Make a house a home

Make a house a home

 Some thoughts on preaching which hits home

We are preparing to move house again soon (2 miles across the other side of Oxford).  As we prepare for the process of transporting all our possessions from one house to another my thoughts turned to what makes a house a home?  The bare structure and location of a property only becomes home when it feels lived in and starts to reflect the personality of its inhabitants.

The same could be said to be true of preaching.  Many sermons which I listen to show evidence of structure, design and effort.  But they often don’t feel lived in.  They lack the warmth and personality which only comes when the preacher has inhabited the text for themselves and taken it home.

What are some of the errors which sermons make?  You can probably think of more, but these few thoughts came to mind.

Pegs

When you first move into your new house boxes get emptied and mounds of clothing, books etc. await proper ‘filing away’.  Should someone come to visit the chances are their coat will need to be draped over a chair or put on the bed.  Hopefully, in time, pegs will appear upon which you may hang your coat.

In a similar way, many sermons which I hear offer nowhere to ‘hang your hat’ so to speak.  There is content, but it lacks pegs.  Without this attention to structure, the hearer can struggle to navigate their way through the sermon.  Without pegs it is unlikely that hearers will be able remember salient points of the sermon for the week ahead.

Rhetoric gets a bad name today. But the later Greek sophists (Isocrates. Cicero etc.) believed Rhetoric to be the ability to speak with such clarity that the audience would be persuaded.  Philosophers think clearly.  Rhetoricians think clearly out loud.  Preachers should be doing the same.  This will in part be reflected by careful attention to the structure and form of the sermon.

Personality

It takes time for a house to become a home.  Over time the inhabitants will begin to stamp their own personality on their property – hanging curtains, arranging flowers, decorating to taste etc. 

Many sermons I hear lack personality.  Phillip Brooks’ now famous comment that preaching is “communication of truth through personality” is exactly right.  Obviously we don’t want the sermon to be littered with personal anecdotes and stories.  It is not supposed to be a talk about them.  However, congregations listen when they can see that for the preacher the message has hit home personally.

They have been moved by the message they are preaching.  They have made the connections as to how it applies to their own life.

Punch

Sermons which hit home are those which apply pertinently and pointedly to today’s world.  They are illustrated in real life.

Too many sermons I hear leave me only in the world of the text.  Now, of course, this is not the worst problem, there are equally many messages that never take me to the world of the text and only start in the world of today.  I guess the former may be the weakness of evangelical expository preaching; the latter is the weakness of liberal preaching.

John Stott has regularly repeated the need to engage in “double listening” – Hearing the voice of the text; hearing the voice of the world. 

When you move into a new house you are inclined to think: however did they live with that wallpaper?  How come they didn’t modernise the bathroom suite etc.  But of course, it is very difficult to see your environment and culture from the fresh perspective of an outsider. 

As preachers we need to retain the fresh “eyes” of an outsider, someone who has not spent the whole week labouring over the text, and who can see the difficult punchy questions which might need addressing.

At home in the sermon

By this expression I don’t at all mean that preaching should be psychologically therapeutic, only comforting and devotional.  What I think I mean is that I expect preaching to give me pegs (to help me recall and apply the bible to my life in the week ahead); personality (so I feel that the preacher has met with God in his preparation); punch (I see the issue with a freshness and pertinence for the week ahead).

The healthy Counter-balance written into church membership

The healthy Counter-balance written into church membership

I am finishing off the final editing on my book on John’s Gospel entitled: Lives Jesus Changed.

As I arrived at chapter 20 I was struck by Jesus’ pastoral concern for his mother even as he was enduring the agony of a sacrificial death. He placed her in the care of the Apostle John and instituting the future of the caring Christian community we know as the Church.

A consistent theme in John is that the disciples can expect hostility from the world, but safety in Christ:

If you belonged to the world , it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world , but I have chosen you out of the world . That is why the world hates you. (John 15:19)

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. (John 17:15)

The thought that struck me powerfully this week was this: the thing that puts us at odds with the world (being in Christ and our resultant membership of the Church) is also the very thing that fortifies and strengthens us to live for him. Let me put it like this.

The Church is call to be both:

Counter-cultural – we side with Christ. If the world hated Christ then we can expect it to hate us too. More positively, Christians are not supposed to just “go with the flow” but rather, under God, they are to seek the reform of society by His Spirit, for his glory. You are not of the world, but Jesus has sent us into the world for the world’s better good (e.g. John 17:16-18).

Cross-cultural – the great glory of the Church is that by being united to Christ we are also now in unity with the great diversity of believers across lands, nations, kingdoms and time zones. The community to which we now belong is made up of a vast array of diverse people (see John 12:32 – all peoples (all nations) make up this church).

The thing that has struck me afresh is that these two marvellous truths about the Church (as being counter-cultural and cross-cultural) are a marvellous counter balance to each other. Without the world-wide weight of our membership of a universal church we would be picked off by the enemy, discouraged by loneliness and defeated by our weakness. Similarly, if the Church is not distinctive and separate from the world there is no way in which it will become a movement of people which will begin to change this world for good.

Jesus’ vision for his body, the church, is that the people who have been saved by him out of the world but for the good of the world, should vastly increase the scope and breadth of his ministry and do so much more than he could have done if he had remained a solitary man on this earth.

What a vision for the Church! Will you repent with me of feeling anything less than enamoured by it or anything less than grateful for being a part of God’s weighty purposes on earth?!

Bible by the Beach

I have just returned from the first “Bible by the Beach” held at Eastbourne over the May Bank Holiday weekend in 2009. This was a very encouraging occassion with good input from Paul Williams from Christ Church Fulwood, Bishop Wallace Benn who had the vision for this great event, and Archbishop Ben Kwashi, the Bishop of Jos, Plateau State in Northern Nigeria who spoke movingly (and cheerfully!) about the horrendous persecution which he and his family have suffered from militant Muslim’s (more on this on the Anglican Mainstream website http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/?p=1924).  Our sung worship was led by Fatfish and Stuart Townsend.

My own modest contributions were three seminars on Building Healthy Leaders (see www.simonvibert.com for the powerpoint slides) and preaching at St Mary’s Hailsham.

This event is due to run again next year so keep an eye on the website www.biblebythebeach.org.