The Evangelical Giveaway 6

nor does it engage with the overall Story found in Scripture. (the study on James)

Jim,

The best narrative-based "preaching" that I've heard is from Dan Allender. He's president of Mars Hill Graduate School in Bothel, WA north of Seattle. I heard him speak on God and Moses meeting at the burning bush. It was transformative. He also has a message on Paul as "the chief of sinners" which, too, is quite compelling.

Scot,

Expository preaching has taken on canonical status in the evangelical (dispensational-oriented) churches. That it's a relative new approach in church history is not well-received by many.

Scot,

How would you typify preaches such as Augustine and John Chrysostom? How about later preachers such as Luther and Calvin. Are we far afield from them? Is imitating past preaching even if it is a 20th century phenomenon (and this sounds unlikely to me)a bad thing. I've heard Dan Allender speak and he is quite good, but I'm not sure I could do that. I like Garrison Keillor too and I know I can't do that. So, why would narrative preaching be held up as a golden bullet? Maybe if you could do a little historical comparisons that might help.

--Ken

This is great! Finally putting words on something that has perplexed me for a long time but which I have been unable to articulate. I find 99% of sermons to be easily forgotten; this helps explain why. Inviting response rather than application is much more helpful to growth/formation.

I'm curious as to why you use the word "overwhelming" as a description of prophetic Spirit in the NT.

Dana

Hey Scot,

Love the website by the way... I'm a seminary student who, while evangelical, never even heard of expository preaching until I came to seminary. It seemed like such a strange concept, especially when I started noticing that what was called expository preaching was little more than topical preaching with a text made to support what the preacher already wanted to say anyway. I remember being in a preaching class, and after one guy had finished giving an topical sermon (which was not recommended, but still allowed) the professor said, "That was a great message; what would have made it better was if you had found of a text to support it." What had been something of a romance with the idea of expository preaching went out the window at that point - the comment just felt really fraudulent. Why would it have been a better sermon if the guy had poured the pancake batter of Scripture into the waffle iron of his sermon and then cut off whatever flowed off the side? Anyway, the point is that what most people DO that gets called expository preaching is really just topical preaching in disguise - and both forms (in my opinion) betray a total lack of fascination with Scripture. In principle I think that expository preaching is better than the alternatives, but I think it has to be more than topical preaching in disguise, and it definitely has to be more than a fill-in-the-blank sort of information exchange. At minimum, I think expository preaching has have as its goal an encounter with God in Scripture where hearers are invited to imagine life differently - but maybe that's just my charismatic heritage coming through...

It's on my list, Andrew!

Love your waffle iron illustration-

Dana

Doesn't there still need to be place for the OT/NT paradigm of the prophetic word? The prophet stands as an individual on behalf of God *against* the community. Would John the Baptist be considered modernist under these terms? Isn't the problem with Jesus that he speaks with authority, not simply citing the authority of the rabbinic community? I'm simply thinking about these as thematic or paradigmatically.

Someone can speak as a member of a community and yet still stand against that community. And I don't know if the prophets promote individualism or community as they preach against (and for) the entire community. I suppose my question is this: Is there room for the man or woman with a burning vision of Christ to break in and claim judgment--or will he be hushed up by the community that says "Sorry, sir...you'll have to sit down. We do our theology by majority vote." ?

Scot,

You're correct to point out examples of good "exposition" in the Church Fathers and Reformers. Have you read any of Jonathan Edwards? Hardly expositional. Yet there was not this fetish that it's the *only* way to "rightly divide the word of truth." What exactly did Paul mean by the "whole counsel (will) of God" in Acts 20:27? In the popular evangelical mind the phrase means "expositionally teaching the Bible from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21." What do you think?

Meant to say ... "The New Testament Sermon is ..." sorry

When I've been in small groups, I usually seek to end up teaching in them. One of the reasons is that I hate "discussions" by people who basically are uninformed on even the content of the Bible, let alone any idea how to approach it without simply reading it through contemporary, individualistic eye glasses. A sermon that sought to evoke a "community" response would be to invite this same problem on a larger scale. When I think of expository preaching, whatever others may thinkg, I conceive of a preacher actually going through the biblical text, so that whatever the Bible addresses, the preacher addresses. The alternative, as I have experienced it, is for the preacher to read a verse and use that solely as a spring board to go off and do whatever eh/she felt like. In one church I was a part of, this meant that no matter what text was read, the message was about God wanting to comfort us in our difficulties. To me, this is not faithful to Scripture because it has other agendas in addition to this legitimate one.

Furthermore, since the odds are quite small of getting everyone in the congregation to _study_ the Bible at all, what is the problem with looking to the preacher to do his/her homework, tell the congregation what the text means (or, in difficult cases, the possibilities) and then talk about how to apply htat? Furthermore, what is so bad about application? If I read Jeremiah 2, to pick a text at random, I don't know how to live that out or even "respond" to it. So I'm hoping that the preacher has been guided by the Spirit to come up with a way to apply that so that Jeremiah 2 has some significance for me. Otherwise, why read Jeremiah at all?

Ken

Dan,
I'm in agreement on the "lifetime" comment. I don't see Word as Sacrament, but Word and Sacrament.

Hi Joel,

If I understand what you are saying, I agree wholeheartedly. I sometimes get the impression that preachers are either afraid taht the straight message of Scripture is not enough or that people might reject what Scripture says and therefore something else is needed or that Scripture is someone inadequate for modern life. Certainly, however, God is able to speak through His Word, even in ways that were not planned by the preacher potentially.

Clint,

Thanks for the information. What does this approach do with non-narrative material? It would seem that usch an approach would have no place for most of the prophets, Proverbs, Qoheleth, any of epistles and parts of other biblical books. My issue with any approach to preaching I've encountered in the last several years is that it privileges a tiny bit of the Bible and virtually ignores the rest. It's no wonder, for example, that believers I encounter are woefully ignorant of the OT. What they hear preached is pretty ignorant of the OT too.

Hi Ken and Joel,

From what I've seen, one of the weaknesses of narrative preaching is that it does have a tendency to avoid non-narrative material. That is why I'm doing what I'm doing here, trying to use prophetic literature in a narrative preaching application. I don't think it will be a seamless integration, but hey!--why not try. At least I can get a degree out of the deal--hopefully.

Let's see--why Portland didn't work. Where to begin. Essentially I lived for years without intentionality. I became an elder at a church, then later on staff, then ended up as pastor there. Basically the short story is, we had a church that had divisions on the elder team that proved to be irreparable. In the end, we had to close the church because the dysfunctions were so deep that it couldn't work.

The great thing was, in some of the changes we were able to make, some people's lives were changed. That group ended up starting a new church called "Imagine" that is going well today.

Mainly my issue with preaching was that I tried the methods I was taught in seminary, but the culture was so unhealthy that I'm not sure any method would've penetrated. In this context I believe my ministry was literally a "no-win" situation.

Hey Joel, I don't feel attacked at all. Remember, I used to be a pastor.

What a fascinating discussion! Thanks for so many wise comments and intriguing questions. A handy summary of many of the variations of "narrative" preaching can be found in Richard Eslinger's "The Web of Preaching." Strangely he omits a thumbnail sketch of postliberal varieties of narrative preaching (especially Charles Campbell's approach) -- even while he is a member of that camp. His postliberal predilections do show themselves in his chapter on preaching and imagination, and he contributed to the conversation in his book, "Narrative and Imagination."

My take on narrative preaching is this. First, theories can be sorted into broad categories of "Sermon as story" (Wes Allen, Richard Jensen, for example), "Sermon including stories" (Fred Craddock, Charles Rice, and African American preachers would be prime examples here), and "Sermon itself as plotted narrative" (Eugene Lowry, David Buttrick, and, to some degree, Paul Scott Wilson). Note that guys predominate here, and the energy seems to have run out in the mid-nineties. The "narrative" crowd were reacting against a dominant rationalist/revivalist "3-points-and-a-poem" model, heir to the Puritan "Doctrine-Reasons-Application" approach, in which you extract a thematic "doctrine" from one or more verse(s), cobble together scriptural support for this theme, and then show how it "applies" to some aspect of human living. Behind this lies an Enlightenment understanding of human cognition in which the preacher opens up the heads of the good congregants, pours in the info, and - presto! - you've got faith, if you can repeat back the doctrine. Narrative preaching arose with the "New Homiletic" revolution which dared to suggest that human beings might just be more than brains on two legs, and so suggested "story" as a more appropriate model for preaching toward faithful living today. Non-European-male portions of Christianity have met the "New Homiletic" revolution with a raised eyebrow: "so what's so new about this? We've been doing this for years, and you dissed us royally as primitive. Glad you're finally catching on...."

One more aspect of narrative preaching: to various degrees (and with differing sophistication) these approaches understand the Judaic-Christian faith as living in the larger narrative of "God-with-us." The postmodern jury is still wrestling with this "metanarrative."

Hope this helps the discussion.

Bob Howard
Currently Adjunct Professor of Homiletics and Liturgics at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary