I’ve found myself in this way differing from a lot of my colleagues and friends in the same (Emergent) movement I’m a part of. They advocate pushing toward a narrative preaching approach and story and so on because that still sort of begins with the text or begins with a story and then just says, “I’m going to figure out a good way to tell this story and whoever happens to show up and hear it, it’s still the same truth proclaimed.” Well, preaching is more than just saying true things; it is saying true things to people. Very few of us would consider preaching to be something you could do in an empty hall or in a field by yourself. It’s just declaring things in the inter-relationality and the give and take of people with people.

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Preaching: In Preaching Re-Imagined, you talk a lot about developing community. Do you see a difference between preaching to the lives of those individuals versus preaching to the community?

Pagitt: It strikes me a lot. I think part of the problem in preaching to a postmodern people -- and maybe preaching over all -- is that we have a much more difficult time seeing our churches as communities of people. What we have more is this collective of individuals having a common experience, or something like that. And so if we don’t have a sense of community identity, communal identity, then we are really stuck with sort of saying, “I just have to talk to each individual person’s life.”

I know one of the things we work hard on is a sense of us understanding where we are as a people and what situation and circumstance we find ourselves in and the degree to which postmodern people can find solidarity with others around the same particular issue. That is a place of real connections. This is why someone can go to a U2 concert and feel this connection and feel like we are a part of the same thing and really feel like the call to the One Campaign to stop world wide poverty, is something that rings true to them even though there are hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands who are hearing the same message, because they feel like we are a part of this together. So (we seek) the formation of communities that we preach in and preach from, because communities preaching within themselves and preaching to one other is an essential part, I think, of an on-going life that would involve preaching with postmodern people.

Preaching: In your book, you talk about a concept you call “progressional implicatory preaching.” Explain what that is and why it’s important.

Pagitt: What I’m trying to get at with this progressional implicatory dialogue is to say that what preaching ought to be is a dialogical process -- not just two people exchanging ideas back and forth, but of the preacher communicating the good news into particular people’s experience. So it has to involve and matter who those people are. Dialogue is something that counts both parties as important. When someone’s having a dialogue by themself, that’s something other than a dialogue; dialogue involves more than one.