
forget application points – go for liturgical response
preaching is only the tip of the communal iceberg.

Point number 2 seems particularly crucial to me.

Let us preachers resist all modernist temptations to see the Scriptures as a propositional textbook of religious facts. Instead, let us see the Scriptures as alive. Scripture is real accounts, testimonies and witnesses of God’s people, through the prophets and the apostles, to what God has done and said and will do. So let us read and speak as ones invited to see ourselves as invited in to participate in the continuation of all this!...
The hubris of pastors thinking they can exegete a text better and more accurately than the thousands that have gone before gets in the way of the Main Thing, the Glory of His Majestic Work and What He is working For in History…
Humility and the skill of listening are prerequisite for anyone being transformed by Scripture. These are the tools for the reshaping of imagination by the Holy Spirit. Humility and listening (i.e. patience) can only be learned in communities who practice worship and mission in ways that foster these basic Christian skills. Without becoming vigilant communities, I fear we all fall into modernist temptation, to believe that Scripture is perspicuous (to me), its meaning is automatically self evident to each individual (as long as they agree with me), and I know Scripture (well enough to justify my life to myself): the ultimate denial of the hermeneutic task.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 6:49pm on 22 July 2006
Category: Faith, Links

When I was doing my sabbatical on Storytelling, the greatest thing I learned – which people told me so often that I had to conclude God was trying to tell me something – was “Trust the Story”. Jesus rarely explained (only when the disciples couldn’t cope with him not doing so, and badgered him). It does seem odd that preachers think they need to do different and better than he did. But it’s about control – “Supposing people get a different message from the one I know is true?” – and yes, frankly, unbelief. We don’t trust the Story.

tony () (URL)
2:42pm on 23 July 2006