Reading Up: The Practice of Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann

Thank God. No, really. Thank. God.

Do you want to know how to begin to think about preaching to a post-modern assembly? Then read this book.

I kept putting off reading The Practice of Prophetic Imagination for a while. I don't know why. It felt intimidating. It felt overwhelming. It felt dense. And it was all of those things. But at the same time, I felt like Brueggemann (as usual) was saying things that needed to be said, setting an agenda that needed to be set, proclaiming the Word boldly. At the end of each chapter, I briefly considered giving Brueggemann a standing ovation. Then I thought my dog might think it was for her, and we don't want her getting a big head.

"Prophetic proclamation is an attempt to imagine the world as though YHWH--the creator of the world, the deliverer of Israel, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whom we Christians come to name as Father, Son, and Spirit--were a real character and an effective agent in the world" (2).

It sounds simple. It sounds obvious. But as Brueggemann takes the reader on a complete tour of the prophetic biblical canon, one sees how the obvious is over and over and over again occluded by the dominant culture. Brueggemann identifies our time as one caught up in "conventional idolatries and/or conventional atheisms," thus meaning that the preaching task is one that requires courage, imagination, and risky. Sign me up.

Brueggemann brilliantly and succinctly sums up the context of twenty-first century American context as being a strange mix of denial and despair. "In our denial, we keep imagining that it will all "work out" and that the failure of our society is not as deep or long term as we might suspect. In our despair, we have the sinking feeling that there will be no return to previous well-being, and we are left in a bad place about long-term prospects" (38). It is in this context that Brueggemann understand the preacher's task to be to name the denial, to name the despair, to allow for grief and woe and to understand God's role in it, and then, upon having sat in those dark places for a while, to begin to turn toward hope.

He traces this movement through the biblical prophetic literature, over and over teaching the contemporary preacher that prophetic preaching isn't only concerned with social justice issues or the problems at hand. Rather, it is a way of imagining the world anew with YHWH as the central character.

He outlines three major tasks of contemporary prophetic ministry:

• To empower and enable folk to relinquish a world that is passing from us (136).
• This requires dealing squarely with denial and despair.
• To enable and empower folk to receive a new world that is emerging before our very eyes that we confess to be a gift of God (138).

Thus, prophetic awareness exists in a paradoxical state between:

• God-given loss that actualizes the "woe" of being out of sync with God's purposes that require relinquishment. That relinquishment in turn produces denial. Thus:
• There is a God-given new emergent that actualizes "the days are coming" by the wise generativity of God that requires receptivity. That receptivity in turn evokes despair. (142-143)

"I believe that prophetic ministry that swirls around truth (against denial) and hope (against despair) is undertaken not because of moral passion (though that counts) but because without prophetic processing of denial and despair, our society will devour itself in alienation" (143).

Perhaps my favorite part of this book is Brueggemann's honest confession that his book falls short of a how-to guide for the local preacher. Though the totalizing forces of our society that try to deny and rule out any possibility that the great God of our creation could possibly be a present, active agent here and now, through imagination, the prophetic preacher enters into a world unseen through that consumerist, militarist lens and sees a world of possibility, of hope, of love, of sustaining grace. There is no prescription for this because it is happening in new ways all the time. Our encounter with Scripture is always new because we are always something new, and this intersection creates the opportunity for even further newness. God is good.

By the end of the book, I kept thinking of Moss' work, not only in singing the blues (in which we do own despair), but in his discussion of Post-Soul generation. As I finished chapter four, "A Lingering Place of Relinquishment," I sat down at my computer and clicked on a link a friend had posted on social media. It was a young woman loudly proclaiming that she had had enough of society's beauty expectations of her, and that she would no longer be following them. Echoes of Brueggemann's and Moss' work in my mind, I fully realized how very desperate this age is to shed the totalizing society that seeks to convince us that there's nothing else there, but how at the same time, that desperation is a flailing one, without a hand hold. Without a prophetic tradition, without a God, we are denouncing something that only grows with the denouncement. Who, then, is announcing God?

The whole book seems revelatory in the way something so common-sense seems revelatory. Which, in some ways makes me sad. But in so many other ways, makes me excited. 

There were too many underlinings and stars in this book to actually quote, but here's a final teaser before you just go out and buy this book:

We do...yearn and trust for more than what the empire can offer. We yearn for abundance and transformation and restoration. We yearn beyond the possible. That impossible is given, when it is given, on the quivering lips of the poet who refuses the thin offer of the totalizers (149).

Preaching Lessons: Angela Hancock

Having just delivered a bit of a mic drop at the end of her sermon immediately preceding this lecture, Hancock stepped up to give us a peek inside her process. Her lecture was titled, "Sermons in Quarantine: The Preacher and Imaginative Resistance." This was a pretty lengthy lecture, but I'm going to break it down here for posterity.

Angela Hancock!

Imaginative resistance occurs when we become uncertain of the narrator, and when we begin to resist or even downright refuse to engage the narrator's POV any further. Hancock emphasizes that in preaching, we offer the opportunity to glimpse something new, somewhere new within the biblical text. And, if we are able to imagine in ways that bring our congregations along with us, this imagining could even take us to a place of moving what we glimpsed there out into our lives.

But, the biblical text is full, FULL of places we have difficulty imagining. So, why do we have difficulty imagining them? First, she says that for us, even pretending to accept the "morally upside-down world" we encounter in scripture feels wrong. A world where a father is asked to sacrifice his son? Feels wrong. A world where babies are killed to protect the kingdom? Feels wrong. It's difficult for us to engage in these worlds because our culture conditions us so effectively not to engage them (more in this in my post about Walter Brueggemann's The Practice of Prophetic Imagination). But further than that, Hancock says that some part of us fears that if we let ourselves imagine this world, we'll also be more inclined to act out these moral problems in real life.

Secondly, Hancock calls out our issue of not wanting to get too close to or to identify with those we disagree with. Pretty simple, and I think jives with what Peter Rollins' lecture.

Finally, Hancock says we resist a narrator in ways that are tied up in issues of authority. While the initial question related to this is, "Do you trust the source of this information?," Hancock places us firmly in a post-modern context when she poses the next relevant question, "Is this person telling about rightness or wrongness? And if so, does she have privileged information that gives reason for this judgment." Her argument is that in today's world, an authority who simply stamps a story or event as "good" or "bad," is regarded with suspicion. And so, she encourages the pastor to trust the assembly: "Tell us the story. But when it comes to deciding what is good, we are just as capable."

Oftentimes, though, sermons wind up in quarantine--written off by listeners due to imaginative resistance. Hancock emphasized that both preachers and listeners can put the sermon in quarantine, and outlines common ways each does so.

Preachers put the sermon in quarantine when...
...we disagree with the storyteller and framework of the text. I think what she was getting at here is when a preacher knows enough biblical context to be suspicious of a text, but not enough to be able to actually trust the narrator. For example, I have this problem with interpreters of Paul. You can tell authentic Paul when there are layers upon layers of meaning in a text. Interpreters of Paul tend to come off sounding a little flat and didactic. I struggle with taking these storytellers seriously. But Hancock urges us not to put the text in quarantine ourselves, painting it ourselves as an irrelevant text.
...we cannot imagine the moral universe the text deals with. If we can't imagine the moral universe, how do we expect to ask our congregations to? This requires a dedication to the text that goes beyond mere suspension of disbelief, and requires actual faith.
...we are challenged by what the Bible tells us. When we confront something ourselves in the text that doesn't exactly line up with what we had hoped to preach on Sunday, we have a tendency to hammer the text into a space it might not be shaped to fit. Hancock said, "If the Bible doesn't inspire resistance, it's not Gospel." And so, our duty is to wrestle with our own resistance to the text.

Hearers put the sermon in quarantine when...
...imaginative resistance is the only goal. Hancock is honest about the fact that some imaginative resistance is going to happen, and is maybe even good. Those stutters in the story where we struggle to make sense tell us a lot about ourselves as people of faith. But the sermon also ought to be seeking to melt away that resistance as well. It's a balance, it seems, of pushing and leading.
...you aren't clear about the framework of a text, even if you are resisting it yourself. Basically, people can see through you when you're struggling and faking it. So don't.

Hancock then provided four strategies for handling imaginative resistance in your own sermon preparation process:

1. Strangify--Be attentive to the ways in which you move to quarantine the text early in the sermon prep process. Do you already know what you'll preach on this text even before you read it? Are you finding ways around the framework of the text to make it more palatable for your listeners? Don't. Be willing to let the text be strange.
2. Converse--Once the text is in quarantine, there may be other texts it is in conversation with. Tradition may have something to say about why this text is interpreted the way it is. Does it need to be rescued?
3. Bring it home--Let the strangeness of the text bring out the difference between the textual world and the local world. What does it say about us? Our world? God? How does it make us feel about each?
4. Listen for the deep music--At the end of the day, the biblical text--any biblical text--found its way into the big story of God's self-giving love. Look for that deeper music as it played then and as it might echo now. There may be some sweetness in the strangeness.

Reflecting on her sermon with Dr. Grundy, I noted that she did a pretty good job of opening up her agenda to us, but that she didn't really reveal this well in her sermon. He indicated that he felt she actually didn't fully allow the strangeness of the text to speak when she made the interpretation that Jesus had given his robe for us. And in reflection, I see his point. She did tidy up the ending quite a bit in order to make it something we could handle, something we could grasp: Jesus did this for you.

In the lecture, I can see room for celebration in her notion of letting the deep music burst forth. But again, I think that there needs to be some sitting in that music. Some toe-tapping, if not all-out dancing in that music.

And though she didn't address it directly, I think her acknowledgment of imaginative resistance opens up a lot of room for discussion about sermon delivery. Hers was calm, nearly saccharine-sweet, and now I can see why: she was fighting our imaginative resistance by approaching us in the most unassuming manner she could. I struggle with this, as I tend to write sermons with a slightly confrontative edge. They almost always soften in the delivery, but it's still there. Makes me wonder about how much of my messages are put in quarantine this way.

Heard the Word: Angela Hancock

Hancock preached on Matthew 22: 1-14. Now, if you're just reading this to gloss for ideas, that's great. I want you to keep reading. After you click the link for the text and read it. All of it. I'm serious. Go do it.

Yeah. Verses 13 and 14 are in there.

Hancock read the passage, then ushered up immediately into prayer, "Because after that, I think we need it."

My next post on Hancock's lecture deals with a lot of the underpinnings of this sermon, but for now, I just want to step it through, because it's construction isn't all that complex or original:

She begins with three contemporary stories of individuals who are 'invited.' Invited to church, invited to deeper faith, invited into faith-based relationships. And all three of them somehow turn down the invitation. But Hancock reminds us that there always comes another invitation. So...how do we handle this text?

She then hopped into the text, really imagining the scene with us, and acknowledges quickly that it isn't a normal story about the world as we know it. Something else is going on here, something bigger than that that we can't quite wrap our arms around.

And so, she jumps into the theological implications of the text, sorting through popular ways of interpreting it. It was like she was sorting through old photographs, looking for the one that matched the picture in her mind, and yet, there wasn't one there. She kept setting aside interpretations and digging further into the pile, eventually uncovering with us that this story is not something we can fit into a Polaroid frame. No. It's something much worse than that, she told us.

But she told us we could avoid the terrible. We could avoid the hard. We could just look at the text and avoid verses 11-14. Or 13 and 14. We could just make it a question of whether or not you will accept the invitation to the theological wedding banquet. And drop the mic there.

But Hancock pushes us to consider verse 14--verse 14 which causes us such holy confusion, which causes us to wonder what in the world is happening here, which causes us to want to fix the story. Again, we encounter the idea that this is not a normal story about a normal wedding banquet that Jesus is telling here. And so again, she moves through the traditional interpretations of this text: that the man is not righteous enough to be at the party, that the man is not faithful enough to be at the party, because he didn't care enough to take the robes offered him at the entrance to the party (literalist interpretation), because Jesus never would have said this and so he didn't.

For a moment, she steps back and looks at this interpretation, and uncovers our bias. We want so badly for the man to be kicked out because he deserves it. We want so badly for Jesus not to come off sounding like a jerk here. But then, there's verse 14 to deal with, and we find that it's true, this is not just a story about humanity's failing or a man who doesn't dress appropriately for a party. Instead, it's a story about God's way with us. And if this is how God deals with us, then what are we to make of this?

At this point, my notes dropped off. Because the interpretive turn that Hancock took was new to me. She insisted that Jesus is really the one kicked out of the banquet, that Jesus is the one who was found to be unworthy by the host and was bound, and tossed, and sent where nobody wants to go. It was Jesus who was chosen. Hancock concluded with an image of Jesus having offered his wedding robe to us, so that we could partake of the banquet. And then, she walked off stage.

So, my first instinct was to pick up my Bible and frantically locate the text and read the other stories surrounding it. Here, Jesus is talking to the chief priests and elders at the temple in Jerusalem. The two parables that Jesus tells before this refer to them (they finally realize). I could see how Hancock came to this interpretation. But I was also surprised that with as much openness as she had in the exegetical process in the content of her sermon that she didn't make this process more clear. Instead, she dropped it on us, then walked away.

This is a general critique of the Festival--it felt like most of the preachers didn't know how to end a sermon. So often, I felt like a burden had been dropped on my lap, needed still to be unpacked and given some kind of instruction in order to take it out into the world. So often with these sermons, I felt I would rather leave that package sitting on the pew when I left. Now, I'm going to err on the side of generosity and assume that these folks know they are preaching to professional preachers, and so they can toss a few harder passes at us than someone who is just picking up the sport of faith, but I couldn't help but shake this feeling that some of what they were teaching in doing this just WILL NOT translate in our congregations today.

But past this, I think this was an important sermon for me to hear because I am often so caught up in sermon delivery and structure. This sermon was not delivered or structured in any way that was surprising or even all that exciting. It was entirely the focus on the story, knowing that we would eventually get to the difficult part that I didn't understand, it was the promise that we wouldn't ignore that strangeness of it that kept me engaged. For me, it tied in nicely with Brian McLaren's session the previous morning about reshaping how we look at texts and how we might do better to engage them fully. For me, Hancock's message showed me how to deal with a difficult pericope that doesn't initially sound like it winds up in a place of grace. But through faithful interpretation and understanding, it might just do that.

Reading Up: The Pastor as Minor Poet by M. Craig Barnes

What a gentle, lovely, pastoral little book. So often, I feel jarred and unsteadied by the preaching task, but Barnes does a beautiful job in The Pastor as Minor Poet of making one feel like that pastoral role is one of gentleness and ease, of walking along a beach, conversing with people as they come. I know it's not really like that. I know he knows it's not like that. But with so many of the texts we have read and the speakers we have seen thus far with an air of desperation around then, it's nice to breath in Barnes' measured pace.

What I appreciate most about this book is that Barnes takes the preacher as a whole person--living a family life, being imperfect, having a relationship with God, and doing the daily work of the pastor. In his introductions to the chapters, he lovingly sketches the mundane in a way that you begin to see the subtext he is pointing out so readily. So much of my enjoyment of this book was about the pacing, about the lingering, and about the lingering it encourages pastors to do in order to be poets of subtext.

In some ways, I could see the connection between this work and the work in parables that ACF is doing: both require a keen sensibility to the unseen in the present moment. And perhaps Barnes' work serves as a bit more of a how-to, though it is not didactic. Rather that teaching us how to be a poet, Barnes just seems to open up the world of what it would look like to be a pastor-poet. He doesn't sugar-coat the preaching task--he acknowledges that some days are easier than others. But he does emphasize the persistence and patience required in the task...things I could really work on.

Here are a few quotes:

• "Poets see the despair and heartache as well as the beauty and miracle that lie just beneath the thin veneer of the ordinary, and they describe this in ways that are recognized not only in the mind, but more profoundly in the soul" (17).
• "What the congregation needs is not a strategist to help them form another plan for achieving a desired image of life, but a poet who looks beneath even the desperation to recover the mystery of what it means to be made in God's image" (18).
• "Poets are devote more to truth than to reality; they are not unaware of reality, but they never accept it at face value...This is why poets care about the text, what is said or done, but only in order to reveal the subtext, which reveals what it means" (19).
• "In contrast to the biblical and theological poets, the pastoral poet has the unique calling of making sense of their worlds in light of the dust and grit of daily life in a parish....the pastor poet lives with a crowded and noisy soul. Central to what it means to be ordained is to open the doors of one's soul to the complexities, pathos, longings, and even sins of those the pastor has vowed to serve" (22).
• But the creativity of the minor poet is found not in the discovery of new truth, or in speaking and writing for every other people. It's found in the fresh articulation of familiar old truths in a specific context. Clearly, that's what pastors do" (26).
• "We wrap ourselves in small talk about small things in order to hide from holiness" (30).
• "The secret to intimacy with another person is discovering the sufficiency of God's love without that person. It is the only way we are ever free to give love to another human being who can never meet the needs of our souls" (46).
• "Since their souls are a sacred meeting ground, it is critical that pastors know how to expose themselves to God. It is not enough that they have learned as minor poets how to peer into the subtexts of the Bible and the congregation. They also have to attend to the underlying holy space of their own lives" (108).

Reading Up: The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor (or BBT as I like to call her now that we're BFF) has a real knack for saying what she's saying without saying it. Or, as my short story teacher called it, showing instead of telling. Perhaps because of the title of this book, I was expecting something a bit more prescriptive, but with BBT, prescriptive is never even on the menu (see 36).

But the closest she gets is in her chapter entitled, "Preaching." The chapters before have all been leading up to the vision of the preaching life, task, and moment that she presents here, so the concept in all its fullness isn't foreign at all, but seems an obvious extension of how she understands call, church, and the world. Most succinctly, BBT understands preaching to be a cooperative task between God, herself, and the community of faith--discount any of the three, and you have something that would be classified as other than preaching in BBT's book (ha!), I think.

The accumulated effect of her conversation about life, call, church, the world, and preaching is a sketch of the pastor as careful observer of the world and lives that God loves so, so dearly. And she is also the bearer of a difficult but good news that is not so easy to deliver or to receive if you're doing it honestly. It strikes me that BBT is so effective because she is so adept in that art of indirect speech Rollins emphasized. Though, I will say more in a moment about when that speech goes silent.

When I was in college, I majored in English and sociology. When people asked me what I was going to do with that, I would laughingly tell them, "I'm going to watch people, then write about it." At the time, I hadn't encountered the Gospel--at least not in any meaningful sense of the word 'encounter.' And so, as my vocation has become a bit more clear and as my faith has deepened and begun to truly shape my life, I would probably now say that I'm going to watch the world, listen for the Word, and then write about that.

The second half of The Preaching Life appears to be a collection of sermons. And so, I'm moving through those a little slower than the first half, savoring them. But one thing I notice about them is the same thing I noticed about her sermon at the Festival of Homiletics--they don't really have endings. I mean, they end. That's true. But they don't feel finished. I told a classmate it felt like being invited over for a meal, encountering a lavishly set table, lifting the lids of still-simmering pots to smell the flavors to come, beginning to have a good conversation over a glass of win, then, at the moment when supper will finally be served, of having all the food packaged up in Tupperware and sent home with you to reheat and eat in front of the television.

I think I understand that BBT creates these scenes, sets them in front of the congregation, and begins the task of looking at them together, expecting the examination to continue after that particular moment of examination is over. This is a subtle art. And I admire subtlety a great deal. But in the preaching task, sometimes the Good News needs some additional help in being revealed. And this is where celebration makes all the difference.

In my first preaching class last semester, Dr. Grundy had us write the 3-minute ending of our sermons first, emphasizing celebration. For many of us, this was a new idea, one we had to learn from textbooks, and then from actually hearing some of our classmates who knew what they were doing do it. It felt uncomfortable, I'll admit, to be asked to add so much flesh and skin to the sermon, but it was effective. Very few of us left the assembly wondering how God might carry us forward into the next day with the message we had just received. And I think this is what's missing from BBT's endings--the understanding that God's hand is held out to us in that moment for us to grasp and walk into the new life waiting there for us. And that takes daring, dedication, and imagination all at once.

And so, here's my preaching goal: to be BBT with celebration. Not a shabby goal, I don't think.

Here are a sampling of the quotes I want to continue to bathe in:

• "God has given us good news in human form and has even given us the grace to proclaim it, but part of our terrible freedom is the freedom to lose our voices, to forget where we were going and why" (5).
• "Our job is to stand with one foot on earth and one in heaven, with the double vision that is the gift of faith, and to say out of our own experience that reality is not flat but deep, not opaque but transparent, not meaningless but shot full of grace for those with the least willingness to believe it is so" (13).
• "When God calls, people respond in a variety of ways. Some pursue ordination and others put pillows over their heads, but the vast majority seek to answer God by changing how they live their more or less ordinary lives" (27).
• "For me, to preach is first of all to immerse myself in the word of God, to look inside every sentence and underneath every phrase for the layers of meaning that have accumulated there over the centuries. It is to examine my own life and the life of the congregation with the same care, hunting the connection between the word on the page and the word at work in the world. It is to find my own words for bringing those connections to life, so that others can experience them for themselves. When that happens--when the act of preaching becomes a source of revelation for me as well as for those who listen to me--then the good news every sermon proclaims is that that God who acted is the God who acts, and that the Holy Spirit is alive and well in this world" (33).
• "Understood in this way, preaching becomes something the whole community participates in... If the preaching they hear is effective, it will not hand them sacks of wisdom and advice to take home and consume during the week, but invite them into the field to harvest those fruits for themselves, until they become preachers in their own right. Preaching is not something an ordained minister does for fifteen minutes on Sundays, but what the whole congregation does all week long; it is a way of approaching the world, and of gleaning God's presence there" (34).
• "The church's central task is an imaginative one" (41).
• "It is a matter of learning to see the world, each other, and ourselves as God sees us, and to live as if God's reality were the only one that mattered" (44).
• "The theological word for this experience is revelation, but the process, I believe, is imagination" (48).
• "My relationship with the Bible is not a romance but a marriage, and one I am willing to work on in all the usual ways: by living with the text day in and day out, by listening to it and talking back to it, by making sure I know what is behind the words it speaks to me and being certain I have heard it properly, by refusing to distance myself from the parts of it I do not like or understand, by letting my love for it show up in the everyday acts of my life. The Bible is not an object for me; it is a partner, whose presence blesses me, challenges me, and affects everything I do" (60).
• "A sermon, on the other hand, is an act of creation with real risk in it, as one foolhardy human being presumes to address both God and humankind, speaking to each on the other's behalf and praying to get out of the pulpit alive" (74).
• "When I say 'I' from the pulpit, I want them to say, 'Me too.'" (84).
• "This is one of the hardest and most rewarding aspects of the job. We do not make sermons out of air; our creations, poor or brilliant as they may be, are always variations on someone else's theme. The main melody is always a given, and even when we launch into our own bold improvisations we are limited to a scale of eight notes" (87).

Reading Up: Unlearning Church by Michael Slaughter

As I was reading Michael Slaughter's Unlearning Church, I had this strange notion that I had read it before. I went to look at my bookshelf to see if it was shelved in my collection of "United Methodist Here's How To Do Church" books. It wasn't. But gazing at that ever-expanding shelf (the connection is always being educated), I realized I'd probably read a number of things very similar to this: a pastor of a large church (always male), writing in very general terms about a very specific way in which he has grown the Church (now, whether that is church is his church or THE church is another debate for another day). And so, I'm wondering what I can learn about preaching from it.

It's not a book about preaching, as much as it is a text that is wrestling with the space in which preaching happens--namely the church. Chapter 4, entitled "Thriving in Paradox" is a pretty helpful primer to postmodern culture, if you're not living in the middle of it already, and its tips about church itself are good things for preachers to consider as well: that knowing is not as important as experiencing; that hard questions do not require easy answers, but rather spaces where they can be asked; that diversity is a reality and actually leads to greater community than homogeneity. I guess this would be the greatest strength and weakness of the book: how it does a good job of identifying what church and leadership might look like in the postmodern world, and how obvious all of this is to a young leader already. Oh wellsies.

The second half of the book is geared directly toward church leaders, and it was there that I was able to glean a few things for preaching. I want to touch on Slaughter's idea of a "trainer-coach" that he outlines in chapter 7, "Replicating the DNA." He writes:

"In the church setting, we need to help trainer-coaches break down the messages presented in each worship experience so they can formulate specific plans according to the needs of those in their cell groups. We design each weekend worship experience with supplemental curriculum for the trainer-coaches to use." 

I've had some experience in churches who have used a Sermon/Learning style, but what Slaughter outlines here seems to be different--seems to be an intentional effort to equip leaders in the church to be able to engage the message presented in worship in ways that connect with a small group's life. My knee jerk reaction is that it is preposterous to know how the message is going to connect with an individual or a group. To plan a curricula around that seems kind of presumptuous. Then again, creating space to reflect on the message isn't a bad thing. How then might this idea be a little less top-down management-style and something that is more organically available to the congregation's small groups?

I was also intrigued by his description of the Family Room in chapter 3, "Engaging the Whole Person." Evidently, it started as an experimental space for in-between the Christmas Eve services where people could gather to converse, share prayer concerns, connect with trained lay-pastors, or...whatever else. It was set up like a living room with couches, candles, and coffee tables, and was hugely popular for folks leaving the services. It has evolved into an ongoing ministry at Ginghamsburg. Certainly in a large church, the setting of the family room has something to offer. It makes me think about the early Christian home churches, with the community gathered to hear the Word, pray, learn, and sing. I know the movement toward home churches and small in-home groups is a popular one, but I wonder how many of us have actually experienced hearing a sermon in that environment. Or actually processing a sermon immediately following worship. More things to chew on.

Though Slaughter claims to have abandoned the pastor-as-CEO model for church, his book still reads like a business how-to. But here are a few quotes that I'd like to chew on to inform my preaching:

• "Some people at Ginghamsburg say, 'Mike, you don't feed me anymore.' Many of these people forget that our connection with God is never complete until we make the commitment to sacrifice our personal needs and come down from the mountains of our personal spiritual journeys to serve the needs of the oppressed and hurting all around us" (107).
• "UnLearning leaders [or preachers?] go beyond the latest leadership fads and technological innovations to the ancient practices of spiritual formation--the practice of daily disciplines that Jesus was committed to, such as prayer, solitude, meditation on the Scriptures, fasting, fellowship, service, generous giving, and commitment to simplicity of lifestyle" (109).
• "A Christian [preacher] is not someone who makes an intellectual statement of belief, or who commits to a lifestyle of little do-good-isms that have no spiritual motivation. A Christian is someone who is like Jesus" (113). What does it mean for the preacher to be like Jesus?
• "Postmodern people are looking for authenticity. They do not seek explanations about God so much as they seek authentic life-demonstration of biblical relevance. UnLearning leaders are more about a demonstration of a greater-works-than-these, authentic faith than about simplistic Jesus slogans and magic faith formulas. Their greatest persuasion point is authentic life experience, not argumentative reasoning" (115). 
• "So many times we try to tell other people the will of God in their lives, rather than that God's desire is simply to live in them, period" (119).
• "You'll keep the godfathers and godmothers of your church very happy if you continue doing church the way you've always done it--without any risk or change. But we don't have time to play the kingdom of church. We have time only to obey one voice--the voice of God. Do not settle for anything less than God's creative purpose" (127).

Preaching Lessons: John Bell Part II

When I read that Bell's lecture was on "Hidden Women in Holy Scripture," I knew I wanted to attend. Not only would I be enjoying the lovely ringing of his Scottish accent, but I would be hearing about something so often overlooked in preaching that I find myself desperate for it: taking up the female in the Bible.

Bell began his lecture by acknowledging the power of the male reading of the Bible in its shaping of how we read it now. The male gaze tends to overlook the female, to under-read her, to skip over her contributions to the story in ways that are unfaithful to the fullness of the Biblical witness. I'm kind of glossing over this point because it's one that I already understand, but if this is coming as a novel concept to you, leave a comment, and I'd be happy to chat with you about it.

Mostly, the lecture was John taking up stories of women in the Bible and reading them imaginatively and with value. For example, he read the parable of the lost coin as just as strong a witness as the parable of the prodigal son. Why hadn't he seen God there before, he wondered aloud. He read the story of the Samaritan woman at the well with such imagination: he saw her as a woman who was outgoing and vibrant, who was persuasive and outgoing, and who had these gifts redirected in her encounter with Jesus. It was a pleasure to listen to, really.

The best part of the lecture was the handout he gave with a breakdown of Biblical women, their appearance in the Testaments, and how they were treated by the text (Protester, Deliverer, Sexual Intrigue, Victim of Male Cruelty, Honored by God). It is a fantastic resource for preachers who would like to dig further into stories that don't come to light all that often, or for engaging familiar stories from a different vantage point. I'll plan to post a link to this sheet here sometime in the near future.

Here's a link to a PDF of that handout. Feel free to save and use!

After the lecture, a group of us from Eden approached John for a photo. But I also needed to ask him a question. At the beginning of his lecture, he acknowledged his male gaze, but he also spent a long time discussing how males and females read the Bible differently. I didn't want to categorically take his remarks as still being sexist despite their awareness of the male gaze, and so I approached him about it. I said, "I have a sincere question. Do you really think that men and women read the Bible differently?" He answered yes, that he thought that there were different sensibilities brought to it. I asked a further question about how he thought cultural conditioning might just be a part of this, and he acknowledged that it could. I thanked him for adding that nuance and left it at that.

When I looked around the room, I noticed that the majority of people in the session were women. Listening to a man tell us about women in the Bible. Now if Bell's assertion was right, that men and women read the Bible differently, then what exactly could he tell a group of women about women in the Bible, since we've been reading it as women the whole time? I'm being ridiculous to make a point. Bell's assumption that men and women read the Bible differently assumes a culture that conditions us differently. The reason his reading of these stories is novel to us is because we, as women, also live in a culture that has conditioned us to gloss over these stories, not to preach these stores, not to know what to do with them. Just because we are women does not mean that we have eyes to see.

By upholding the false dualism of the male and female gender, Bell not only excludes anyone who considers themselves to fall outside of those two poles, but also assumes a greater democracy in ways of knowing than is fair. More than his maleness clouding his ability to see these stories, it is his conditioning in maleness that does so. And he forgets that women are often conditioned in the exact same way. This is a long way of saying that yes, a man and a woman might read Scripture differently. But so might a woman and another woman, a man and another man, a woman and a transgender person, a man and a boy, a woman and a girl. What Bell illustrated well is that when you begin to value differences in reading, the possibilities for revelation in the Biblical text absolutely explode. But his binary understanding of that reading actually do more to reduce it than to explode it further.