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Holy Week resources and reflections

The miracle of preaching

Editor's note: "Preaching is what God does, and we have to learn and re-learn that" (William Willimon). Chris Brown, a student at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, covered a three-part lecture series delivered by William Willimon at PTS on April 27 with the theme, "God's Activity in Preaching." The lectures, titled "The Miracle of Preaching: Preaching as God's Word," were presented as a part of the seminary's annual J. Hubert Henderson Conference on Church and Ministry.  Willimon, who is bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church and author of nearly 60 books, spoke with natural humility and humor to the pastors, alumni, and seminarians in attendance. His message, however, contained a powerful challenge to preachers: "In order to be a preacher, you have to keep practicing miracle."

 

Editor’s note: “Preaching is what God does, and we have to learn and re-learn that” (William Willimon). Chris Brown, a student at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, covered a three-part lecture series delivered by William Willimon at PTS on April 27 with the theme, “God’s Activity in Preaching.” The lectures, titled “The Miracle of Preaching: Preaching as God’s Word,” were presented as a part of the seminary’s annual J. Hubert Henderson Conference on Church and Ministry.  Willimon, who is bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church and author of nearly 60 books, spoke with natural humility and humor to the pastors, alumni, and seminarians in attendance. His message, however, contained a powerful challenge to preachers: “In order to be a preacher, you have to keep practicing miracle.”

 

 

Why do preachers need to be reminded that preaching is a miracle? Willimon describes the problem as one of modern epistemology: we leave so little room for revelation in our theologies and our ministries that we reduce preaching to a merely human endeavor. Congregations do not hear the messages of sermons because pastors try to do it all on their own. Though professing with their mouths that Christ is risen and at work in the world, many pastors deny that message by failing to trust Christ to work through their preaching. To illustrate his point, Willimon quoted Jim Wallis’s explanation of why a group of pastors had trouble believing stories of the miraculous work that God is doing in and through inner-city churches: “The greatest threat to mainline liberal Protestantism is that Jesus might have risen from the dead.”

Willimon makes clear that because we believe Jesus rose from the dead, and because we believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, we can affirm the fact that God is at work in our world, even in our churches. But preachers often forget this and fail to rely on the miraculous work of God to speak the Word to congregants through their sermons. Without God’s action, preaching is reduced to rhetorical techniques by which we attempt to control the Word. Designing a sermon for a specific rhetorical effect may perhaps be the most dangerous mistake preachers make because it attempts to take control away from God. As Willimon repeated in all three lectures, “I am least faithful in my attempts to be heard.” 

In Willimon’s second lecture of the day, he critiqued what he called “PowerPoint Preaching.” Referring not just to the computer program, Willimon described PowerPoint Preaching as preaching that takes the complex and nuanced words of Scripture and boils them down to a few simple principles or tips for life. While this simplification of God’s Word often comes out of apologetic motives, it results in a humanistic utilitarianism that in fact removes God from the picture. As Willimon quipped, “In leaning over to speak the Word, we fall face down.” Preaching simplistic principles is popular because it flatters the ego, but dangerous because it reduces God to common sense principles and eliminates the need for revelation. PowerPoint Preaching assumes that these common sense principles are recognizable to anyone present and encourages people to pick what makes sense to them — rather than “be coaxed into an alien reality.” 

Willimon sees this oversimplification of the Gospel as an error that is ironically present in both the liberal and evangelical wings of the Church.  Both, he argues, have reduced Jesus to a set of simple principles we use to improve our own lives. “By pushing this message rather than a relationship with this complex living being, Jesus,” he said, “we do with Scripture a mode that is never practiced within Scripture.” Instead of preaching the Gospel, many pastors ironically “try to protect people from Jesus.” For a servant of the Word, protecting the congregation from Jesus is a betrayal of the pastor’s purpose. To counter this trend of simplification, Willimon suggested pastors need to recover the use of narrative, poetics, and mystery in preaching. Preachers must realize that there is a cost for pointing to Christ, and in Willimon’s words, “part of that cost is to be constantly baffled by the story that is larger than my ability to tell.”   

In his final lecture, Willimon sought to reclaim pastoral identity as distinct from other helping professions. Specifically, he suggested that a major means of “Word-avoidance” in churches today is the idea that pastors have no greater purpose than their people. Drawing on Barth, Willimon made the point that preachers are servants of the Word, not just the congregation. The greatest service pastors can render to congregations is subservience to the Word. 

Pastors should be careful, however, that they neither demand the miraculous of themselves nor attempt to gain control of the miraculous gift of the Spirit’s presence in preaching. To say that preaching is a miraculous gift, an act of grace, is to say a frightening thing because gifts, by their very nature, can be withheld. For an illustration, Willimon noted how Jesus at times must have walked away from situations of pain without healing everyone present. In the same way, preachers will have Sundays when they sense the miraculous work of God and Sundays when they wonder where Jesus has gone. Thus preaching is a radical act of trust, a belief that God is at work even in our weakness and our inability to perceive God’s presence. Preachers have to be willing to fail, because this is where the work of God begins. In Willimon’s words, “Every Sunday becomes a death and resurrection — a death as we relinquish control and a resurrection as we see if Jesus picks it up and runs with it.”  

 

Chris Brown is a graduate of the University of Colorado and active in the college ministry of First Church in Boulder, Colo. He plans to graduate from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in May 2008. He is an Inquirer, to become a Candidate this month, from the Presbytery of Western Colorado.

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