Is the problem preaching or what we’ve allowed preaching to become?

Another quote from The Complex Christ: Can Anyone Tell Me What Preaching Is For?:

If we were serious about discipleship, would we have sermons? Clearly not. No discussion. No interruption. No comeback. No further comment.

Heh, it’s almost as if we preachers were produced at a factory somewhere! I guess they are, sort of.

It’s here that I remind myself of Haddon Robinson’s assertion that there is no such thing as a sermon form. Haddon defines preaching as:

the communication of a biblical concept, derived from and transmitted through a historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit first applies to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through the preacher, applies to the hearers.

Not a bad definition of preaching. It’s an academic one that you can (and he does) unpack.

The point I want to make is that the definition says nothing about form. It doesn’t have to be a lecture and it doesn’t have to be from a stage. You can have discussions and interruptions and comebacks and further comments. It can use stories and songs and the lead article from the newspaper. Jesus ran clinics on how to use imagination in preaching.

All this to say I’m not sure if Kester is faulting preaching, or how boring we’ve allowed most preaching to become.