Just because postmodern people value community doesn’t necessarily mean they are willing to work for it. There’s still a pretty strong sense of individualism and having to put together what’s referred to as a “designer religion” or “designer faith.” There are people who have very high capacities and high skill sets for going through these messages and pulling out ones that they want to give value to in their life. Music, television, movies, ads, friendships, sermons, they’re all part of the whole milieu of possibilities.

So that’s part of the struggle in situations like that when there are a lot of people like that and they’re strangers. When someone is in that kind of situation, their engagement at the church service level on Sunday kind of experience, worship service level, is to connect with these people as much as you could so that you build creditability and trust and that they will become a deeper part of that community. That’s not an uncommon way for people to progress and to preach. It’s a different style, the sermon plays a different role in situations like that than they do inside of a community of people who are committed to living life in a certain way.

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Preaching: If someone was to attend your weekly gathering (at 5:00 pm Sunday) and worship with you at Solomon’s Porch, what would that be like? What would they experience?

Pagitt: There’s a few hundred of us, 200-300 people or so. That kind of scale. A lot of young people but not exclusively. We’re in the city of Minneapolis. We just recently moved into a vacant church building, so we remodeled the church building. We meet in the round and the format and design and the feel of the meeting space is like that of a home. The furniture is normal household furniture and it feels like a big great room or living room or something. And that is all really important because our Sunday experience is one of the ways that our community meets together.

There’s no place, no thing in our community that functions as the central or primary thing; our entire communal life is what matters to us and there are different ways that we meet or serve a different role in our formation. So, Sundays are a particular way of meeting and there are certain practices that we perform on Sundays.

One of those, when it comes to preaching, is that we try to engage in a collective conversation about who we are, where we are in the world and what God would have for us. The sermon is a part of that process. It’s a part of that conversation. Its role is the verbal articulation of our saying, “Who are we, where are we, and how do we interact with the larger story of our Christian life and our Christian faith?” So we almost always use the Bible as the primary, as one of our primary dialogue partners in this. And the way we look at it -- that it’s not just dialogical between me, if I’m doing the sermon, as presenter and the congregation -- but rather we as a community are in dialogue with the scriptures. We want the Bible to talk, and we want to talk. And we want to say: what does the reality of what we know to be God’s way of being in the scriptures, what does that mean for us in the way that we are to be, in the way that God is with us today.