One of the roles I have at the Open Door is to be a prophetic poet. A teacher, a preacher, a communicator of God's Word. I have wrestled for the past few years about this solo role and desired to see a more holistic pedagogy discovered and practiced. People learn in multiple ways and a "talking head" is the worst in terms of information retention (check out the Seven Intelligences Theory and/or Dales Cone of Learning). And even with that we act as if that is our only goal is information retention - not the transformation of the human heart and the church community. Another person who has inspired me to embody a more holistic pedagogy is Parker Palmer who talks about the importance of communal and experiential education. Read anything you can by him!
Anyway... all I wanted to do is to get you to read this post by Jonny Baker who deconstructs the idol of preaching and proposes an imaginative alternative that is communal, creative, thoughful, Bibilical and inspiring - one of the best I have read in some time. It is inspiring me to think anew about my task as a prophetic poet!
http://jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker/text/Preaching.pdf
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3 comments:
The article is great! In reading Barth and others I've come to a very deep theology of "the Word." But I don't think that the Word, aka, Jesus, is only active through the act of preaching. I think the Word is active through the proclamation and experience of the gospel, that can come through a variety of means.
The only thing I don't like about a lot of the emerging church practices is that they seem to be driven by what people need. This is good, but I think it should be balanced with deep theological understanding of the new practices... that's when things get really exciting for me!
Maybe I'll blog some of this.
bj -
thanks for sharing this article. it has taken me awhile to read it but i am glad i finally did.
here's my first thought: who rejected this article (for the book on preaching it was intended) and why? when i read this i am thinking, "ok, right, yeah..." it doesn't seem very radical to me. and that's the cool thing. God already has many of us moving in this direction (it's amazing what perspective brings to us). i am grateful for people like you and John @ Open Door and others in our community who are embracing what i consider to be a much more faithful approach to the proclamation of Jesus, the Word of God.
try bringing this thread of thinking into your homelitics course at PTS - now that's radical.
I hope to attempt to bring this into homoletics this year and see if I can actually pass the class! SHould be fun.
John thanks for the push back. One of the thing sI would be interested in looking at is what do 100+ references to preaching in the NT have to say to this discussion??
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