In my initial chapter design, I would have now considered the authority of the preacher. My thinking was to show the preacher as standing between God’s authority through the Bible and the congregational encounter with God in the sermon. On reflection, addressing the authority of the congregation before that of the preacher seems more appropriate for a number of connected reasons. As Thomas Long asserts, theologically preachers come from,
within the community of faith and not to it from the outside. […] We are not
visitors from clergy-land, strangers from an unknown land, ambassadors from seminary-land, or even, as much as we may cherish the thought, prophets from a wilderness land. We are members of the body of Christ, participants in the worshiping assembly, commissioned to preach by the very people to whom we are about to speak.327
I have previously noted that in my ministry situation the membership directly appoints the minister by election. That I could not be the primary preacher without the direct appointment highlights the institutional authority in the congregation that commissions the preacher. That, however, in keeping with Long’s statement, should not be the normative authority of the congregation. The congregation is not simply the attending individuals, a numerical mass of people who authorise and attend the
327 Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching (Louisville, KY.: Westminster/J. Knox Press, 1989), p.2 and p.3, his italics. His comment regarding prophets fits his not-from-outside thinking here rather than necessarily contradicting Osmer’s focus on ‘prophetic discernment’ that I consider below.
preaching; it is the body of Christ, the community of faith (and those seeking faith), who are together a part of God’s ongoing story and are seeking to live faithfully under his authority. To speak and act appropriately as a preacher means to speak from and within and to this gathered community. This community perspective, set within the drama of God’s world as considered above, highlights a number of issues that impact on the preaching task in my local situation.
First, is what I consider to be a sense of individualism within ABBC. A focal point of evangelicalism is that of personal (individual) salvation: ‘Faith is the exercise of personal trust in Jesus Christ as Saviour’.328 This ironically tends, in my experience, to create an impression of the church gathering as a collection of individual believers rather than a single spiritual community.329 Indeed, my research sermons were described as ‘individualised [meaning to the individual] and personalisable’, and ‘applicable to individual lives’,330 and my own conclusions in the interpretive task included connecting with individuals in preaching through awareness of Multiple Intelligence theory. Despite the rightful focus on individuals, theological awareness of the gathered church reminds the preacher that there must also be a clear sense of preaching to one congregation.Not only is over-individualism deficient in itself, but it is doubly tragic in light of the perspective of the ongoing community dynamically living ‘within’ the Bible story before the sixth act, the final completion of God’s story. This community is authorised into being as part of God’s world-stage action. The normative task impacts on preaching, including my narrative-critical approach to it, with the reminder that the congregation requires a deeper sense of being the present
328 Tidball, p.118.
329
I am setting aside at this point the open-to-all nature of the church that faith-enquirers are welcome in the church community.
330
and ongoing community of the people of God. Preaching should therefore not simply be addressed to a collection of individuals.331
Given this evaluation it is nevertheless encouraging that the congregational research in this thesis offers some solution to this concern. Recognition was shown of the ability to speak to individual and congregation simultaneously: ‘…you talk to the congregation but you’re talking to me…as an individual at the same time’.332 This suggests that a balance of attention towards individuals in a sermon does not have to be at the expense of the community focus which the theological task shows to be important.
The second issue is that in the churches where I have been the lead preacher, including at ABBC, I have been largely left individually responsible for the preaching planning. On occasion I have asked people, and specifically leaders to whom I am more directly accountable, for suggestions about preaching subjects and content. Usually I have gained little response but rather perceived an underlying sense that it was my task (delegated authority?) to assess and manage this before God. This makes my research findings about a positive desire for greater congregational involvement all the more startling. It seems to me that despite some interviewees’ wishes to be involved, the congregation has ignored, or perhaps doesn’t know of its legitimate authority to participate in preaching other than being recipients of it. Conversely, this also suggests that I have accepted a norm that I perhaps ought to have resisted before now. Whatever the causes or reasons, a position where the
331
Strangely, the sense of individualism I perceive in ABBC may also connect with the past sense of individualism that the church had, highlighted by the ‘Independent’ signage I found in Chapter 1, although I concluded that it extended even further, into isolationism. Though I have no direct connecting evidence, this suggests the possibility of a context of multi-layered individualism. 332
congregation is actively engaged beyond being hearers is a necessary corrective. As Van Harn aptly states, ‘A sermon is not the possession or product of an elite few; it is the responsibility and privilege of the whole church’.333 This fortuitously connects with the quote and my comment in Chapter 1 regarding a benefit of narrative-critical interpretation as ‘returning the Bible to the people’.334 If my narrative form of preaching does that, it fits perfectly well with the authority of preaching, alongside the Bible, being returned to the congregation.
The third issue, a consequence of the two previous ones, is that of striking a balance between focusing on the congregation and the individual. Osmer’s ‘What should be going on?’ was given at least a partial answer in my research. Interviewee interest was shown in congregational involvement within sermons by contributing life illustrations, testimonies, examples or suggestions of hymns and songs. One interviewee made a direct connection in saying that an ‘interruption’ to the sermon, ‘can build up individuals and it can build up the fellowship’.335 This helpfully recognises and amalgamates the personal and corporate perspectives within the gathered community. Furthermore, it creates a greater action-event dynamic that is appropriate within narratively-focused preaching. A narrative Bible authorises a narrative community, although this community comprises individuals. This returns me to the issue of precisely where the balance should lie between the two.
In Preaching Jesus, Charles Campbell locates preaching firmly as within the community not the individual,336 developing what he calls his ‘cultural-linguistic model
333 Van Harn, p.125. 334 See pp.21-22. 335 I1T 01, p.10. 336
Charles L. Campbell, Preaching Jesus: New Directions for Homiletics in Hans Frei’s Postliberal
of Christianity’ from what Hans Frei and George Lindbeck applied more generally to religion.337 Lindbeck’s approach views religion as ‘a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought’ and significantly for my concerns here, states that, ‘Like a culture or language, it [religion] is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectivities of individuals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those subjectivities’.338 The turn is from what Lindbeck describes as cognitive or ‘experiential-expressive’ models, or a combination of the two.339 Applying this to the Bible, the cultural component is that, ‘The normative or literal meaning must be consistent with the kind of text it is taken to be by the community for which it is important’.340 Campbell draws out the community implication for preaching:
[T]he community is logically prior to the individual, and the individual exists only within the context of relationships and roles played in a particular community. This understanding of preaching does not ignore the individual, but rather views the individual within the context of a faithful community. In fact, this approach does not even ignore the needs of individuals. Rather, it assumes that the fundamental need of persons is to be faithful disciples in a truthful community; and it assumes that this is the reason people are listening to sermons in the first place.341
My reaction to this is one of affirmation of the community, as stated above, yet with a concern that the individual must not become lost within it, and furthermore the individual has to live faithfully in the world when physically outside the gathered community. Campbell is clear that ‘the church lives in service to the world for which Jesus died’.342 In that sense, the community that authorises preaching also (perhaps
337
Campbell, p.64, n.5. 338
George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, 25th
Anniversary edn (Louisville, KY.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), p.19.
339 Lindbeck, p.2. 340 Lindbeck, p.106. 341
Campbell, p.222 n.3. 342 Campbell, p.221.
passively) commissions the individual who is part of the church community and recipient of its preaching to represent the church and the Gospel to the world. The community becomes the community at large, but the individual is still part of the community, and has every right to ask, even demand, that preaching helps individuals to be what they are meant to be when physically away from the community and are ‘acting’ on God’s stage of the world. Individuals must sense that their personal needs, life situations and challenges are being addressed, therefore I want to maintain a sharper focus on what Campbell seems to subsume within the communal model. Preaching must address both the congregation as a single community, and the individuals within it. Furthermore, my research highlighted the legitimate demand of the participants that preaching should address those who attend church as enquirers and visitors, those who therefore are not (yet) explicitly or even necessarily implicitly part of the community. This is a demanding task, as recognised in research interviews, but it is not impossible. Indeed, the individual and community are integrally and dynamically related. In Telling the Story, Andrew Walker, albeit speaking of evangelical revivals, says, ‘Revivalism, by definition, involves the notion of mass crowds as the matrix in which God will visit his people individually’.343 That community matrix and individuality is equally appropriate in the local church setting. The church community and the individual sit in balance.
Finally, how does preaching within this biblical narrative and community contextual model relate to the other models? Lindbeck recognises that models can co-exist and even sees advantages of hybrid models,344 but does not consider them necessary or workable for his primary purpose, an examination of the potential for ecumenism
343
Andrew Walker, Telling the Story: Gospel, Mission and Culture, Gospel and Culture (London: SPCK, 1996), p.64.
344
using his cultural linguistic-model. Nevertheless he utilises the perspectives of the other models within his.345 There is nothing in the cultural-linguistic model that necessitates rejection of cognitive theories, for instance, but that ‘the conditions under which propositions can be uttered are very different in cognitivist and cultural- linguistic approaches’ and whereas for the cognitivist they are for ‘technical theology’, for his new model the propositional focus is to ‘mold lives’.346 This is directly relevant to my situation, where my research has suggested a culture of an informationally focused faith. In the practical, working terms of the church, it affirms the importance of sharpening the focus on practical faith rather than simply espoused beliefs. Focusing on God’s authority in the Bible, which establishes the authority of the church as the ongoing narrative community (comprising the individuals within it), the preaching task should be to facilitate active faith from within the authority of the church community, remembering that this congregational authority is itself logically and theologically preceded by that of God’s authority in the Bible. The congregation is therefore not the final authority in preaching, as will be evidenced in the next section. I will also highlight a significant fault line in the cultural-narrative approach to the faith community. The preaching task cannot be fully understood until the authority of the preacher is considered, which, I will show, counterbalances and at times outweighs though certainly does not remove the congregational authority.