A new generation from diverse backgrounds and complex situations challenges the church's traditional way of preaching."
This straightforward description of the thorny realities that confront us as preachers is the opening sentence of a significant article in this issue of Ministry by Gerhard Van Wyk and Rudolph Meyer, "Preaching Beyond Modernism," part 2 (see page 12). While their basic concern is not new, what they bring to this observation is thought provoking and enlightening.
Behind their thinking is the fact that ministers face a powerful new and perplexing tide of worldview. Thus, pastors are quite easily seduced into experimenting with schemes and strategies to entice people into church and keep them securely seated in the pews! Good as they may be, many of these schemes have a way of developing into shallow, gimmicky fixes that demean the dignity and high calling of bonafide Christian ministry, worship, and preaching.
When it comes to possible gimmickry, some novel way of preaching is often uppermost in our minds. We urgently want to be relevant and meaningful worthy objectives, to say the least but in our attempts to become so, our preaching can lose its spiritual authenticity, biblical depth, and even its God-given reason for existing.
In our desire to mold our preaching according to contemporary need also the worthiest of motivations we tend to concentrate on altering the content and style of preaching, as if that were all that is necessary to remedy the prob lem. Important as content and style are, however, there is more, and this is where the insights of Van Wyk and Meyer are helpful.
They call for a new kind of pastoral humility, in which the preacher no longer projects himself as the final authority, and the members of the listening congregation as essentially inferior in their grasp of what the preacher may haughtily have pro claimed.
Van Wyk and Meyer are looking for a fundamental attitudinal shift amongst us, a re-evaluated understanding of who the minister is or sees himself or herself to be in relation to those who hear Christian preaching.
The problem among us is that there is a significant school of preaching thought, hubristic "pulpiteering" as a manifestation of legitimate confidence and the distinct spin-off of some sort of divine unction. As people have reacted more and more against this overbearing attitude, some of us, in turn, have responded by moving too far in the opposite direction. This is not what this call for humility is all about.
It is, instead, a call for us to take more of a horizontal posture among our people and among people in general. We are called to stand alongside them. While this call is also not new in itself, it can by all means do with some serious attention and adaptation here and now. Deep in ourselves, we have to know that our authority is not something we own or create, or even that the church itself owns. We have our authority, thank God, only from Jesus Christ Himself, through the witness of the Spirit.
One of the best illustrations of this "standing alongside" approach may be found in that fabulously suggestive story of Philip's encounter with the Ethiopian financial officer (Acts 8). At the direction of the Holy Spirit, Philip goes "down" from Jerusalem to Gaza. He positions himself close to this man's chariot entourage (verse 29). He then runs right up to the chariot, and listening to what the man is reading, he asks the Ethiopian if he is understanding it. On the backdrop of this horizontal man-to man approach, the way is opened for a heart-to-heart encounter; and it doesn't take long for the man to actually ask for baptism.
Van Wyk and Meyer, of course, approach their subject from the point of view of the realities that underlie the modernist/postmodernist debate, both of which present potentially serious dangers to authentic Christian faith and preaching.
Without question one of the most serious of these dangers is the way the largely unquestioned knowledge oriented modernist approach has a way of puffing up (1 Cor. 8:1, KJV) those who believe that through biblical research (mere "exegesis" from a liberal or conservative point of view) has led them to possess "the truth." So they come to feel justified and duty-bound to pompously condemn and dismiss every thing at variance with their research.
It is this attitude and its kin that, with good reason, Van Wyk and Meyer are calling us away from, as we confirm our person-to-person ministry and our identity in Jesus Christ and in the verities of the faith once delivered to the saints.
