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| Preaching
Two stereotypes in the popular mind of the 21st century characterise the Christian Church. One is the picture of a group of robed clerics clustered round an altar participating in elaborate rituals and swathed in a cloud of incense. The other is of a fiery preacher, haranguing a quaking or rejoicing congregation from a pulpit or stage "six feet above contradiction". The former image is most closely connected with the Catholic party of the Christian Church; the latter with the Protestant party. Yet both groups place preaching at the heart of the Christian ministry. Preaching as a ministry is not confined to the ordained. If the clergy don't do their preaching, lay people must. The roots of preaching as an activity go back far beyond the boundaries of human history. Our very earliest evidence indicates an art already sophisticated and central to even the most primitive cultures. Certainly by the time of the Greek and Roman cultures the art of speaking (rhetoric) was an essential part of a gentleman's education. Apuleius in the second century says that at a banquet
Rhetoric as the art of persuasion was tuned to a fine pitch in the Roman Empire and so on through into Europe of the very recent past. It was equally prized in other cultures. The author of the Acts of the Apostles (17.19) relates how Paul in Athens attempted to speak in the public square where many a debate would have taken place. Paul's preaching in Athens failed - but we don't know if that was because he wasn't skilled enough or because his hearers lacked interest in his subject. At any rate, Paul seems to have been eloquent enough a speaker to persuade many in Corinth and elsewhere to become Christian. He certainly was reputed to have talked for a long time on occasion - in one case, long enough for the unfortunate Eutychus to go to sleep and fall to his death out of a third storey window (Acts 20.9). His letters clearly contain the message of his sermons, no doubt preached over periods of time. But the length of Paul's speech or sermon (as we would today term it) would not have been unusual for the time. In Southern Africa today, many cultures are only a generation away from a purely verbal means of communication. Paul's culture, unlike those of Africa, had writing - though that was confined to a very small proportion of the population. In both cases, the spoken word was accorded a degree of respect much greater than that given by the communication-overloaded cultures of modern times. To this day, sermons in some African churches can last for hours, replete with repetition and great detail. As scholars emphasise, the gospels are essentially a type of preaching. That is, each contains a vision of Jesus derived from a particular Christian region in the years between about 70 (Mark) and about 110 (John). From the earliest days of the Christian Church, then, preaching during gatherings and worship rapidly became the norm - as it had been in Jewish communities and many other places of (pagan) worship throughout the Roman world. In Roman political life, the rhetorical debate took the place given today to the highly professional image building of political parties through radio and television. Over two millennia, the Church has gradually developed a substantial practice of preaching. But expert preachers existed only in the more educated strata of the clergy until quite recent times. In the average congregation the sermon would have been more like an extended homily than a well constructed, sophisticated sermon. In Europe before the 17th century, for example, homilies were produced for the use of poorly educated clergy. In 1547 a Book of Homilies was produced in England for the use of disaffected and semi-literate clergy. It consisted of twelve simple homilies, each about a theological or ethical matter. A second book of twenty-one homilies followed in 1571. But it was the Reformation which brought the sermon proper into full bloom. As the new churches moved away from sacramental practices, so the art of preaching the "Word of God" became more and more central. Just as Catholic churches have the altar at the center of focus in a building, so many Protestant churches placed the pulpit at the center. Preaching as the proper function of a clergyman rose to its zenith as education became more common. By the 19th century in the Western world, preaching was important enough for many thousands of books of sermons to be published and avidly collected and read by many. Today, preaching must take its place in a world bombarded by political and commercial messages through the media - from print to the most recent arrivals, the internet and the mobile telephone. Mass media preaching reaches millions wherever Christians are willing and able to pay the steep costs of buying television and radio time. Otherwise, today's preachers speak to relatively small numbers as they gather in church for worship. Nevertheless, there remains a sturdy body of theory relating to preaching as an essential facet of the Christian life. A typical outline might propose three aspects to preaching:
Perhaps understandably, as the media have taken over the attention of the average Western citizen, so have Christian claims for preaching grown larger. In many churches, only the foolish preacher will time his services and sermons to coincide with a popular television program or an important sporting event. To compensate, many clergy insist that the sermon remains more important than the mass media. And as the pews have emptied in Europe, so have trainee clergy been given ever more grounding in the practices of preaching in the wake of far reaching theological claims. John Stacey writes that
Having said that, there have been a number of clear trends in preaching since the eventful decade of the 1960s and the subsequent domination of preaching by the mass media:
What of the future of preaching? Will it survive and strengthen as an essential tool of the Church - or will it gradually succumb to the blast of sounds and sights which increasingly unite the global community? Only time will tell, of course. And the tides of cultural change are extremely slow. Even now there is a large gap between the Western world and the slowly awakening cultures of Africa. The latter may have to first go through a phase of sermonising before it must face the challenges which so stress Western Christianity in the 21st century. Bishop John Spong has tried to envision a Church of the future [3]. He suggests that it will embody a number of characteristics which we can now only glimpse on the cultural horizon:
If Spong is even moderately correct, the sermon is clearly going to either disappear completely, or persist in a modified, attenuated form. It will become more of a dialogue than a monologue. Preaching will have to prove itself in a forum where hearers can and will contest a point or deliver their own contradictory testimony. In short, preaching is already in the workshop waiting to be
remodeled and reshaped into something radically unlike anything before. |