The Sermon without End: A Conversational Approach to Preaching

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The Sermon without End

Praise for The Sermon without End

Praise for The Sermon without End

"The Sermon without End develops a comprehensive, generous, and readable argument for a less assertive-argumentative and more conversational approach to preaching. Without accommodating or overreacting to postmodern culture, Allen and Allen invite preachers to rethink sermons as genuine conversations about the meaning of the gospel with the many and diverse persons in their increasingly multicultural and multireligious ‘neighborhoods.’ This book reads like a breath of fresh air in the midst of the often-stifling debate about what churches need to be doing in postmodern culture."

—John S. McClure, Charles G. Finney Professor of Preaching and Worship, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Nashville, TN

I encourage you to join Ron Allen and Wes Allen’s walking tour. They will help you see the neighborhoods and dwellings preachers and congregations inhabit in new eye-opening ways. These habitations have nurtured and encouraged but, as the authors suggest, they are not where we should be living in this postmodern age of rapidly changing cultures. Allen and Allen invite us to move to a new neighborhood of postapologetic preaching. This neighborhood is one shaped by listening, respecting the other, and reciprocating conversations that contribute to the way our preaching helps to make meaning in God’s world.

—Lucy Lind Hogan, Hugh Latimer Elderdice Professor of Preaching and Worship, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC

Allen and Allen present a conversational approach to theology and preaching that takes seriously the church’s location between modernity and postmodernity. Their lively and accessible imagery will encourage preachers to take a closer look at their own ‘homiletic neighborhoods’ as they search for words to engage in reciprocal, unending conversations with a multitude of others.

—Sarah Travis, Sessional Lecturer and Minister in Residence, Knox College, Toronto School of Theology, Toronto, ON

"This is an important, timely book. Ron Allen and Wesley Allen invite us into a powerful new way of practicing preaching as a conversation. For them conversation is not just one more preaching style—not even just a method. For Allen and Allen, preaching as conversation is a way of doing theology that opens up preaching more profoundly to others. If you sense that real depth is missing in preaching today, be sure to read The Sermon without End."

—David Schnasa Jacobsen, Professor of the Practice of Homiletics and Director of the Homiletical Theology Project, Boston University School of Theology, Boston, MA

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COPYRIGHT PAGE

The Sermon Without end:

a conversational approach to preaching

Copyright © 2015 by Abingdon Press

All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed in writing to Permissions, The United Methodist Publishing House, 2222 Rosa L. Parks Blvd., PO Box 280988, Nashville, TN 37228-0988, or e-mailed to permissions@umpublishing.org.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Allen, Ronald J. (Ronald James), 1949– author. | Allen, O. Wesley,

   1965– author

Title: The sermon without end : a conversational approach to preaching /

   Ronald J. Allen and O. Wesley Allen, Jr.

Description: First [edition]. | Nashville, TN : Abingdon Press, 2015. |

   Includes bibliographical references. | Description based on print version

   record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015019245 (print) | LCCN 2015017883 (ebook) | ISBN

   9781630883225 (e-pub) | ISBN 9781630883218 (binding: pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Preaching. | Apologetics. | Conversation—Religious

   Aspects—Christianity.

Classification: LCC BV4211.3 (print) | LCC BV4211.3 .A4258 2015 (ebook) | DDC

   251—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015019245

All scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Dedication

For our faculty colleagues

at Christian Theological Seminary

and Lexington Theological Seminary—

thank you for being conversation partners

who have led us deeper into Christian faith across the years.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Apologetic Neighborhoods

Chapter 2

A Postapologetic Neighborhood

Chapter 3

Postapologetic Preaching as Conversation

Chapter 4

The Conversational Sermon as Postapologetics

Introduction

Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon open their influential book, Resident Aliens , with a wonderful story.

Sometime between 1960 and 1980, an old, inadequately conceived world ended, and a fresh, new world began. . . .

When and how did we change? Although it may sound trivial, one of us [Willimon] is tempted to date the shift sometime on a Sunday evening in 1963. Then, in Greenville, South Carolina, in defiance of the state’s time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us—regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church—made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox.

That evening has come to represent a watershed in the history of Christendom, South Carolina style. On that night, Greenville, South Carolina—the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world—served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church. There would be no more free passes for the church, no more free rides. The Fox Theater went head to head with the church over who would provide the world view for the young. That night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish.¹

Hauerwas and Willimon draw the conclusion that the mid-twentieth century fall of Christendom (or the façade of Christendom) signals that the church is and should be in exile from the wider culture. The church (following the likes of Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich), they say, slides down the slippery slope of unfaithfulness to the counter-cultural gospel when it engages in apologetics; that is, when it asks, How do we make the gospel credible to the modern world? In contrast, they follow Karl Barth in rejecting apologetics, view the church as a culture unto itself properly standing over against secular culture instead of engaging it, and argue that the proper question for theology is, How do we make the world credible to the gospel?²

The story is provocative and insightful but not without problems. One problem with the story (and with taking a lesson from it about the way the church is to approach sharing its faith in the twenty-first century) is simply that is no longer 1963.³ If we return to Greenville, South Carolina, today and go looking for the Fox Theater, we would not find it. It closed in 1978. It has been replaced by various multiplexes around the city showing films from around the world at all times of the day. The day is long past when everyone who wants to go to a movie (on Sunday evening) is forced to watch and buy into the essence of American, white masculinity represented by John Wayne. We can find choices to fit nearly every interest, taste, existential investment, and worldview.

In any given theater in Greenville, we can walk into the movie of our choice with members of the millenial, generation X, baby boomer, silent, and greatest generations carrying our foods of choice—popcorn and Coke, nachos and Icees, hotdogs and iced tea, or ice cream Dippin’ Dots. The seats around us might be filled with people of Native American, European, African, Caribbean, Central American, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Asian descent. We might find people who are men, women, gay, straight, bisexual, transsexual, and transgender. We might see single people, couples, groups of friends, and families. We might have a social conservative sitting to our left and a liberal to our right. We could notice people from a cross section of socioeconomic statuses. We might find Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews along with those whose are spiritual-but-not-religious, agnostic, and atheist—and some of them carpooled together. And until the movie begins, we would almost certainly see people from all these different cultural divisions and cross divisions looking at their smart phones, checking e-mail, texting, surfing ranges of sites from the Internet. Toto, we’re not in the twentieth century anymore.

Hauerwas and Willimon were partly correct in their analysis of that Sunday evening at the Fox Theater in 1963 when Willimon snuck away from church to watch a movie. That night did represent the end of Christendom. But that really is because it represented the end of modernity. It was the beginning of the end of homogeneity in our society (that is, the end of the façade of homogeneity as perceived by many people of European origin). From our point of view, the church today exists in, and must speak to and with, an ever-increasingly pluralistic and globalized culture.

The dynamics of diversity, or the culture of otherness represented in the multiplex, however, is not only a phenomenon of the secular society in which the church exists. We cannot say, The church is in pluralism but not of it. If we walk into morning worship in many churches, we will find the same dynamic of a cross-cultural gathering that we observed in the theater, even if it is not to the same degree of diversity. Radically different understandings of God, self, neighbor, and world bounce this way and that off the walls of the sanctuary in a manner analogous to the sounds of banjos, djembes, cellos, electric guitars, and, yes, pianos and pipe organs meshing and clashing with lyrics in English, Spanish, and Swahili in a global music mash-up.

Any approach to the Christian faith that assumes the church can isolate itself from the multilingual interaction and multivalent interpretation that is constant in the twenty-first century is anachronistic and naïve. For the church and its preaching to be relevant in this new and constantly shifting age, a new way forward is needed.

Historically, the church has used the rubric of apologetics to describe how the church engages the culture in which it resides and participates. A traditional definition of apologetics is as follows:

A theological/homiletical approach that uses the categories of knowledge, thinking, and values of the contemporary culture to explain and defend the faith in response to explicit or implicit misunderstanding, challenges, and attacks in order to commend that very faith.⁴

In chapter 1 we will explore this definition and examine the three broad approaches to apologetics that have dominated modernity. We will use metaphors drawn from ways of living with one’s neighbors to classify these approaches. The first is the Hatfields and McCoys approach to apologetics—a feud between faith and reason, between the church and culture. In this approach the church apologetically defends the faith against assertions in society that conflict with scripture because scripture cannot be wrong . . . because the God who inspired it cannot be wrong. The second approach is characterized by an apartment building in which faith, the tenant, pays rent to reason, the landlord. The church apologetically accommodates its theology and proclamation to the reasonable assertion of culture. The third approach is that of a gated community in which the church and culture live in different neighborhoods. Faith and reason may live near each other, but they speak different dialects. In this approach, the church rejects apologetics altogether.

Given these three approaches to apologetics in modernity, what approach is called for in postmodernity? Should a pastor preach apologetically in the twenty-first century? We answer this question with a resounding yes and no. Yes, it is the preacher’s job to explain and defend the faith in order to commend that faith to any who will hear the church’s proclamation. And this must certainly be done in terms accessible to those who would listen (i.e., in language that engages contemporary knowledge, thinking, and values).

But, no, the traditional definition of apologetics operating in modernity implies forms of interaction between the church and the world that are not quite at home in the postmodern ethos. In traditional apologetics the terms of communication are defined by the culture but the communication itself is from the church to the culture. Paradoxically and unacceptably, this approach subordinates proclamation and interpretation of the Christian gospel to cultural forms of expression while placing culture in the subordinate position of passively receiving the gospel the church offers.

Thus in place of an apologetic approach to preaching, we propose a postapologetic homiletical approach—an approach that is conversational, seeking critical reciprocity between the many and varied voices in, around, and outside of the church. This approach is post-evangelical in that it moves beyond attempts to defend a premodern understanding of the faith over against evolving scientific and philosophical thought. It is postmodern in the sense that it moves beyond the liberal tradition of accommodating the gospel to evolving thought. And it is post-postliberal in that it recognizes and values that intercultural dialogue is ever present, causing the continued evolution of scientific, philosophical, and religious thought.

In chapter 1 we review the evangelical, liberal, and postliberal neighborhoods in relation to modernist apologetics. In chapter 2 we propose a postapologetic stance we argue is appropriate for postmodernity. Chapter 3 offers a conversational homiletic that accords with this postapologetic stance. And chapter 4 offers practical advice for preparing a conversational sermon along with a case study of such a sermon.

1. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Alien: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 15–16.

2. Ibid., 15–24.

3. For a variety of responses to Resident Aliens twenty-five years after it was published, see "State of the Colony: Resident Aliens at 25," Christian Century 131, no. 20 (October 1, 2014): 22–34.

4. This definition is informed by the variety of approaches to define apologetics found in the following reference works: Alan Richardson, Apologetics, Apologists, Apology, in A Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Alan