I think that’s why postmodern people are so confused by churches. You know we end up being as pastors, these people who have this really deep knowledge of frankly pretty obscure things and we are telling this large group of strangers truths about this set of knowledge that we have that we’ve figured out why it’s important. And we do this week in and week out and week in and week out as if the work that we did a year ago, or two years ago, or five years ago, in these people’s lives did not prepare them to now be able to be the people who can figure out what the meaning is and what the implication and application of all this is.

It really struck me how people can go to church for twenty years and they still believe in and of themselves, “I wouldn’t really know how to exegete the passage. You know that’s what the pastor does.” Well, why has the pastor been doing that all of these years if the people haven’t picked up the ability to do it in two decades? It’s just such an odd equation. And I know a lot of this changes, people who’ve read my book and hear me talk like this say, “it’s really a different thing when you’re in small communities where pastors stay a long time and know their people.” But I think when you’re in situations like that where there is a real deep understanding between pastor and congregation that the preaching takes on a different function. It happens in a different way.

It’s a different kind of preaching. I think it’s told out of the common story of these people. It’s one of those things I think African-American churches had for a long time when there was a more common experience in the African-American community in the United States. I think that’s changing a lot now, but when there was a more common experience the pastor could preach into that common experience and proclaim the good news into that shared hope and shared struggle. People not having much of a shared hope or shared struggle now makes preaching a more difficult endeavor.

Preaching: There is a contrast in terms of the kind of church; there are different church models, different approaches. For example, in contrast to what you just said about preparation,. Ed Young Jr. says he spends the vast majority of his week getting ready for what he’s going to say at the weekend services. And this is not a traditional congregation; it’s overwhelmingly young adults, with the majority of those attending being young singles. So that’s a different context and a different approach.

Pagitt: In some ways, what young singles and postmodern types do is they take this church presentation as one of the menu resources in their lives. And “yeah, it’s good, I go to church and I get that contribution and that becomes one of the seven or eight equal contributions in my life that I will sort through as to making decisions in what I do and how I do it.” And you end up with a service provided by the church of a way of viewing the world. You know it would be like: how do we attend to watching a Dr. Phil show or something else. People don’t expect that Dr. Phil knows your issues; you hear him talk to somebody else and you think, “ah, there’s some advice I could get from that.” And that’s a pretty common response for young people.