The Most Important Question We Need To Ask About Preaching (and often don’t think about).

My friend John Chandler used to have this amazing podcast called SermonSmith (it’s still up if you want to listen to it). Each episode was a deep dive into the sermon preparation process of a preacher. He began with what I always thought to be an unassuming question.

“What is the role of preaching in your church?”

Unassuming.

Right?

But over the last few months as I have begun thinking deeply about the changes of worship, preaching, ministry, gathering…pretty much all the things involving church in the era of C19, I kept coming back to John’s question.

What is the role of preaching in your church?

I think the way we answer that question really helps define things for us. It gives us focus in wild ways. It helps the preacher in their preparation process. It helps the congregation because those minutes become the property of everyone there, not just the preacher. It helps the community around the congregation, because hopefully the message is part of the functional discipleship system of the local church.

MY JOURNEY

Last year I started reading through Mark Lau Branson and Alan Roxburgh’s book Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions. If you keep up with me anywhere online, you’ve heard me talk about this book. It is probably one of the biggest influences I’ve read in the last few years. All of this is happening as every church is trying to claw its way out of the reality of C19, and I began asking big questions because my own ministry was is a giant transition of church mergers, buildings acquisitions, major renovations and new construction…all smack in the middle of the pandemic. Through this I was seeing different levels of engagement, people interested in faith that would never really walk into church, and many other changes.

And through this I began asking tough questions about my own preaching possibly being a bit out of whack. While I’m not sure this was the first time in my ministry it was, it was most certainly the first time I felt it at a deep level. I remember writing in my journal about learning to work hard on application, asking myself questions about how am I pointing to what Jesus is currently doing, and many other things.

As the world was changing, I started to think about how my own preaching needed to change.

But where and how?

WHAT DOES JESUS SAY?

As a person who typically aligns with the wider Biblical theology world, I wanted to jump into scripture and see what paths I could see that might help me answer this question. The first thing I began to draw out was in the gospel of Mark, when I realized that Jesus’ first message was the exact same message of John the Baptist.

“The time has come…the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.” MK1:15.

Then Jesus begins a tour of the area driving out impure spirits, healing others, and modeling the prayerful life. All in chapter 1. In the middle of this he tells others this…

“let us go somewhere else - to the nearby villages- So I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” MK1:38

We can go super deep into this teaching ministry of Jesus, but quickly, the pattern we see through the gospels are the miracles of Jesus as evidence of control (physical, supernatural, environmental), and then His teachings that draw a picture of this kingdom. I don’t want to go into this too much here, but I feel like Jesus’ teaching approach is very different than ours.

If we ask the question “what is the role of preaching to Jesus”, it has to be answered in tandem not with just his ministry of miracles, but also with his physical interactions AND with his teaching/preaching.

In short, we can answer the big question for Jesus as worldbuilding. Jesus’ preaching is building the kingdom. We can compare it to the trowel that puts the mortar between the bricks. Jesus preaches the difference of the kingdom, and then shows what it looks like to live in the kingdom with others AND the supernatural power of the kingdom as it overcomes the world.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

I think the best place for us to start answering this question is by asking a few other questions.

How am I building worlds?

That is the question I have been asking myself lately. When I think about my preaching, I find myself asking and trying to answer THAT question more than anything else. It helps me avoid the temptation to get too theological (for the sake of being theological). It keeps me off of soapboxes…or should I say it makes me develop what was once a soapbox into a picture of the world of the kingdom. Where I once struggled to preach application, it drives me to think about what are the tangible activities that we can be aware of when we preach?

I’ve been working on the difference between application that allows us to be in control and the types of application that cause us to trust Jesus more and learn to live deeper into the type of discipleship that follows the path of us decreasing.

Am I focusing on doctrine in a way that restricts the kingdom or doctrine that pushes us towards kingdom growth?

Preachers love doctrine. We tweet about it, we read about it, we argue about it.

Preachers love doctrine.

But in our attempts to preach doctrine, are we doing it in a way that follows the path of worldbuilding? Is our love of doctrine causing us to develop fruits in the way Jesus talked about?

I think asking ourselves this question also helps us sift out is this something we have found to be necessarily in our community for spiritual development or just something we want to talk about (let’s be honest here…that totally happens).

Another problem with only preaching doctrine is that doctrine alone really fails to build character. Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks talk about this is their new book The Other Half of Church. By focusing on knowledge, doctrine, and the more propositional side of faith alone, we fail to develop the neurological pathways and responses that allow us to act like people of faith (grab this book. It is great).

How am I seeing preaching as part of a larger theological vision for my congregation and my area?

I think there are two great resources to help us as we answer this question. The first is Tim Keller’s book “City Church”. It was written as a response to folks asking for Keller and Redeemer to write a book about their church planting method. Instead, Keller wrote a book about developing a theological vision for your city. It is fantastic.

The second is to take a LONG look back at how John Mark Comer and Bridgetown Church in Portland took years to talk about discipleship in their congregation with their “Practicing The Way” series (and the new resource site practicingtheway.org). This is a great look at how preaching serves as just PART of a congregations plan to make disciples and build the kingdom. Many times we see the sermon as the only thing that drives spiritual development and how many people see listening to a sermon as the minimum amount of spiritual development they have and need in their life. Instead the sermon serves as just ONE of the intentional waypoints in a churches mission.

Preachers need to see the place preaching takes in discipleship, and that it might not just be them doing it. What does it mean to have different voices for specific reasons?

Who am I preaching to?
I think back to a time where I had to preach to a service of homeless folks and drug addicts in our church for a Monday night service we had. And I decided to preach through a passage in Revelation 7. While my supervising pastor said I did a good job, and the message was really well directed for the evening…I now look back and think of my time preaching there and wonder if I was making the best teaching decisions for what that particular congregation needed. My Dad often tells me he doesn’t like to preach at other churches because his messages have been specifically directed towards the congregation he has led for 40 years.

And I think there is a lot of truth in that.

Should preaching be this general activity no matter who is there? Or what does it mean to teach specifically to the things EVERYONE in the congregation needs to hear? Grappling with congregational discernment is a real thing. I’m talking about it in episode 6 of Productive Pastor next week, but I also have this short congregational discernment guide here.

As I think about the church, a postC19 world (if we can even say that), and what it looks like for the west to be the biggest mission field in the world, what role does the sermon play?