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I remember a course with Doug Webster at OTS / Tyndale many years ago. It was a monday class & therefore full of pastors and a few of us in full-time studies. Doug made the comment that we need to rethnk the sermon and consider more dialogue... he practically had a revolt on his hands... "we can't do it that way".

You ask an excellent & important question. I'm not sure there is a simple/easy answer. For there to be dialogue/learning together there has to be some change in attitude & format.

I've been to the gig a couple of times in Kitchener. They use a model that includes
a> teaching,
b> breaking into small groups during the service for discussion, and,
c> dialogue
all in a congregation of around 80-100 people.

I think part of the established churches difficulty is that we try to make the sunday morning event into an all purpose event - we try to make it do too much and so accomplish less than we could.

"Preaching is, after all, about the listeners and their response to God. Sermons are too often written in the absence of the listener. Perhaps this is why they are so quickly forgotten." Sounds like seeker sensitive stuff with a change in what is offered.

Preaching is not about the listeners, anymore than little house church discussions are. Sermons are about God, as anyone committed to theocentric preaching knows.

It is God who is too often forgotten in sermon writing and that is why they are so quickly forgotten. Of course, sermons could be forgotten because of hard hearts, late nights, unrepented sin ... on both sides of the pulpit or the coffee table.

Traditional church services that are other than God focussed will make one "stare straight ahead for the message" and living room conversations will do no more. Kinnon's little tongue in cheek April Fool's joke smacks of rearrangng the deck chairs on the sinking ship.

Ken:

Even as someone who advocates theocentric preaching, I disagree.

In preaching a congregation comes together to hear God through his Word. It's a communal act of listening together to God's revelation, and then responding together to what God has revealed.

This can happen through monologue, but I'm wondering if we lose something if we filter God's Word through only one person within a congregation. Is there a place for allowing God's people to wrestle together with the implications of a passage as we hear it?

This often happens in small groups or alone at home, but perhaps there's a place for this to happen within the larger congregation as well.

Sermons are not about God [period]. They are about listening to God's Word, being shaped by God's Word. I think we have to be careful not to become bibliocentric. We are to be shaped - not by a book [I am not downplaying the authority of the Bible] - but by the Father|Son|Spirit - fully trinitarian. To use a nice technical theological word: perichoresis - we are invited into the midst of the "dance" of Father|Son|Spirit.

In one of the churches I pastored I used an adult sunday school class to walk through the text ahead of my preaching the text. I found that a helpful way of drawing a few into dialogue in a way that shaped the preaching.

"Kinnon's little tongue in cheek April Fool's joke smacks of rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking ship."

Really? Ya try ta be funny, and then somebody's always got to bring up the Titanic. My heart will go on, however.

please do not sing that song :-) my daughter bought the soundtrack when it first came out. We had a new cd player and one of my sons had been playing around with it. I put the cd on... was a reading a book while I listened. about 45min later Nadine asked how I liked the cd... I said it was very repetitive... the cd player was set on repeat track!

Darryl:
You said:
"In preaching a congregation comes together to hear God through his Word. It's a communal act of listening together to God's revelation, and then responding together to what God has revealed."
Then it is not ABOUT people is it.

Michael:
The subject matter of sermons IS God [period]. It is communicating what God says. It is showing them God's character, power, sovereignty, love, grace, justice, will, salvation, law, requirements, ... . But you agree with that when you say : "We are to be shaped - not by a book [I am not downplaying the authority of the Bible] - but by the Father|Son|Spirit - fully trinitarian. To use a nice technical theological word: perichoresis - we are invited into the midst of the "dance" of Father|Son|Spirit." If it's not about God we have nothing to be invited into.

Bill:
I never mentioned the Titanic. I just want people not to forget who the king of the world is.

My point was that people make their points about a traditional setting in a church with a preacher at the front or about rejecting that for another model more to their liking. The setting is irrelevant. If God is not the main thing then nothing matters.

I have often wondered if we would profit from having more than one person sharing each morning and it wouldn't have to be staff ministers. In rotation, one or two men of the church share a passage and what they feel God is saying to them or wanting to say to the church. Then have the pastor share. The passages could be related or not. This provides more involvement in the ministry of the church and encourages growth. If God is working in the church we need to allow that growth to find an outlet.

Ken,
The metaphor you've used is normally stated as "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" - thus my riff. Being the simple man that I am, however, I don't understand how what I wrote "smacks" of it.

Or are suggesting that preaching or no preaching, the ship is going down?

Randy,
More involvement amongst the men, anyway. Would the women-folk be off baking or something.

Preaching has got to be theocentric, or it's wasting a lot of people's energy in investing time at church.
But the experiences of drinking in, absorbing, working through, and giving the Holy Spirit much more room to work the sermon into the people (and stir up the hard-packed or weed-infected soil that plagues most of us ) has got to be communal. We must engage in the sermon material, along with others, or be prepared to accept, as one deacon recently admitted: "I've been preached at all my life. Five minutes after the sermon's finished, it's all gone. It's wasted."

I can guarantee you, that's the case with far too much of the body of Christ. All we're doing is furthering the individualistic faith agenda, and if you don't yet see what that's garnered us, you're not seeing.

Here are some ideas our housegroup recently came up with, in grappling together with moving towards becoming doers of the Word, and not merely hearers. (These suggestions are going to our deacons, in letterform):
 small group discussions or facilitated discussions, en masse, during a re-worked time slot immediately following the sermon (suggestion: not less than 20 minutes in duration), ideally ending with prayer and with main points of discovery fed-back to the whole body
 a sermon one week followed by a short discussion period, and then an interactive discussion time about the previous week's sermon the next week (i.e. no sermon 2nd week)
 opportunity to engage the pastor in Q & A about his sermon, either during or after his message, while still sitting together as a congregation

Listening - audience-style is far too passive a role to leave our people too. It only encourages more passivity.

Mike Frost, in Exiles, shares a telling exercise he engages church folk in. On a piece of paper they draw 2 columns, titling the left side 'Audience' and the right side 'Church'. He then asks them to write under 'audience' the attributes of an audience, as found for example at theaters, concerts, etc. In the right column, they write attributes the New Testament ascribes to the church.
After completed, he asks the folk which list best describes their experience of church. Eight times out of ten, they choose the left side.

There you have it.
Excellent question Brother! "How can preaching become a dialogue, in which the preaching becomes a conversation and the congregation hears God together with the preacher?"

Keep talking, and God might actually get material to make a family-body-priesthood out of us, yet!

There are four ways of learning - intellectual, intuitive, affective, and somatic, combinations of introverts and extroverts (basically).

Ken, you could make your sermon a theocentric award winner, and you aren't going to draw all your people to God, you cannot.

"So here's a question: how can the people be let in?"

What a good question, I believe church is about interdependence.
Darryl, I don't know.

I always thought that the preaching and teaching of preachers and teachers were the ordained means of communicating God's word to the church?

Trish, I still believe in this preaching and teaching, but I don't think that precludes congregational response.

It seems that the New Testament doesn't see the congregation as only a group of listeners. Example:

"When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation..." (1 Cor. 14:26)

The priesthood of all believers means that the pastor isn't the only one with something to say.

I'm not for going to the other extreme and just making everything an open-ended discussion, but I think that we can wrestle together with our response to God's Word, and bring up any questions or insights we may have.

How do we, the people of God, engage the word of God? If our only means of doing that is in a passive "learning" or "entertaining" environment then it is little wonder, as in Naomi's deacon's case five minutes after the sermon, "it's all gone."

There are certain sermons I heard twenty years ago that still have impact - because we wrestled with them within our community. (A sermon by Bob Roxburgh in Guildford, England in 1987 informs my understanding of the working of the gifts of the Spirit to this day.) Hundreds, if not thousands of others, went into short-term memory and quickly dissipated. Leaving little lasting impact. (Actually, I do remember some of the humourous stories.)

Like Darryl, I am not suggesting everything as an open-ended discussion. I do believe in the role of the pastor-teacher (as one of the five fold ministry gifts) - but not as the "voice from on-high" - and not embodied in only one person in the community. As an egalitarian, I also don't believe that role is gender specific. (Sorry for my snarky previous comment, Randy.)

We need to be engaging with the Word of God as an ongoing part of our community life - in all our gatherings - over coffee with friends, during meals, on couches and chairs in our living rooms, walking along the Boardwalk in whatever city you are in, even during our gatherings on a Sunday morning - all as an active part of the warp and woof of our community life.

Creating a time for response and reflection to the Sunday sermon is a start...but only just.

Bene Diction (great handle BTW)

You said "Ken, you could make your sermon a theocentric award winner, and you aren't going to draw all your people to God, you cannot.
So here's a question: how can the people be let in?"

I agree with this comment 100%. Please don't confuse what I am saying with saying that people never need to interact with one another. My point in this discussion is that the main problem with church is not how we communicate. I believe the Scriptures need to be preached in the traditional sense of that concept. I also believe that we need to interact with our listeners. We have just started having a Q&A after our morning service (only once a month so far, and we have only done it once, to this point.) And there are other thiings we can do to help "bring people in". But neither the theocentric award winner nor the all star interaction can do anything. If we think that just because people are talking that spiritual rejuvenation is taking place we are kidding ourselves. What brings people in is the Holy Spirit. It is an act of grace through the declaration, in whatever form, of the Word of God. We should never confuse participation with being brought in anymore than we should confuse preaching with it.

This whole topic reminds me of Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman. She is focussed on where to worship. Jesus is trying to get her out of the outward aspects of worship to the spirit and truth of the matter. Let's not make the same mistake as she did and think that a certain form is necessarily better than another.

Bill: This is what I meant by saying your little joke "smacked" of rearranging the deck chairs on (OK, OK) the Titanic. If all we are doing is avoiding staring at the front then we still have the same problem. The new setting feels more comfortable, but unless God does something it is no more fruitful than the traditional service.

To Everyone: This is a terrible venue to carry on any type of meaningful conversation. Sorry if I have sounded heavy handed. I am a real nasty guy, but not as nasty as this type of interaction makes me sound. Just ask Darryl.

Having just left a church that I attended for 22 years (the last five as an elder) the recent dialogue on this and Bill Kinnon's site has been somewhat electrifying. I feel as though I have been given a vocabulary to begin to describe some of the thoughts I have had over the past 10 years or more.

You guys are way ahead of me in all this organic church stuff so I will just say what is on my mind and maybe it will add something to this thread.

I always wondered why the pastoral types thought that we (the audience who imagined they were the congregation) needed to have a different sermon each and every week. Many times I would not remember what the sermon was about only a few short hours after we had left the church building.

Why I let this go on for so many years says a lot about the state of my mind as well as the rest of what I perceived to be the body of Christ.

As for teaching or presentation styles (congregation involvement, slide shows, movie trailers, loads of props and illustrations) the point is that very often I had not put into practice what I thought I was being told was good for me and my walk with the Lord the week before--or the week before that, ad-infinitum.

I don't have the answers, it seems, to even the most simple questions that many of you have already worked through and feel comfortable with. I know who does and as I begin to see the horizon again, I am beginning to walk toward Him and the new day that is in front of me.

Thanks for staying the course.

Actually, Ken. He said you were much nastier...Very Big Grin!!! :-} to the nth degree.

Joking aside - I think this is a critically important topic for us to be discussing. How do we grow together in our faith? How do we mentor and be mentored? How do we both learn and teach?

If someone spends days preparing a sermon (or in many cases, a lifetime) how do we "maximize our return on that investment" - forgive the business language. Perhaps I should say, how do we effectively steward that resource.

I am convinced that conversation and relationship are more important in real Christian community than the preaching time on Wednesday, Saturday night, Sunday morning or Sunday evening. But this isn't an either/or situation - it is a both/and. The teaching and preaching (within context) can and should play a significant role in the life blood of the community of faith.

As part of the Body of Christ, we have all been given priestly gifts - I don't see the five fold ministry gifts (APEPT) being limited to a few. We are all required to exercise those gifts - rather than having them exorcised by others.

Great discussion, Triple D. Thanks for making it happen.

Bill,
Here's a text that supoports what you just wrote.

Acts 2:46, 47 "And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved."

This was a church of 3000 people, so I think it fairly safe to assume that all of them were not meeting in a different house everyday for a sermon to be preached to them. They attended the temple AND met in homes. Who knows? Maybe they talked about what was preached. In any case they met, broke bread, praised God and grew.

And Darryl was right.

Ken, didn't mean to sound harsh:^)

This chapter from Eat This Bread was interesting, Miles had no earlier baggage about church.

http://www.killingthebuddha.com/takethisbread.htm

I've spent most of the past twenty years sitting in the pew. Except for 21 months during the past three years where I serve a church as their interim pastor, my experience has been as a parishioner. My advice is that the pastor needs to listen to what people are dealing with in their lives. It isn't that they then preach on it. Rather, they internalize the issues that people have and let them become their issues.
I know this is a really heretical idea within the preachers fraternity, but the more I listened, and the more I stopped trying to preach impressive sermons, the more I found myself preaching about what was current that morning. I found myself unable to write a sermon before 5 or 6 am on Sundays. I'd spent all week working on it, but it didn't formulate in terms of what I was suppose to say until just a few hours before I stood up in the pulpit to preach. What I found is that I was less academic, and more real with the congregation. I found that the issue of the text became the issue in my life, and without making the sermon about me, became the sermon I was supposed to preach. It was real. What I found was the congregation listening because they realized that this was real to me, and not simply this week's sermon. It was a very humbling experience that I would not trade for anything. It transformed me as a professional clergy so that now I understand better the connection between the spiritual and the organizational that is taking place at the same time. What I came to realize is that I was no different from the people in the pews, only with a different set of responsibilities to fulfill. And I was blessed by that reality. Thank you for your question.

Bill says: "We need to be engaging with the Word of God as an ongoing part of our community life - in all our gatherings - over coffee with friends, during meals, on couches and chairs in our living rooms...even during our gatherings on a Sunday morning - all as an active part of the warp and woof of our community life.
Creating a time for response and reflection to the Sunday sermon is a start...but only just."

I'm with you Bill--I only wish far more of His church was. It seems Western Christianity--at least, far too much of it--has become quite accustomed to being Sunday listeners, blended together with a good dose of relative goodness.

No wonder the world finds us trivial. That's exactly what our righteousness and our holy works amount up to. (Shows how little we really are in touch with the Guy upstairs.)

I see the 'response and reflection'times (especially if immersed in urgent prayer by at least a few) as helping the Body to wake up and get real with God, rather than continuing in her ever-so-deceptive passivity.

You've also pointed out that: "conversation and relationship are more important in real Christian community than the preaching time...But this isn't an either/or situation - it is a both/and."

Francis Schaeffer (prominent christian philosopher of the '50s-'80's) pointed out the two core orthodoxies: "so there must be two orthodoxies: the orthodoxy of doctrine [reformation/truth/proclamation] and the orthodoxy of community [revival/love/ministry]. And both orthodoxies must be practiced down into the warp and the woof of life where the lordship of the Lord Jesus touches every area of our life."

[Schaeffer was a pastor for some years, before he recognized the great losses, in part due to the missing orthodoxy--community. He left the pastorate and established connversational/relational communities (L'Abri) that became safe places for people to converse and explore the necessary marriage of faith and life.]

I believe our churches are in a crisis state, because of our failure/neglect in both orthodoxies, taken individually, and then combined together.

They each need to go as far as it takes to bring us to 1.) loving and fearing God, for real, with all that we are and 2.) loving others as Christ loved.

Both are formidables loves. Both turn the world upside down. Starting with our own.

Since a fair bit of our conversation here is leaning towards the conversational/relational themes, I quote Larry Crabb (Safest Place & Connecting):
'The greatest need in modern civilization is the development of communities---true communities where the heart of God is home, where the humble and wise learn to shepherd those on the path behind them, where trusting strugglers lock arms with others as together they journey on.'

If that sounds like 'true grace' to you, it's because it is. People in our churches our thirsting for this, but they can't find it anywhere. Some have gone so long without it, they long ago lost sight of it.

If we haven't got the Gospel of Grace to show to the world (starting within our very own church communities) what have we got?

Terry Henry:
"I always wondered why the pastoral types thought that we...needed to have a different sermon each and every week. Many times I would not remember what the sermon was about only a few short hours after we had left the church building...Why I let this go on for so many years says a lot about the state of my mind...As for teaching or presentation styles...the point is that very often I had not put into practice what I thought I was being told was good for me and my walk with the Lord the week before--or the week before that, ad-infinitum...
I don't have the answers, it seems, to even the most simple questions that many of you have already worked through and feel comfortable with."

Forbid!--that we've 'worked through them and are comfortable.'
That's why we need people like you to show up, and remind us what we're really dealing with here.
Thanks for holding up the mirror!

All this dialogue is all very well and good, but please allow me to add my two cents worth:

The two things I think are most needed, but which are all too often missing from many sermons today: INSPIRATION and ANOINTING.

INSPIRATION: What is the message GOD wants to impart to His people? Not what does the Pastor want to say, not what are the people wanting to hear, not what is the most pressing social issue of the day, but what does GOD want to say?

ANOINTING: Even if one does make every effort to find the message God wants to tell His people, without His anointing, the message falls flat. And there is only one way to receive that anointing and that is by spending time in His presence, lots of time. All the other busy-work and programs which detracts from time spent in God's presence will subtract, exponentially, the anointing from the message.

Oh, and I am with Ed Brenegar: Don't talk AT me or TO me, talk WITH me, and be REAL.

I think preaching as dialogue has lots of potential if we can get it to work. The problem is that the average "person in the congregation" doesn't quite know what to do when you offer them a chance to speak. Sermons have been given as a one-sided lecture for so long, that people are shocked when they are actually asked to participate in the discussion. I think if you do try dialogue, you have to be willing to let silence linger for a while as people have a chance to digest things and give the Spirit a chance to work. (I once tried getting responses from the audience and moved on when I did not get a quick reply and my wife later informed me that someone was just about to speak up if I had just waited a bit longer.) So it's more risky to start a dialogue because you can't control what response (if any) you will get but it can also be more meaningful for all involved as the "teacher" can learn from his/her students and vice-versa.

Off topic a bit, but seeing the earlier comments on "rearranging deck chairs" bring to mind a post I wrote on my blog called "The Unsinkable Church". Check out the link above if you'd like to read.