Am I a speacher?
I love my job. I really do. Quite possibly my favorite element of my job is the privilege of teaching the Bible to people at Seven24 on Sunday nights. I love studying for sermons, I love writing sermons, I love giving sermons, and most of all I love the way that God uses his proclaimed Word to change lives. I'm also constantly thinking through different ways of making the teaching portion of Seven24 more effective. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the world's greatest out-of-the-box thinker, but when it comes to something as critically important as communicating the truths of scripture in such a way that they are transformative for myself and others, I certainly want to think as creatively as possible.
It's for that reason that I've begun reading a chapter out of "Preaching Re-imagined" each night before I go to sleep. Doug Pagitt's basic premise is that preaching in churches has turned in to "speaching" (speech making) and that this is largely ineffective. Pagitt advocates a shift to what he calls "progressional dialogue", which is a more interactive preaching format practiced at his church, Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis, MN. I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book, so I'm not quite able to draw any definitive conclusions just yet, but so far what he's saying makes a lot of sense.
At Seven24 we have an interesting situation in that on your average Sunday night usually at least 80% of the people in the room have already listened to a fairly lengthy sermon that day, either at our church or another church. I often get the sense that the last thing that's needed is for me to talk at them for another 40 minutes, especially given that I'm speaking to mostly college students, who have a lot of good insights and a strong desire to share those insights with others. That being said, creating a "sermon" that is highly interactive is, frankly, difficult. More often than not I'll have at least one question that I'll invite the congregation to respond to, but I've struggled to truly create a more conversational sermon setting. The lack of conversation during the teaching times at Seven24 is not due to my need to hear myself talk or a lack of desire on my part to interact with the community...it's simply due to my own difficulty in figuring out how to effectively engage the audience. Today I began working on a sermon for the sixth installment of our periodically recurring series called "Why We Do What We Do", and I look forward to hopefully engaging people at Seven24 in discussion in the midst of the sermon in a way that will hopefully be more beneficial to us as a community than me giving a 40 minute speech would be.
I've already got quite a bit more that I could say about some of Pagitt's ideas so far, but I think I'll stop there for now. To anyone reading, what do you think? When you go to church would you rather here just a straight sermon or would you prefer more interaction? Why do you feel the way that you do? I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts.
P.S.- my talk from last Sunday night is posted here .
It's for that reason that I've begun reading a chapter out of "Preaching Re-imagined" each night before I go to sleep. Doug Pagitt's basic premise is that preaching in churches has turned in to "speaching" (speech making) and that this is largely ineffective. Pagitt advocates a shift to what he calls "progressional dialogue", which is a more interactive preaching format practiced at his church, Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis, MN. I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book, so I'm not quite able to draw any definitive conclusions just yet, but so far what he's saying makes a lot of sense.
At Seven24 we have an interesting situation in that on your average Sunday night usually at least 80% of the people in the room have already listened to a fairly lengthy sermon that day, either at our church or another church. I often get the sense that the last thing that's needed is for me to talk at them for another 40 minutes, especially given that I'm speaking to mostly college students, who have a lot of good insights and a strong desire to share those insights with others. That being said, creating a "sermon" that is highly interactive is, frankly, difficult. More often than not I'll have at least one question that I'll invite the congregation to respond to, but I've struggled to truly create a more conversational sermon setting. The lack of conversation during the teaching times at Seven24 is not due to my need to hear myself talk or a lack of desire on my part to interact with the community...it's simply due to my own difficulty in figuring out how to effectively engage the audience. Today I began working on a sermon for the sixth installment of our periodically recurring series called "Why We Do What We Do", and I look forward to hopefully engaging people at Seven24 in discussion in the midst of the sermon in a way that will hopefully be more beneficial to us as a community than me giving a 40 minute speech would be.
I've already got quite a bit more that I could say about some of Pagitt's ideas so far, but I think I'll stop there for now. To anyone reading, what do you think? When you go to church would you rather here just a straight sermon or would you prefer more interaction? Why do you feel the way that you do? I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts.
P.S.- my talk from last Sunday night is posted here .
Comments
rhett