I happened upon a webinar on “Preaching Better Sermons”
hosted by a website called PreachingRocket.com. I had never heard of the
website, and only discovered the webinar because it was trending on Twitter
about the time it launched this morning.
The 4-hour webcast was a series of pre-recorded interviews
of relatively famous pastor/authors at their locations or via Skype. Between
each interview was an advertisement testimonial for the PreachingRocket.com
service.
Overall I was very pleased
and impressed by the interviews. The final question of each was a shameless
plug for the interviewee’s latest book, but that is to be expected in a free
webinar with such big names as Mark Driscoll, Andy Stanley, and Dave Ramsey.
Here are some takeaways from the four-hour webcast:
First, the speakers were largely representative of the
Emerging Baptist Church[1]
movement. The list of speakers was Andy Stanley, Steven Furtick, Crawford
Loritts, Nancy Duarte, Darrin Patrick, Louie Giglio, Pete Wilson, Ed Stetzer,
Mark Driscoll, Donald Miller, Jon Acuff, Mark Batterson, Dave Ramsey, and Brad
Lomenick. I had never heard of several of the speakers, and the ones with whom
I was familiar didn’t have the best reputation in my mind as preachers. The one
woman interviewed was not included for preaching, but rather as a
“communication expert.” I am not implying that the PreachingRocket.com agenda
is anti-women-in-ministry, but the inclusion of no females in preaching
ministries (and only one non-white male who is) speaks volumes for the intended
audience of this webinar. In reality, I probably fall smack-dab in the middle
of their target demographic, and that hurts a little.
Secondly, there was a clear dividing line between those
interviewees who actually understand preaching and those who understand public
speaking. Both perspectives were helpful and informative to the other. Whereas
Stanley, Loritts, Patrick, and Giglio used the pastoral nature of preaching as
their starting point, Stetzer, Acuff, and Ramsey focused on techniques and
styles more germane to non-kerygmatic public address. There are insights to be
gleaned from both, yet in a webinar dedicated to preaching better sermons the
mixture of the two camps felt as though there was a stuttering, halting theme
to the day.
Thirdly, there was a certain “meta” sense about the
interviews that I certainly enjoyed. This was not a webinar about homiletics or
even the principles of oratory. This was a rubber-meets-the-road series of
interviews that always began with “how do you prepare every week?” That was
certainly appreciated, and was something I liked hearing and relating to. The
ideas presented in the interviews were “big picture,” that is, they were ideas
related to preaching as a story, to preaching as an authentic expression of
faith, to being inauthentic without the reality of Jesus’ life. These themes
can indeed be mixed and interchanged depending on the personality of the person
preaching, and to that end I think preachers of every stripe could learn
something from the webinar.
Finally, I took away from the webcast that my people
(whoever that is) were somehow left out. The interviewees all come from what we
used to call “seeker” churches, built on evangelistic preaching and the
assumption that non-churched people will be present in every service. Related
to this model is the very essence of the preaching style and substance of these
men, which is in turn related to the worship style of the churches they
represent. I noticed that none of these preachers followed the Lectionary or
gave a not to the Church Year, none of them seemed concerned with liturgy
(beyond the de-facto liturgy of their ever-morphing worship), and only one
(that I noticed) seemed concerned with extra-worship discipleship. Yes, I know,
this was a webinar on preaching better sermons, not discipleship; but the tone
of the interviews made it sound as though the sermon was the one-and-done
weekly attempt to evangelize and disciple the non-believer and believer alike.
I know that’s not true at many of the churches represented in the webinar, but
it felt that way.
Where is a
place in all of this for a liturgically aware Baptist? Do the points made in
the webinar only apply to those preachers in seeker-style churches? I’d hope
not. Too much of what I heard today made me proud to be a preacher for that to
be true. I only wish something other than the stereotype had been in play, both
ecclesiastically and demographically.
If you can get access to the webinar, watch it. It made me
want to preach better sermons, and just might have helped me to do so.
[1]
There is probably a better term for this, I just don’t know it. What I mean by
it is the trend among larger, multi-site congregations with Baptist (or at
least congregational) church polity and evangelical protestant theology. They
are characterized by their worship style, as well, as demonstrated by many of
the speakers’ having “worship teams” and other support staff that organize and
coordinate complex audio/visual experiences to accompany the sermon.
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