“I believe preaching to be a crucial act of the church. That’s why preaching needs to be released from the bondage of the speech making act. Our impulse to tell the story of God in our communities is the right one, but making speeches is the wrong way to do it. Our desire to be a people who is connected with the truth of God is the right one, but speeches won’t get us there. This dependence on preaching as speech making has become a form of communication I call speaching. Our desire to use our pastoral gifts of discernment, knowledge, and articulation for the benefit of our communities is the right one, but speaching will keep us from fulfilling that desire.”
“It seems clear that we’re living in an age containing more great preachers than at any other time in history. We also have greater access to wonderful sermons, and every week in North America more people listen to sermons - live, on the radio or television, on CDs in their cars, and on the Internet - than at any other time in history. But if we look at how Christians continue to struggle with what it means to live in the way of Jesus, we soon realize that great preaching isn’t sufficient.”
“Speaching stands in contrast to what I call progressional dialogue, where the content of the presentation is established in the context of a healthy relationship between the presenter and the listeners, and substantive changes in the content are then created as a result of this relationship. It works like this: I say something that causes another person to think something she hadn’t thought before. In response she says something that causes a third person to make a comment he wouldn’t normally have made without the benefit of the second person’s statement. In turn I think something I wouldn’t have thought without hearing the comments made by the other two. So now we’ve all ended up in a place we couldn’t have come to without the input we received from each other. In a real way the conversation has progressed…The point is that we are in relationship with one another and we are contributing - through dialogue - to one another’s lives.” - Doug Pagitt from “Preaching Reimagined”
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I think to a real degree the professionalization of ministry has created a dynmanic where the pastor/preacher becomes a surrogate for actual, meaningful engagement with the truth of God by the community. We have to create a better forum and environment within the context of our shared life together for progessional dialogue. Pinball comes to mind. Launcing the ball doesn’t equate to “points scored.” The more “bounces” and points of conact and reflection etc, the more “points” are scored per “ball launch.”
I think we need to perhaps see the role of the preacher change somewhat. Kind of like pinball flippers perhaps. When the ball fails to generate points, we need to put it back into action and watch it work again. This will require a much different sense of expectation from the community as well. It is easier to passively listen than to passionately interact. The spectator reality that exist in nearly every American church service has bred a passivity among supposed disciples that will have to be challenged in order for progressional dialoge to be meaningful. It is probably our fault as “leaders.”
Additionally, the average participant in a worship gathering will have to bring a little more to the table for this to work. Unless the scriptures fill our minds, hearts, mouths and meditations throughout our days, I wouldn’t expect progressional dialouge in the community context to amount to much more than repackaged “christianese.” The biggest frustration I have had with my early experimentations with progressional dialogue in both the large and small group setting has been the fact that people often have very little to say, or, perhaps, they are simply preconditioned not to contribute. Sociologists sometimes refer to this phenomomon as “Social Loafing.” Essentially, “hiding in the crowd” rather than feeling a responsibility toward the remainder of the people in the room to actually risk putting oneself forward. It is this selfishness that must be put to death in our communities.
Excellent Billy! Great thoughts…so many things “bouncing” around in my mind right now. Cant wait to hear what others sense, and will bite my toungue till then (even though i just want to mind dump right now). Great way to start the conversation!
We have tried the progressional dialog experiment with our small group of about 15. It defiantly works better than speaching at them (witch is only really useful for the speacher).
We have found that in our community people have a difficult time really listening to each other and allowing another person’s thoughts to change the way that they think.
We have tried it with where we have members of the group listen then repeat what another person has said and then they are only allowed to add to the conversation if the can expand on the previous person’s thoughts. This type of expansive dialog has worked better with our group on-line than in person.
Listening to each other and expanding on their thoughts is a skill that must be explicitly taught to every one in the group before progressional dialogue can be realized.
Billy, our realities will definitely have to change if progressional dialogue is to work. Having been speached to for so long, we sort of just accept that that is the way church is supposed to be. We come to a church and listen to someone talk for an hour and then we get up and go home, never truly engaging the Story for ourselves. This has been the case for so long that we have been conditioned to live this out. So a change to PD is hard because as you point out, people want to sit passively and be told what to believe and think rather than passionately engage conversation. I also understand as well that if we are not moved and have an intimate relationship with the Story, then when we share about scripture, our words can easily be cliche christian-ese rather than passionate thoughts that we have wrestled with.
Rob, thanks for your comment. It is interesting as to what you are finding while experimenting with PD. I guess in order for PD to work we have to be good listeners and allow our views to be available for change. We don’t have to change our views on everything everyone says, but it must be an option. If we all hold our opinions in stone, the dialogue will quickly turn into a pointless debate where no one learns from each other. Glad to hear that you have found a way to make people listen more!
I stumbled across your blog while searching for images for a video I am making. I ended up spending some time reading your blog and I thought I’d just leave a thank you note before getting back to work.
God bless.
I think its 99% WHAT is being preached and 1% or less HOW its being preached. Also the theory bears striking similarity to the Hegelian dialectic.
Barron, I dont really understand what you are saying. Are you saying that the reason preaching doesnt work is 99% what is being preached and 1% how it is being preached?
Hi Ryan- Sorry for being so cryptic on that last post…what I mean is that although there are an abundance of sermons online, in print, and in the pulpit–(I’m including “conversations” in this category as well)…I think there is still a famine in the church…a crisis in theology. Someone is always absent of the preaching…
i mean OFTEN missing from the preaching…ryan, for the most part, speaking to the general problem ,how would you characterize the what and who (the subject) of preaching?
Barron, How does Hegel come into play here? I wonder how you think it is the same. Plus, as a pastor, I disagree with you about the 99 to 1 ratio. Can you define a “crisis in theology?” Most churches that I am in contact with still draw people together to focus on the scriptures. That is the content. I don’t think there is a problem with the seed itself. It sometimes seems that preaching, the way it is being done here in U.S. churches, just isn’t getting the seed into the soil too well. I think progressional dialogue can help here.
I have done just a very little reading about learning styles and engagement. A surprisingly small number of people engage ideas best by listening to someone else talk. Unfortunatly, most major universities have been slow to adapt to this research but are beginning to. Elementary educators are much more on top of better teaching ideas. (There are a number of Universities adapting through the creation of classrooms more as learning communities. Focused progressional dialogue is used frequently, although they don’t call it that.)
Personally, having taking a learning styles test, I discovered that I learn best through abstract conceptualization coupled with active experimentation. That means when I engage the scriptures (or anything else for that matter) I like to throw ideas around first and then try stuff. I think that there is an unbelievable transformative life giving power contained within the scriptures as well as a multitude of ways people can meaningfully engage it. I think that in general, pastors ought to be chastized for their utter lack of imagination when it comes to putting those two pieces together. Shame on us for professionalizing our process of communicating and subsequently, locking everyone else out. I feel like Moses who said “I was everybody was speaking for God.” Can you imagine a church that functioned less like an audience listening to “professional” preaching and more like a fully committed learning community gathered weekly to meaningfully take an active role in discoverng the story? I think that Corinthians supports this to a degree. It talks about multiple speakers in any one gathering. I haven’t put all this together yet, but I am processing.
I was trying to think of a drive-by-comment lacking any real context, but the problem is that I’ve read the book. As much as I LOVE to see random soundbyte regurgitation by people that love to have something to say and an audience to say it to, I REALLY LOVE IT when you’re discussing a piece of literature and people that havent read it interject with an opinion that has NOTHING to do with whats being discussed. I mean, sure, it’s one thing to take a posture of learning and say something to the effect of, “Hmm…interesting…help me understand what you mean.” Or, “You know, I haven’t read it, but it seems to me that the author is saying this–am I even close?” But the truly great moments in blogdom are those moments of unconscious violence that we exact on one another when we take advantage of these spaces of honest reflection and use it as a platform to broadcast our apologetics and “change people”. It’s sad that my greatest stimulus to comment comes from a hot button like this, but really, the key to (ironically) progressional dialogue in this space, is the posture indicated by the language that Ryan and Billy use. A posture of learning–a posture of that is moldable–opinions without agenda (to the best of their ability). Billy’s last line (and many throughout Ryan’s writings) should provide valuable hints to all of us attempting to have fruitful dialogue in this space: “I haven’t put all this together yet, but I am processing.”
Sorry to fly off into the deep end there again Ryan–just couldnt believe that these type of comments keep happening. Cheers to the patient and longsuffering. May God continually remind me of my brokeness, that I can be more longsuffering with those he loves.
Anyways, the book was wonderfully formational for me, and helped me articulate some things that I think are already beginning to reshape how I participate in and facilitate community.
Love you buddy.