What I was getting at was our preaching ought to change depending on who’s there. When this really dawned on me as a recipient was when we were attending a church for a few years; I wasn’t working in church ministry at the time. We went to church and I really adored the pastor; he’s a great guy -- a friend of mine still to this day -- but on Sundays it would feel as if I was struck by a drive-by sermon. It didn’t matter if I was there or who else was there, this was the sermon -- it was delivered at four different services, two different times of the day, morning and evening, and you know it’s the way it is. You showed up, you got what was delivered, and that’s that. It really wasn’t changed or affected by the particular people who were there.
So I try to suggest that on-going preaching, on-going use of proclamation of the good news, really ought to be more out of a dialogical pattern than out of a public speaking and mass communication pattern. And then a progressional dialogue means that the content of what’s being preached is actually formed and shaped in relationship to the people who are there, so that it moves somewhere. So not only is it thoughtful of the people who are there, but the preaching changes in light of the contribution of the people who are a part of it.
You’re trying to find a sustainable, long-term way of doing preaching for people. You know an awful lot of folks are really, highly committed to going to church. But boy, it makes a chore out of it when like a woman said to me the other night, “we’ve been going to this Methodist church for 8 years,” this particular church they go to. And she says, “We hear the same thing for all 8 years.” They are highly committed to being a part of the church and they’ll put up with the fact that nothing much changes and that it doesn’t much matter who’s there; they’re just hearing the same material over and over. So, the idea of it being progressional is that people’s lives change and circumstances change, and when they’ve changed then they actually have something to contribute to the preaching act. Then we’re implicated by the story, rather than asking the questions how does this apply to us.
So I don’t think what we say to people is, “Hey, let me figure out a way to tell you how your having cancer applies to your life.” No, when you’ve found someone who has cancer, they already know that this changes my whole life. Some things change, I am a part of this story. I don’t have to ask: what does it have to do with me? It just fundamentally has to do with you in the very fact it is what it is. And I think that good preaching, and preaching that’s done properly, really does implicate us and say to us, “Well, what do we do now?”