Preaching In The Emerging Church: An Interview With Dan Kimball
When we gather we might have a couple of songs, some visuals. Every week we have a report from one of our home communities, because every week we have one of our home communities host the night. We're constantly reminding everybody the church meeting is not about the big meeting — it's about smaller communities that are gathering together. They'll give a report of what God is doing in their groups, how are they experiencing community and how God's changing one of them. They read the scriptures for the night, they'll host in different ways, they'll pray for the offering. So they're involved in the larger meeting.
I'm the primary person who does the preaching. What I'm noticing with the whole emerging church movement — at least what we're doing in our context — is that we are getting deeper in the Scriptures. There are no three point outlines with acronym words — I'm not saying that's negative, I'm just saying for our context. One week I talked about what was death in the Old Testament, what did that mean, what was the word "grave," how did that change with the intertestmental viewpoint of the afterlife, what was becoming more clear when Jesus came about, what did Paul say about it, what did Revelation say about it. It's somewhat like teaching a theology class. We're specifically going into word studies, we are hitting a lot of historical context.
I think what people are looking for in our culture is depth, We talked about hell an entire night, so that's almost like the total anti-seeker model, you might say — though we're being sensitive to seekers. We walked through what different world religions and world faiths believe about hell and the afterlife — the accusation that Christianity alone has this sense of hell, is actually not true. Mostly every world faith has some sort of punishment in an afterlife. So I'm trying to also connect with culture, because you can't just assume that everyone's thinking in just a Christian worldview. I know there are people coming who have different beliefs, therefore I want them to understand that I am aware of other world faiths, other ways of looking at the world, because that's the way our culture is raising people. Then I use that to move to the biblical explanation of things.
I teach 30-40 minutes, sometimes 45 minutes. In my opinion I have to study all the harder, because we do not water things down — if anything we are simply giving it more depth. After the preaching we have about a 30 minute response time. Services are about 1 hour and 45 minutes. We have about a half an hour where it's more contemplative music that is being played — some people choose to sing to the songs and some people just sit.
We set up a prayer path on the side of the room, behind the curtains, and prayer stations that were interactive prayers about the scriptures that we're teaching. One was like a table set up — and I have nothing to do with this, this is a 21-year-old girl who designs these and volunteers to do this. They set up a table and they created kind of a fork in the road and it went it two different directions; one side was a wider road and the other side was a narrower road. And there are little push pins and so they're saying: "Will you take out a push pin and be praying, not saying the name of the person out loud because they might be with you, but just moving a pin over to the narrow road. Ask God to please bring them to the point of conviction where they need Jesus and choose to be on the narrow road." There's another interactive table, but they're all based around the scripture and people. Not everybody goes to those, but people can choose to go over and have some sort of interactive prayer that is based out of the scriptures. Scriptures are on the table. So we're teaching and giving people the opportunity to respond to it.