Preaching: Tell me about your church.

Seay: A lot of young adults. We are actually in a strange period where we are merging with a 97-year-old congregation, so I’m pastoring essentially two churches — one of seventy and eighty-year-olds and another of primarily twenty and thirty’s, along with some forty and fifty-year-olds. We have a lot of artists and storytellers and musicians and writers; we use the visual arts a lot, especially in our services. We have areas set up that as I preach, people are free to respond by painting or creating or sketching or drawing.

Advertisement

Right now we are going through the Psalms, and we are responding to the Psalms communally. So every week we are reading poetry and journaling and looking at paintings that people have written as they have interacted with the Psalms and they have affected them. It’s a midrash. I describe preaching as midrash, the call to engage the story of God in a way that creates attention. I think that good preaching and good storytelling puts us in a place of attention where we are not sure of all the answers and we’ve got to — as The Matrix talks about — we’ve got to go back to the questions and ask the important questions.

Preaching: One of the places where many pastors struggle in the whole postmodern milieu is this whole issue of truth. As those who are committed to Christ and have the scripture, we have a confidence in the truth of scripture and in the truth that is in God. Yet we live in a culture in which truth is a very nebulous term. How do you deal with truth in terms of popular culture as you communicate?

Seay: I think we have to begin with a place of balance. Right now we are really unbalanced. One form of truth we really focus on is a propositional kind of spoken truth. Christ talked about it: He said I speak the truth but He also said I am the truth. We are going to have to be the truth and embody truth as often as we speak it. When those things come in balance truth makes a lot more sense.

For us, what we talk about as a community is that we are to be the body of Christ. As we tell the story through film, art, music, sculpture and literature, then we’re embodying the truth in the redemptive story in a way that brings some balance. Truth is an easier pill to swallow in art. If we are always beating people over the head with propositions we are not going to get very far. Jesus knew that — that’s why He was a storyteller. What we do in preaching most often is take the great stories and we try to say: this is what Jesus meant, let me give you the three propositions. We really miss the boat on that one.

In my preaching, I try to create tension. I really try to raise questions — I don’t try to answer all of the questions. I think good preaching, like a good film, should leave us talking. Force us into discussion to have to engage issues. So what I want most when people leave is for them to feel like they have to talk to somebody about what they’ve wrestled with.