July 28, 2006
The Myth of Expository Preaching (part 3): responding to Scripture as a community
In his final post outlining an alternative to expository preaching, David Fitch invites us to think differently about how we respond to Scripture. Rather than three alliterated application points, why not a liturgical response? And instead of preaching that targets the individual's life, why not a communal interaction with the text? Fitch also shares practices at his own church as they move beyond commodified preaching.
3. FROM APPLICATION POINTS TO LITURGICAL RESPONSE
By "liturgical" I mean the activity of responding to God, who He is, what he has done, and what He has said. It is what shapes us into relationship with him. It makes no sense for the preacher who proclaims the Word of God to conclude with more notes of applications and "to do" lists. Instead the Word invokes postures of response: silence, submission, obedience, affirmation in faith, confession, and of course the Eucharistic celebration of participating in receiving the Body of Christ. Slowly I am formed through the faithful preaching of the Word and ever hearing, responding, submitting, obeying, confessing, affirming and acting in faith.
This means our understanding of sanctification in preaching might have to change. For what is happening to the hearers is not a.) the cognitive digestion of some information about God and moral life, from which we b.) understand and assent and then c.) tell our body to do it. Instead we hear proclaimed the reality of the world through the good news, a declaration of the way the world is, and we are invited to enter in through submission, confession, repentance, and affirmation.
Through this, over time, we cannot help but be changed and engage the world differently. Our character changes, our view of the world changes, the way we see the poor, our money, our children - everything changes. In Christ, by the Holy Spirit, "the eyes of our imaginations are opened, and we receive a new self."
4. FROM INDIVIDUALISM TO COMMUNITY
If preaching starts and ends with the sermon on Sunday, and if the Word is distributed to individuals as portable property to be taken home in notes or a cassette tape, it cannot help but be the means of fostering interpretive violence. The violence comes when we put our own meaning or agenda onto Scripture. The violence comes when the preaching of the Word separates us as individuals each armed with the interpretation we want because we do not come together in mutual submission to discern the Scripture's meaning for our lives today.
If preaching is to avoid this violence, it must foster communal practices that allow us to submit to one another as the Spirit works to interpret the Scriptures. We do this not as a democracy, but as a Spirit filled community where we submit to each other's authoritative gifts. Of course, to even think of doing church this way requires a new imagination.
At our church many of us meet in small triad fellowships to read the texts from Sunday, confess sin, listen, and practice speaking truth with love and submission. We have a B&B (Bible and Brew?uh?coffee) session every Sunday morning to read the texts together and ask what these texts speak about God, his mission in Christ, and how we must respond. We need to create more places to read and listen and speak into each other's lives out of the preaching of the Word.
I believe each local Body of Christ is fertile ground for the forming of our imaginations through the interpretation of Scripture. Here in community we learn the virtues necessary to interpret Scripture for the local challenges of the Christian life. Stephen Fowl calls these communities "vigilant communities" in his book Engaging Scripture. He says faithful interpretation requires vigilant communities that engage in regular practices of truth telling, forgiveness, and reconciliation with people who posses both humility and the ability to listen well.
Without becoming vigilant communities I fear we all fall into the modernist temptation of believing Scripture is perspicuous (to me), its meaning is automatically self-evident to each individual (as long as they agree with me), and I know Scripture (well enough to justify my life to myself) which is the ultimate denial of the hermeneutic task.
Posted by UrL Scaramanga at July 28, 2006 | Comments (15)
July 25, 2006
The Myth of Expository Preaching (part 2): proclamation that inspires the imagination
David Fitch is back to explain why he believes expository preaching is a myth that is hindering the full potential of the pulpit. In part one of his post Fitch said expository preaching has led to the commodification of Scripture. As he promised, he's back to offer suggestions for reclaiming preaching from the influence of consumerism.
Two weeks ago I wrote a post on "Expository Preaching." On the one hand, I was surprised with the number of sympathetic comments and excellent discussion that recognized the problem of "commodification of the Word." On the other hand, there were some folk who implied that I was either denigrating Scripture, diminishing the importance of preaching, or making "meaning" unstable so much so that it wasn't worth preaching anymore. To me, these were the very things I was working against by alerting us to the danger of commodifying the Word. And so I promised a second post that would explore how we might preach more faithfully in our times.
1. FROM EXPLAINING TO PROCLAIMING
We will no doubt need to explain some things in the text, but the primary task of preaching on Sunday morning is "proclaiming" the reality of the world as it is under the good news of the gospel that renders all things new. This means our first task as preachers is to describe not prescribe.
The primary move of preaching will not be sentence-by-sentence exposition & explaining, then an application. Instead the primary move of the preacher will be to describe the world as it is via the person and work of Jesus Christ, then invite the hearers into this reality by calling for submission, confession, obedience, or the affirmation of a truth.
In Brueggemann's words, we preach to "fund imagination." Through proclaiming the Word, the Spirit reorganizes perception, experience, and even faith to enable hearers to live in the reality of Christ's work, respond to Christ, and obey. This kind of preaching subverts the dominant habits of thinking and the ways our imaginations have been taught to see the world. Instead of dissecting the text, making it portable, and distributing it to people for their own personal use, the preacher re-narrates the world as it is under the Lordship of Christ and then invites people into it.
When I preach I see my role as the herald of the new world that has been inaugurated in the death and resurrection of Christ. Whether in the Old or New Testaments, I am unfurling the world as it is under the work of God down through history and ultimately in Jesus Christ. I always start by narrating a common experience from a personal story, a movie, a piece of literature. I try to expose the way we might be living under an alternative interpretation of the way things are. But then I move to the text for the day, read it and start to unfold the reality as it is in God thru Christ. Finally, I then move to invite the gathering into this Christ-reality, looking for responses we can all make to live more faithfully out of who He is, what He has done, and where He is taking us and the world.
2. FROM TEXTBOOK TO DRAMA
Preachers must resist all modernist temptations to see the Scriptures as a propositional textbook of religious facts. Scripture is real accounts, testimonies, and witnesses of God's people. It is alive. So let's read and speak as ones invited to participate in the continuation of all this story! This means seeing the Bible as a Narrative Recently, von Balthazar, Sam Wells, and Kevin Vanhoozer have all taught us to think of Scripture as Theo Drama where we become the participants. This is the metaphor I believe we must follow in our preaching.
If this is true, then we need to put historical exegesis in its proper place. It a tool grounded in history that must be submitted to the traditions and history of God's work in the church. We need not spend countless hours translating each text thinking we have reached the original meaning by our own brilliance. Instead, we stand in a long line of preachers and the vast theological realities that have been interpreted and shown out of Scripture down through the ages.
Authorial intent is not the main issue although it may be of importance for understanding the text at certain times. What is important is the reality being unfurled about God in Christ and how we can best respond so as to live into it until He returns. The hubris of pastors thinking they can exegete a text better and more accurately than the thousands that have gone before gets in the way of the Main Thing, the glory of his majestic work and what he is working for in history. This is where our imaginations will be fed. This is where we will be formed as missional people.
In the final part of David Fitch's discussion of preaching will be posted soon.
Posted by UrL Scaramanga at July 25, 2006 | Comments (26)
July 23, 2006
Spiritual Formation: we’ve already got a proven model, but do we want it?
Recently friends from a major publisher of Sunday school curriculum called me. They were researching trends in spiritual formation, they said, and they thought I might help them.
After a few warm-up questions, they got to the heart of the matter: "What would you recommend for spiritual formation in our time?"
"The monastery," I said.
There was a long pause.
"I'm serious," I said.
Another long pause. "You're going to have to unpack that for us," they finally said.
"It's a proven model," I pointed out, "a model that includes everything we know brings about transformation. What would happen to your life" (I was now turning the question on them) "if you lived in close geographical community and relationship with other people; if you lived in submission to authority; if you practiced silence and simplicity and discipline; if you regularly read the Bible and prayed and meditated on what you read; if you made study part of your life; and if you worked hard in some daily occupation, seeing your labor as full of dignity and offering it to God?"
(I thought, but didn't say, that this is the same general approach followed by YWAM, which started in 1960 and now has 1,000 locations in 149 countries.)
"But not everyone can move into a monastery," they said. True, but we already have the solution: they're called oblates or tertiaries, people who live outside the monastery but who in their daily lives follow the same ideals of sacrifice, simplicity, and service. Or consider the parallel model of Opus Dei, the Catholic organization founded less than a hundred years ago: of its 87,000 members, both men and women, 98 percent are laypeople, and most of those are married.
In fact, to the extent that our local churches are changing people's lives, they're usually approximating this monastic ideal, recreating it on a smaller scale and adapting it for, say, married people who live in subdivisions.
"Okay, but what about the children?" they asked. "What do you do with the children?"
"Actually, monasteries were full of children," I said, "though usually starting at the age of elementary school. From the years 600 to 1000, a period that's been called ?the Benedictine centuries,' the monasteries provided much of the education in Western Europe. And any other questions about what to do with children have already been worked on by the cell-church and house-church movements."
My friendly questioners had a third and final concern: "But you're making it seem as if the culture is something Christians should retreat from, while the emerging church is interested in engaging that culture."
This took some explanation. I do think that as evangelicals we consistently underestimate the power of culture, and our attempts to "be relevant" usually end up as our weakness rather than our strength. But I believe in a certain type of counterculture - in Tim Keller's immortal phrase, "A counterculture for the common good." We create alternate communities that not only pray for the wider world, but also serve that wider world in acts of mercy and justice. Take The Salvation Army--an evangelical approximation of monastic counterculture and discipline, complete with distinctive clothing. In the mid-1880s the Salvation Army took on the audacious goal to end unemployment in Britain. They didn't succeed, but their experiment led to thousands of urban ministries today.
So I return to my original question: What would happen to your life if you lived in close geographical community and relationship with other people; if you lived in submission to authority; if you practiced silence and simplicity and discipline; if you regularly read the Bible and prayed and meditated on what you read; if you made study part of your life; and if you worked hard in some daily occupation, seeing your labor as full of dignity and offering it to God?
At least Saint Benedict thinks you'd become a healthier human being and godlier Christian. And 1,500 years of history would prove him right.
Posted by Kevin Miller at July 23, 2006 | Comments (30)
July 21, 2006
Reaching the Liberal Next Door: Are conservative politics a barrier to the gospel?
Last March, the conversation on Ur heated up when Greg Boyd posted excerpts from his book The Myth of a Christian Nation (Zondervan, 2006). Boyd believes the mission of the gospel is jeopardized when we confuse God's mission with our nation's mission. Wading into the turbulent political waters this time is Wes Haddaway, pastor of evangelism at Harmony Bible Church in Danville, Iowa. Haddaway sees an urgent need to create Christian communities that transcend the Blue State/Red State divide.
Two years ago our church was growing at the rate of about a hundred people per year and we were all very excited about what God was doing. As the pastor responsible for evangelism and assimilation, I had a unique perspective. One night after visiting a family that was new to our church, it occurred to me that no matter what walk of life a person came from to our church, there was one thing that I could be sure of; they had all watched the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News within the last week. They all voted for the same candidates and had conservative social views.
This bothered me because while I was very excited about what God was doing at our church, it was puzzling to me as to why God would do this. "Why would God build the church of people who all thought the same?" The fact is that there are a lot of people in our community that will never come to our church, and it isn't because of Jesus - it's because of us. Somehow we've mixed politics, ideology, and our vision for our country, with who we are as Christians. This is a barrier that causes many people who are not Christians to not even want to be around us.
How can we be a church that allows people to have their politics and ideology, but also welcomes people from other viewpoints to be a part of the same church? (All of this assumes we want to reach those who are unlike us, which for some may not be the goal.)
The early Christians had to struggle with this very kind of dilemma. As a Gentile, I'm really glad they worked through it. Our challenge is very much the same. Our challenge is to not allow ?who we are' to prevent people ?who are not like us' from becoming Christians. If the early Christians had not worked out the 'Jew versus Gentile' issue the results would have been catastrophic. If they had not worked it out it's hard to imagine how a Jewish-based church would have even survived.
Again our dilemma is no less serious. We are drawing a circle around Christ that includes pro-life but excludes an economic system that is generous to the poor. It is fearful to speculate what could happen to Christianity if we don't work through this - after all, our political and socioeconomic views are fleeting compared to the eternal work of God. We need to face the fact that many people of our community and our world will not even listen to the gospel because of the political and ideological bias of the evangelical church.
What this kind of church would look like is hard to answer. However, I'm sure it looked just as hard to the Jewish believers. The answer eluded them for a while, but they found it. Our answer may be as difficult for us to comprehend, but it is there. A starting point might be to focus on some common ground issues, such as; domestic violence, sexual exploitation, racism, poverty, injustice?
Christ said that the gates of hell will not prevail against his church. I believe that the social economic and political ideology of much of evangelical Christianity will also not prevail against his church. Somehow God will save those people around the world, including our liberal neighbor and the person in the office down the hall from us. Somehow God will find a means to reach them. I just think he'd rather do it through us than without us.
Posted by UrL Scaramanga at July 21, 2006 | Comments (30)
July 18, 2006
Axis Denied (part 2): What should we learn from the demise of Willow’s Next-Gen ministry?
In part one Dan Kimball, pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California, discussed the inherent difficulties of the church-within-a-church model that has been popular with churches wanting to reach the next generation. In many cases the divergent values between the mother church and the alternative "Gen X" service cause friction - with the younger leaders usually getting burned.
Seeming to contradict Kimball's experience, Scot McKnight reports that Gene Appel, a pastor at Willow Creek, said "that it was Axis that had led to dramatic changes in the rest of the church." And Willow had adopted enough of the younger generation's values "to call into question the viability of Axis having a separable service." Was Axis really a victim of its own success?
In part two, Kimball shares his story of leading a Next-Gen ministry within an existing church, and bids a heartfelt farewell to Axis.
What is the answer to the church-within-a-church dilemma? I don't know. For me, after leading an alternative worship gathering within a church for many years, we finally planted a new church. Like many others who launched an alternative gathering within a church, we realized that tension eventually arose because of the value and philosophy differences needed to minister to different populations. It turned out that our mother-church (which is a wonderful church) did not want us to truly change beyond just the worship style itself. We were expected to conform to the systems and values of the mother church. We found that it just couldn't work, because the need for different values and philosophy of ministry from the mother church was the very reason we needed to start the new alternative gathering in the first place.
I truly wish these alternative worship gatherings and ministries within a church could work, but they usually don't. I have hope for the future with them, as senior leadership in some churches is open to what it really means to launch something that is "alternative" in more than just style of worship. I believe that it is possible to have both generational and worldview(s) differences within the same church. But it is important to recognize that having an "intergenerational church" is not about just seeing people sit in the same worship service for 60-90 minutes. We do that in movie theaters, and that is not community. Intergenerational relationships occur outside the worship gatherings, so focusing all our energy on the worship service does not produce an intergenerational church.
Axis certainly served a purpose, and I remember when it was thriving. I was close to an Axis staff person and heard about the wonderful things going on there. But Axis is now the latest story of yet another alternative gathering, a church-within-a-church, biting the dust.
Oh, Jesus, lead your church. Keep our own human egos and control issues out of the way so we can let others lead who are in tune with different cultures that we may not be in tune to. May we yield to those placed in leadership above us if serving on a staff. This is your church, Jesus, may we never forget that and may we serve you in the way you want us to for your Kingdom and the mission.
Farewell Axis. Cheers to you. You served a wonderful purpose in the Kingdom and helped many, many people through the years and inspired so many of us to experiment with launching new gatherings. Thank you, Axis (and Willow Creek), for pioneering new ways of ministry. Your influence and inspiration continues to spread wide.
Posted by UrL Scaramanga at July 18, 2006 | Comments (23)
July 13, 2006
Axis Denied: What should we learn from the demise of Willow’s Next-Gen ministry?
Ten years ago the leaders of Willow Creek Community Church realized that 18-30 year olds, popularly known as Gen X, were largely missing from their church. In response, the "seeker-driven" church launched Axis to help "the Next Gen connect with God through high-intensity weekend services with relevant teaching, worship and art." Willow became one of the first churches to experiment with the church-within-a-church model, and many others followed Willow's example hoping to reach Gen X.
This week Willow Creek announced the end of Axis.
Gene Appel, lead pastor of Willow's South Barrington campus, said that leaders have been asking God for months for a new vision for Axis, and they sense an emerging desire to be a "diverse church with an intergenerational vision." If Axis's launch ten years ago signified the start of the next-generation-church-within-a-church phenomenon, what are we to make of Axis's demise? Has Gen X ministry been a failure, or was Axis a victim of its own success - a transition ministry that has outlived its usefulness?
Dan Kimball, pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California, and author of Emerging Church and Emerging Worship, has written about the end of Axis. In part one of his post, Kimball discusses why the church-within-a-church model is difficult to maintain.
I don't know all the behind the scenes discussions that led to the decision to end the Axis worship gathering at Willow Creek. I have talked with some of the Axis staff throughout the years, so I have a general understanding of the history and changes made since it started. I even wrote a chapter specifically about Axis in the Emerging Worship book. But whatever all the reasons for shutting down Axis were, I can say, it saddened my heart. But I was not at all surprised. In fact, I am surprised it didn't end sooner.
With Axis, Willow Creek was one of the first churches to experiment with launching an alternative worship gathering within an existing church. Over ten years ago, Willow was noticing that value differences and cultural differences between generations were emerging. Despite the great success Willow was having with older generations, they realized they needed new expressions of evangelism, worship, teaching, learning, and spiritual formation for those younger people they were not seeing in the church. Needing new expressions of ministry for different cultural populations should be a natural thing. To my understanding this was the reason behind the birthing of Willow Creek itself back in the seventies.
However, when launching a new worship gathering within an existing church, the questions to ask should be: Are the changes occurring mainly generational (music style, appearance, language), or are the changes bigger? Is a shift in worldview(s) occurring? If it is just a generational change, then you might as well just change the music, add some candles, create hip environment, and play a video of the senior pastor. That's changing the style, and I think that if we really peeled back the layers of the majority of these alternative services within existing churches, that is what we would find.
Many of the generation-focused worship gatherings may have a younger pastor with a goatee or funky glasses that wears his shirt un-tucked and looks like he could be a band member from Death Cab for Cutie, and this leader may have some freedom within that service, but he or she can't really make holistic changes to the church at large because their ministry needs to fold into the systems and values of the larger church. Pastors of generational ministries typically report to the senior or executive pastor at a church. That is the power structure for allowing control and change in these situations. To some degree, and I say this with respect, it ends up shaping these alternative worship gatherings into an extended youth ministry, or mini-me hipper version of the main worship gathering.
However, if the changes in culture are bigger than merely generational styles, it is absurd to think that creating a different aesthetic environment and changing the music is really being missional. To be missional to a cultural population that is different in more than age, means looking at everything through a different lens. It means looking at community differently, spiritual formation, evangelism, membership, leadership, communication all through the lens of the new culture and bringing the gospel to them in the unique way that connects to them as any missionary would. This means that the whole culture of a church will change, not just what happens in a worship gathering. That is why only changing the worship gathering is not the answer.
This is why so many worship gatherings launched within a church last only 3-5 years. Very few last any longer than that. They end up imploding because if the new worship gathering is truly rethinking everything as a missionary would to a different culture, then the new ministry with different values struggles to squeeze into the existing church structure's cultural form of ministry. Because the power lies with the senior leadership, the decisions are made from top to bottom, and the alternative worship gatherings are not at the top.
Ironically, the very thing (the need for something different) that the senior leadership was excited about in birthing the new worship gathering, ends up causing all the tension. This usually happens after lots of conflict and difficulty. I have heard too many stories about the sad things that have occurred in these situations.
Posted by UrL Scaramanga at July 13, 2006 | Comments (39)
July 10, 2006
From Lord to Label: how consumerism undermines our faith
Christian critiques of consumerism usually focus on the dangers of idolatry - the temptation to make material goods the center of life rather than God. This, however, misses the real threat consumerism poses. My concern is not materialism, strictly speaking, or even the consumption of goods - as contingent beings, we must consume resources to survive. The problem is not consuming to live, but rather living to consume.
We find ourselves in a culture that defines our relationships and actions primarily through a matrix of consumption. As the philosopher Baudrillard explains, "Consumption is a system of meaning." We assign value to ourselves and others based on the goods we purchase. One's identity is now constructed by the clothes you wear, the vehicle you drive, and the music on your iPod. In short, you are what you consume.
This explains why shopping is the number one leisure activity of Americans. It occupies a role in society that once belonged only to religion - the power to give meaning and construct identity. Consumerism, as Pete Ward correctly concludes, "represents an alternative source of meaning to the Christian gospel." No longer merely an economic system, consumerism has become the American worldview - the framework through which we interpret everything else, including God, the gospel, and church.
When we approach Christianity as consumers rather than seeing it as a comprehensive way of life, an interpretive set of beliefs and values, Christianity becomes just one more brand we consume along with Gap, Apple, and Starbucks to express identity. And the demotion of Jesus Christ from Lord to label means to live as a Christian no longer carries an expectation of obedience and good works, but rather the perpetual consumption of Christian merchandise and experiences - music, books, t-shirts, conferences, and jewelry.
Approaching Christianity as a brand (rather than a worldview) explains why the majority of people who identify themselves as born-again Christians live no differently than other Americans. According to George Barna, most churchgoers have not adopted a biblical worldview, they have simply added a Jesus fish on the bumper of their unregenerate consumer identities. As Mark Riddle observes, "Conversion in the U.S. seems to mean we've exchanged some of our shopping at Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, and Borders for the Christian bookstore down the street. We've taken our lack of purchasing control to God's store, where we buy our office supplies in Jesus name."
Ultimately we shouldn't be surprised that American Christianity has succumbed to the pervasive power of consumerism. Alan Wolf, a leading sociologist and the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, has concluded that, "In the United States culture has transformed Christ, as well as all other religions found within these shores. In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture - and American culture has triumphed."
To validate Wolf's belief one need only look at religious traditions more recently introduced to popular consumer culture. Last month The New York Times ran an article about the first Indian megatemple (the Hindu equivalent of the American megachurch). The enormous building is designed to attract and entertain the un-templed with a large-format movie screen, an indoor boat ride, and even a hall of animatronic characters. The temple's public relation's director proudly admits, "There is no doubt about it - we have taken the concept from Disneyland." Similarly, Times writer Laurie Goodstein has reported on the struggle of American Muslim clerics to protect their faith from the influence of materialism and consumerism.
Indications are that over time American Hindu and Muslim leaders will follow their Christian counterparts in succumbing to the siren song of consumerism. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, co-authors of The Churching of America, 1776-1990, argue that ministry in the U.S. is modeled primarily on capitalism with pastors functioning as a church's sales force, and evangelism as its marketing strategy. Our willing indoctrination into this economic view of ministry is so complete that most pastors never question its validity or recognize how unprecedented it is within Christian history.
According to Finke and Stark, the American church adopted a consumer-driven model because the First Amendment prohibited state-sanctioned religion. Therefore, faith, like the buying of material goods, became a matter of individual choice and self-expression. And "where religious affiliation is a matter of choice, religious organizations must compete for members and . . . the ?invisible hand' of the marketplace is as unforgiving of ineffective religious firms as it is of their commercial counterparts."
This explains why corporate models, marketing strategies, and secular business values are pervasive in American ministry - we are in competition with other churches, and other providers of identity and meaning, for survival. To appeal to religious consumers we must commodify our congregations - slapping our church's logo on shirts, coffee mugs, and bible covers. And we strive to convince a sustainable segment of the religious marketplace that our church is "relevant," "comfortable," or "exciting."
As a result, choosing a church today isn't merely about finding a community to learn and live out the Christian faith. It's about "church shopping" to find the congregation that best expresses my identity. This drives Christian leaders to differentiate their church by providing more of the features and services people want. After all, in a consumer culture the customer, not Christ, is king.
This post is an excerpt from the article "All We Like Sheep: Is our insistence on choices leading us astray?" You can read the full article, along with others on the issue of consumerism, in the summer issue of Leadership Journal.
Posted by Skye Jethani at July 10, 2006 | Comments (36)
July 6, 2006
Protesting, Pirates, and Potter: our inconsistent outrage toward Hollywood
The summer movie season continues. First Elizabeth Diffin confessed her affection for da Vinci. Then Skye Jethani thanked Hollywood for not marketing Superman to churches. And now Johnny Depp and crew blur the line between character and criminality. In this post Dave Terpstra, pastor of The Next Level Church in Denver and frequent contributor to Ur, wonders why so many Christians protest Harry Potter but seem passively accepting of Pirates of the Caribbean.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is opening in theaters this week and I haven't heard a peep from concerned Christian parents. Yet anytime a Harry Potter film comes up on the screen many Christians are quick to condemn it. So I have wondered, why the inconsistency?
The similarity in material between the two movies that should concern parents is amazing. First, both films focus on activities contrary to the teachings Scripture, piracy and witchcraft. Second, the hero of Pirates, like the hero of Potter, is practicing what is considered evil - not just battling against those who practice it. Third, there are dark forces involved in both. Harry Potter films are amuck with sorcery and the like. Pirates of the Caribbean films are full of curses and the undead. The list could go on.
So where is the outrage? I wondered if the issue was simply one of popularity. Was Pirates just not big enough to condemn publicly? But I checked the records. Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl grossed only $12 million dollars less than the best-selling Harry Potter movie so far. And it beat the other three. With all of the hype for the Pirates sequel, this new movie might gross more still.
So where is the outrage, I wonder? Is there another issue here? I believe there is.
Because most followers of Christ are unfamiliar with the occult, anything that looks like it or hints at it is suspect. We simply don't know that much about the spirit world. Scripture speaks of it, but not in a highly detailed way. So when we see children casting spells on the big screen, we ban our little ones from watching it because we know that witchcraft is bad.
But for some reason the swashbuckling comedy of Captain Jack Sparrow doesn't draw the same ire. I believe Captain Jack could be far more corrupting to youth. In the first movie, when asked about his plans by two bumbling members of the British Navy he confessed it is his intention to "raid, pillage, plunder and otherwise pilfer my weasely black guts out." Not exactly Christian virtues. Harry Potter would never stoop to that sort of behavior.
One of the themes of Pirates is that a man can be honorable and a criminal. But, pirates by definition cannot be good. Or can they? In the first Pirates movie, Captain Jack Sparrow really was a hero. He stopped other pirates who where doing all of the terrible things that pirates typically do. He helped people who were in real need. Even though he said he was going to act like a pirate, he really didn't. Ultimately, greater good was done.
Likewise, in Harry Potter movies, Harry, Hermione, and Ron are true heroes as well. There is real evil in their world, and Harry, more than any other wizard or muggle (non-magical human) battles against it.
So, I wonder if fictional pirates and wizards really can be good. The issue is whether the phenomenon of heroes emerging among pirates and wizards is truly corrupting and dangerous to our youth, or if it's simply good storytelling. I suppose each parent needs to make up their mind on that issue.
Nevertheless, in my mind, if we are going to pick on Potter, we must pick on Pirates. Otherwise, perhaps Christians should keep their mouth shut about both.
Posted by UrL Scaramanga at July 6, 2006 | Comments (35)
July 3, 2006
The Myth of Expository Preaching & the Commodification of the Word
The summer issue of Leadership, due in mailboxes soon, will focus on the impact of consumerism on our faith and ministries. To get the conversation started, in this post, pastor/professor and regular Ur contributor David Fitch discusses how expository preaching can make Scripture into a commodity that people consume. You can read more about Fitch's critique of consumer driven ministry at his blog, The Great Giveaway.
There is a myth surrounding expository preaching among North American evangelicals. It goes like this: if the preacher follows the text more closely in his preaching, both he/she and the congregation will stay true to the Word of God. No other agendas or human wisdom will slither into the preaching. Implied is, if the preacher but applies the exegetical historical-critical skills learned in seminary and studies the text in its original language, (s)he can arrive at the meaning of the text all by him/herself. This is the mythology I believe is behind expository preaching in the evangelical world.
Why do I label this a mythology? Well first of all, the historical-critical method in the hands of individuals has not yielded a singular meaning as "intended by the author" in over 100 years. Instead what we have is thousands of commentaries on the Bible that present numerous unresolved options for interpreting practically every verse in the Bible. Historical-critical exegesis hasn't generated more unity over Scripture; it has generated less.
In reality what guides interpretation is not individual analysis of the text. It is the broad consensus interpretation for the biblical texts found in the ongoing history of church doctrine. The myth that expository preaching is more faithful to the text is simply not true. There is plenty room for all kinds of human interpretation even within expository preaching.
Even if we could agree that each individual mind under the Holy Spirit can come to the one propositional meaning for the text using exegesis, we cannot assume then that these truths as communicated by the preacher will necessarily be heard as the same to every listener in the pew. As Derrida reminds us, repetition never leads to the "same." Each idea is heard in terms of each hearer's context. The person in the pew takes notes, selects what he or she hears for special notation, and walks away with "the nugget" for the day that can best support his or her current life or context.
Every preacher has had the experience of greeting people after church who thank him/her for what the sermon said. Then the preacher is stunned to hear they took something from the sermon totally different than (s)he had intended. So even if there were a stable authorial meaning inherent to the text, it still could not be communicated intact in the ways expository preaching assumes.
Most disturbing about the myth of expository preaching is the excessive individualism that is promoted by the assumptions that undergird it. Expository preaching can actually encourage the person in the pew to be isolated from further conversation and testing of the Scriptures within the congregation (1 John 4:1). This is because expository preaching commodifies the Word. It carefully dissects the text into three (stereotypically) points and an application, which is then offered to the parishioner as the means to further her Christian life. The person sits isolated in the pew encouraged to take notes, analyze, digest the sermon, rarely giving the Amen. Expository preaching operates under the assumption that the congregation (or radio listener) is composed of individual Cartesian selves isolated and separated from each other, yet capable of listening and receiving truth as information from the pulpit.
By default such a sermon cannot help but situate the parishioner so that (s)he is in control of the Scriptures because it is the parishioner who decides whether, how, and what to accept in the preaching. Ironically, as the expository preacher carefully follows the text in his preaching, the center of control for the meaning of Scripture has shifted from the Bible to the autonomous mind of the listening parishioner. Meanwhile the preacher seeks comfort that somehow the Holy Spirit works in mysterious and unsuspecting ways and His "word shall not return void."
Expository preaching assumes that Christian growth happens individually and cognitively: the believer in the pew hears the sermon, takes notes, and acknowledges an application. (S)he then goes home to apply it in everyday life. Sanctification happens through the cognitive mind digesting a "truth" which then enables the mind to tell the body to do it. And so I fear, that in the large evangelical lecture halls of our day, thousands sit and listen, take notes, and selectively hear what they will hear. The Word has become information to be used for my life as it is. Many times they leave having never confronted the life-changing reality of the Lordship of Christ over their lives.
What I have said above is a pretty heavy indictment. Some might imply that I don't believe preaching is any longer possible in the postmodern worlds. But nothing could be further from the truth. Others might argue the same problem plagues topical preaching. There are those who respond to all of this by dismissing the role of traditional preaching altogether. And some respond with attempts to democratize preaching.
I believe we desperately need the preaching of the Word in the church today. But we need preaching done, not as isolated individuals, but in and through the community of the Spirit. And so in my next post, I will discuss how we can reshape and restore the proclamation of the gospel in the church gathering amid postmodernity.
David Fitch is pastor of Life on the Vine Christian Community in Long Grove, Illinois, a professor of ministry, theology, and ethics at Northern Seminary, and author of The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and Other Modern Maladies (Baker 2006).
Posted by UrL Scaramanga at July 3, 2006 | Comments (33)
