Pagitt: I didn’t grow up going to church at all -- church was not a part of our family at all -- so my personal family history of church wasn’t anything. But when I got into Christianity I was discipled by evangelical parachurch groups, so they loved me and cared for me early on. I went to Bethel College in St. Paul and Bethel Seminary, so I did my training there. And I was a part of a megachurch in the southwest suburbs of Minneapolis for 10 years before working for Leadership Network and then starting Solomon’s Porch.
Preaching: As you look out 10 or 20 years from now, how do you see preaching changing?
Advertisement
Pagitt: I think churches are going to change. Churches are going to move in two directions -- I think they will become increasingly large in general and I think they will become increasingly particular on the other hand. So I think that preaching will change and develop to fit those two modes of the church.
I think the thing that will be gone -- and I don’t know if it’s twenty years or 100 -- is the sense that there is a denominational value to a church, necessarily. I think that’s the part that’s going to change. Like, “Well, that’s just how Methodists do it or this is how Presbyterians do what we do.” I think that’s going to increasingly not have as much sway. I think that as churches become larger or more general they will have a certain kind of preaching and it will have to be refined and developed to fit that setting. And then churches have to become particular and contextual. And it doesn’t necessarily mean real small, but it probably means less than gigantic. The way the preaching happens there will also develop. I have a sense that in the context of the more particulars, it will become more dialogical, more interactive. Not just people sharing sort of half-thought-through ideas with each other, but truly informing one another on areas we have to be informed on.
Preaching: One thing I sense in the Emerging Church conversation is a great deal of interest in spirituality and spiritual formation. Does preaching play a role in that for you?
Pagitt: I do think we need to consider the role of preaching in comparison to the other approaches to spiritual formation. I think preaching is one of the really good forms of spiritual formation, but it is not the primary one and it’s not necessarily the most comprehensive. It’s just a particular kind of one of the particular practices we use to spiritually form us, but it’s not the exclusive one or the primary one. I think hospitality and service, that kind of thing, are all a part of it.