Postmodernity should be seen as offering fresh mission opportunities for preaching. The rationality of the Enlightenment gave Christian apologetics a secure place, but it also subdued intuitive and spiritual dimensions of experience. Webber writes of the "dead end street of modernity, which proudly thinks the human is autonomous and the individual mind is the final arbiter of truth" (1999, 34).

In Newbigin's withering analysis of modernity's impact on Christianity he cogently argued how it has privatized Christian faith out of the arena of public truth (1986). Haeurwas and Willimon cheer on the freedom that the church has now been given in Postmodernity. They give a graphic metaphor for the change in world views by retelling the episode about one Sunday evening in 1963 in Greenville, South Carolina. Members of the Methodist youth group slipped out of church when the Fox Theater opened. The world "served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church.... The Fox Theater went head to head with the church over who would provide the world view for the young .... That night (it) won the opening skirmish" (1989, 15-16).

Electronic culture has many critics, but we need to be open to its opportunities. Famously Postman decried the TV age in Amusing Ourselves to Death, but he greatly overstated his argument (see Sample 1998, 23-24). Sample makes a good case that the common criticism leveled at electronic culture that it does not lead to commitment and bonding is "decidedly wrong and arrogant" (74, 75). Rather, new ways of bonding and commitment have emerged through image, beat and visualization. The challenges which come from, for example Babin's "modulations" and "immersion" in affective worship or from Troeger and the role of imagination in the preaching task (1991) require a considered response. Issues like the place of preaching within the holistic experience of worship press upon us in the electronic context. Those who have already encountered the paradox of Millennials combining loud worship music with intense listening to the preacher, know just how much significant change is taking place.

2. A realism about living in transition.

Though the precise details of Fig. 3 are open to debate, it is undisputable that we are all caught up in the reality of culture and communication transition. Whether we like it or not we live in times of critical change. At any time of transition there are inevitable insecurities and tensions. Old and new coexist uneasily. Defensiveness becomes as easy a response as does the temptation to swallow simple solutions.

We must resist defensiveness. Much of the current conflict between the so-called "old homiletic" -- propositional preaching -- and the "new homiletic" -- re-presentational preaching -- is unproductive. In practice these two ways of preaching will continue to operate alongside each other and need to learn from each other during this transition. In a plea for "other voices at the homiletical table" Rose rightly sees traditional theory as a major voice because "many of its central claims remain dominant and normative in other understandings of preaching" (1997, 33).