Ministry as Midwifery

"I did not come to you," Paul writes to the people at Corinth, "proclaiming the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. . . . that your faith might not rest in human wisdom but in the power of God" (I Cor. 2:1) Human wisdom frames clever arguments, prizes toughness, applauds size and overlooks the use of steroids to build a strong arm or rack up impressive achievements. I come not with such spectacular and clever wisdom, Paul says, but with a message and a manner, a style focused on Jesus Christ and him crucified: weak and foolish in the world’s eyes, gentle, vulnerable, sensitive -- "in order that your faith might not rest in human wisdom but in the power of God."

A young man whom I have known for almost 30 years recently invited me to preach on this text at his ordination. The text is one of those passages that ought to come at the end of a sermon, for there is nowhere to go except to your knees after it is read. It reminded me of an incident from that young man’s life, a Memorial Day holiday when he was 15 or 16 years old. The church staff was on a retreat at his parents’ mountain cabin, and Jim had come along with his mother and father to help. With them came Laska, a magnificent Siberian Huskie. Laska was so pleased with the beautiful surroundings that she decided it was time to bring forth a litter. From the first sign of the impending births until the last puppy was safely delivered, many hours later, Jim scarcely left Laska’s side. He was present to that dog all day and all night. Often down on his knees, he protected her, encouraged her, stood by her. And when the night of her labor was spent, he carefully shared her production with us and his eyes shone with the beauty and mystery of this moment in creation.

Paul’s text has helped me find in this memory a paradigm, a warm, rough model for the ministry: the ministry is like the role of the adolescent boy playing midwife to his beloved dog. Like all comparisons, there are certain dangers in this one. A minister friend quipped, "Sure, the midwife and the minister have lots in common. They both deal with messes." If so, the model offers a good dose of reality, which makes ordination vows even more impressive. But the comparison goes deeper than that.

The boy midwife was on his knees, his attention rooted before the mystery and wonder of creation. He persisted there, hour after hour, energized by anticipation and by hope in his prayers and his service. But his prayers and his service were not intellectual exercises. Both were rooted in feeling. Curtis Berger shocked his Columbia University Law School associates at a convocation for the opening of the school year by saying, "I do not assert that legal education makes our graduates evil, but I do believe that [it makes them] less feeling, less caring, less sensitive to the needs of others,. . . even less alarmed about the injustices of our society than they were when they entered law school." Seminarians also run the risk of dulling the warm, real center of their faith as they study Greek, Hebrew, sociology, psychology, hermeneutics and theodicy.

The boy midwife on his knees, engaged by his own life of feeling, was, as Webster defines the midwife, "the woman with." May he always be "the woman with." May he grow into that power to feel with others and find no limiting chauvinistic anxiety compelling him to be "the man apart" who stands at a distance and pontificates because he is not strong enough in self or in God to risk being touched in soul and body. "The man apart" claims objectivity; too often the truth is that he cannot risk subjectivity and is threatened by the warming of his heart.

But Christian midwifery is even more than being "the woman with." It requires initiative with love. It seeks out another’s pain. Laska, the dog, retreated from public view as her pain increased. The midwife sought her out and made her place of retreat his place of midwifery. He did not set up office hours on the front porch (the clinic model) and send out a general announcement to all dogs in the neighborhood that he was there if they cared to come. He went to Laska, finding her huddled in misery and bafflement. He sought her out. How long has it been since your physician, your teacher, your lawyer has come knocking at your door, saying, "I just stopped by to check up on you. How’s it going?" That kind of visit is not only a professional’s prerogative, but the minister’s personal privilege, now too often surrendered in favor of the clinical model and the unlisted telephone number.

This boy midwife was "the woman with" and the one who took initiative, but he did not presume to have all the answers or what Paul calls human wisdom. He had only the power of simply staying close and standing by. He had no particular skill except himself. He was asked to be not the solution to the pain but a channel of comfort, to stand by like the child who was late coming home and explained she had encountered her friend who had broken her favorite doll on the sidewalk. "And you stopped to help her pick up the pieces?" her father asked. "Oh, no. I stopped and helped her cry."

So it is to share the pain, not to explain it or arrest it or fix it up. Jesus Christ crucified does not have all the answers to Job’s moral pain, but instead takes it into his own being so that it becomes God’s pain too. Picking it up, he goes public with it. As Walter Brueggemann and Dean Thompson have helped us see, when pain is processed in public, lifted up and shared, it releases unsuspected energy. It releases the remarkable and powerful energy of compassion, social imagination and brand-new ways of looking at things. It is the divine prelude to resurrection. They remind us of this point by citing part of recent history: when Rosa Parks went public with her pain and refused to ride in the back of the bus, she released energy, the energy to take a giant step in righting a great wrong and to lift many a burden.

The boy midwife and the ancient text remind us that the church ordains its ministers not because they are great or wise or even good but because they promise to be "the woman with," and to stand by and process the pain of the earth and its people. They are ordained to be the mid-wife to the church in order for the church to be the midwife to the world in its labor. The church possesses God’s pain made public in Christ, releasing the energy of compassion.

Hang Tough

No one who has been hindered from participating in the joy and fulfillment of sexual union by a constricting view of sexuality handed down in the name of religion will object to the work of those who have liberated sex.

So also with the Bible.. But in both cases a further step is in order because such liberation as an end in itself is a dead-end street. Many sexually liberated persons have come to that dead end in their sexual relationships. Many thoughtful Christians have come to that dead end in their relationship with the Bible. This article offers a word for them. The four guidelines it proposes to get them moving again may serve as a springboard boosting them forward into the Bible as a Book of Faith.

The Demystification of Scripture

Sexual liberation has brought many to a view of sex that causes them to snort in disgust when others claim that the old definition of a sacrament (in the religious realm) is also a fitting definition of sexual intercourse (in the personal realm): “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. They view sex as an outward and visible matter and nothing more, thus demystifying it.

When Walter Wink asserts (in The Bible in Human Transformation: Toward a New Paradigm for Biblical Study [Fortress, 1973]) that historical criticism of the Scripture has demystified the Bible much as Kinsey demystified sex, he is helping us to understand how the objective scientific approach to experience, sexual or biblical, is not the whole story and alone may be destructive of the essence! Wink prefaces his treatise with Nietzsche’s observation that “It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. Do you have to salt your truth so heavily that it does not quench your thirst any more?” Precisely! Recent scholarly work on both the Bible and sex has been heavily salted with the scientific method and a presumed value-neutral stance. In both instances this “salting” has been costly, depriving us of the beauty and mystery of both the Bible and sex. We have been robbed of the Bible’s power to bring us into touch with Someone beyond it and us.

Such disastrous demystification has been one of the unforeseen spin-offs of much liberated technical-historic biblical scholarship. We do not, of course, want to return to a “know-nothing” attitude about the Scripture which boasts that faith requires nothing more than the literal meaning of the words. I am told that the Chinese language has no character for the word “literal,” but that the one used means “on the surface.” We cannot be content with the surface of the Bible. Scholarly work can help us to delve more deeply. We do not want to lose the benefits of that liberation which modern scholarship has wrought. Indeed, many scholars who are themselves persons of faith are leading the way to turn us back from historical criticism as an end in itself. The guidelines to be suggested in these pages arise from the help provided by critical study of the Bible.

Private Piety and Public Religion

However, there is another peril in talk like this. Not only does it sound as though we should do away with scholarly research of the Scripture; worse, it gives aid and comfort to those who would have us believe that the Bible as the Book of Faith is solely a matter of private piety and individual concern. Such talk can appear to promote private or personal religion as opposed to public or social religion -- another way to turn our use of the Scripture into a dead-end street.

That same peril has accompanied the modern effort to liberate us sexually. We have wanted to help people experience the intensely inward and private aspect of sexuality. But individuals who make private happiness and personal fulfillment the primary standard for judging a marriage or other sexual arrangements have turned away from profound public and social dimensions. We are learning that sexual practices are not a private domain and that “living together” is more than a personal arrangement: it is a social contract. The church asks that the marriage vow be made in public as a witness, a public commitment. Sexual expression between consenting adults is often viewed as purely personal. But sexual permissiveness has public consequences. It may also reinforce other permissive attitudes that can have catastrophic public political implications.

Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, writes in a Time essay (May 8, 1978):

Transposing the liberation of the psyche to the social level, we have killed our neuroses and now live in. a permissive world. But permissiveness turns out to be very naïve, and the world today is in danger of being taken over by the naïve. Many newly liberated people are astonished at how easy it is to rule or be, ruled: all that is needed is a single party and a brutal police force: But rule was, never meant to be easy.

People of the Western world who have read the Bible as a Book of Faith have given us a vision of a public order based on personal discipline that does not require weapons checks at every airport, a vision of a corporate freedom unmarked by holocausts and terrorism. Such freedom is disciplined by the Bible’s realism about human nature. That realism understands, the necessity of appropriate outward restraint and inner control. But when the inner control is abandoned, then the outward restraints grow out of proportion and take over public life; dictators are welcomed, and the Bible is once again considered subversive literature. Like unhappy children, we need and yearn for ultimate authority. It is better found in the Scripture than in the state. But biblical literalism provides authority in a manner insulting to our intelligence and distressing to our humanity. To read the Bible as a Book of Faith is to discover in it the true biblical authority of truth and meaning. So now we return, to the original question How can we so read it?

I am grateful to a trusted colleague of more than, a dozen years who would scrutinize my sermons and then look imperiously over her typewriter at me and demand: “But how do you do it? Give us some “how to’s.”, Here, then, are four “how to’s”: one, Hang loose; two, Hang in there; three, Hang together; and four -- well, that one is a surprise. We will come to it in due season.

Freed From Literalism

First, then, Hang loose! Be relaxed about all the limited human ways in which the Faith Story is conceptualized in various times and cultures. We don’t have to believe impossible things just because they are in the Bible; after all, the Bible presents a flat earth in a three-story universe. If I must accept that world view to respond to the claim laid upon me by the Savior of the world, then I cannot respond.

I believe in the spiritual reality of the Ascension. However, if I must believe that Jesus’ body floated through the sky like some Palestinian Mary Poppins in order to believe that he lives in the bosom of the Father, then my faith is badly shaken. The biblical texts’ expressions or symbols that are part of a world view foreign to us have been the bars of the prison where the spirit has struggled for freedom in this ancient literature. Countless modern Christians are already largely liberated from that prison of literalism -- freed, however, only to enter another prison; namely, the belief that through historical criticism and objective scholarship we can discover, in Luther’s words, the “single, simple, solid intent and stable meaning” of Scripture, the author’s original intent.

This, too, is a kind of literal-mindedness, one that hampers the free movement of the Spirit working in and through these ancient words. How much freer is the view of Augustine: “What more liberal and more fruitful provision could God have made in regard to Sacred Scriptures than that the same words might be understood in several senses

If we cannot “hang loose” in regard to these “period pieces” in the Bible, these human conceptualizations, the church may lose those who cannot be content with a world view that regards women as innately inferior to men. The God of all being who encounters us in Scripture will manage to get to us through that and every other barrier of human conceptualization -- even as God gets through the pre-scientific world view -- only as we hang loose about them and are able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Hanging loose, however, can result in “reductionism” whereby we reduce our encounter with the Bible to terms agreeable to us. We need some sound way to make these judgments, rather than relying simply on what is pleasing to us in our limited time and place. When Augustine spoke of the fruitful provision God made for the same words to “be understood in several senses,” he went on to say, “all of which are sanctioned by the concurring testi

mony of other passages equally divine.” He is proposing that the Scripture itself holds within it a basis for the appropriate evaluation of the various meanings any one passage might present. Scripture, like the church itself, contains the principles by which it is to be judged. “There are many Christians,” John Herbert Otwell has written,

who have turned to . . . modern art for their description of truth. . . . Those who prefer Archibald MacLeish’s J.B. to the book of Job represent this faction for us, since Mr. MacLeish removed God from the center of the book of ‘Job when he rewrote it to make it a description of the human, situation [I Will Be Your God (Abingdon, 1967), p. 207].

It is that center which we need to identify so that we can hang loose about the rest, What God is it who is central and who provides the plumb line so that as we’ hang loose we do not inadvertently let go?

Here “doubting” Thomas, that maligned disciple, is our guide. Not having been with the other disciples when the resurrected Christ appeared to them, he heard their testimony but resisted: “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” What a service he rendered in demanding as absolute continuity between the historic Jesus and the Risen Christ. Unless the Spirit one has encountered matches Jesus at the point of his absolute self-giving, at the point of that love which suffers long and is kind, at the point of that love which for the joy that is set before it takes up the cross, then one has not been encountered by the God of Jesus Christ.

Telling the Story in Word and Deed

So hanging loose is only introductory, a warm-up discipline to limber us up to be open to the central core of the Bible. When we discover that or are discovered by it, then we must engage this second guideline in reading the Bible as the Book of Faith; namely, Hang in there!

There is a central, abiding, incontrovertible Story in the Bible, a melody that will not be silenced despite many poor notes, bad notes, wrong notes, hesitations and repeats sounded by the human musicians. This core of faith-tradition must not be surrendered. The obedient church is not the church defending any theory of Scripture or explaining away its contradictions or pressing its human limitations as divine mysteries; rather, it is the one telling the Story in word and deed.

The center of this story and of all stories is Jesus, the Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who has in his hands the print of those nails which go through to the hands and heart of God. What think ye of Christ? What is your Christology? That is the question, and it informs the way one reads the Bible -- as a Book of Faith, as a secular book or not at all. But the reading also informs the faith. For example, some of the most exciting new writing about the nature of Christ has been done by Hans Frei in The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Fortress, 1975). He applies a model of personal identity to New Testament narratives about Jesus. The result is to see how Jesus is most himself in the Passion narratives. Before that, Jesus’ identity is understood in terms of the hopes and history of Israel. “Are you the Messiah or should we look for another?”

But in the Passion narratives, where he is most himself, there is a dramatic switch and Jesus then “identifies the titles rather than they him” (Theology Today. April 1978, p. 60).

See how this model fits with Herman Waetjen’s Origin and Destiny of Humanness (Omega, 1976), a fascinating work on Matthew’s Gospel. In Matthew’s account, unlike those of Mark and Luke, we encounter two donkeys for Jesus to ride in the Palm Sunday parade -- a procession which is re-enacted annually in our liturgy. But what are we to do with the two donkeys? The literalist must somehow get Jesus on both of them. The liberal, on the other hand, has long since dismissed them as one of many textual distortions. Some monk made a mistake in copying. Or Matthew was trying to remind people of their history.

But Waetjen says No: words have more than one meaning. When we say that someone wears two hats, we do not mean it literally but are describing something important about the functions that person serves. So here are two beasts of burden -- one a coronation beast, the donkey; the other the “son of a pack animal,” a colt. The first is a symbol of “messiahship”; the other suggests “the Servant of the Lord.” Here, Waetjen sees, as Hans Frei does in his work on Christology, that there is a change at the beginning of the Passion. At that turn in his life Jesus no longer takes his identity from the history of Israel. Now he is no longer a nationalistic savior but the universal Savior; forsaking the coronation beast, he rides the pack animal and becomes the suffering servant of the whole creation.

All of this is only a sketchy illustration of the trembling life breaking out of the Scripture when we hang in there on the central Story and the primary issue. When we press at this living core of the written word, we discover that it is not the dead letter of the ancient past; it breaks out to bring us to our feet -- or to our knees. Some years ago I heard a Scot discussing the decline of the stir over Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologizing” of Scripture. “We are called,”, he said, “to be listeners of the word. The outcome is that what is demythologized is not so much the text as ourselves.” When the Bible is alive, it strips us of our deceptive and comfortable myths -- myths not about God but about ourselves.

Conversation in Community

So we must first of all hang loose about the human ways in which the Bible’s Story is conceptualized; having done that, we are prepared to hang in there with the central theme, the biblical melody of creation and redemption. But now mark this third: Hang together.

The Bible is a community book, and it yields up its treasure only when it is shared. It is basically “oral” and asks to be read “in community.” The church comes into being wherever two or more persons gather in Christ’s name. To gather in his name is to be open to him. The Christ event -- Jesus’ birth, teaching, healing, praying, suffering, dying, rising again and the descent of the Holy Spirit -- this Event and all that led up to it and “all that has followed from it are what the gathered community talks about, in all its liturgy and all its life, if it is Christ’s church.

The heart and core of all that talk are the heart and core of the Bible, Jesus Christ. “Bible conversation,” if you will, is the church’s talk, and lies behind all its liturgy and its action. When the church ceases this conversation, it makes itself increasingly vulnerable to being cut off from the Spirit of him in whose name it has gathered. This conversation and its consequences are the faith community’s business.

It is often said, and rightly so, that the world sets the church’s agenda. Yes, indeed, for it is the world -- especially that hurting, suffering, vulnerable part of it -- for which Christ received the nails in his hands. But Paul Hoon suggests we not forget that “it is God who, in the Event of Jesus Christ, has called the meeting.”

That “meeting” in his name breaks open the Scripture as the risen Christ opened its meaning to the disciples blinded by fear and disappointment on the road to Emmaus. “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). The fruitfulness of such meeting comes not because two or three heads are better than one numerically but because the interaction between persons is creative of the new. The conversation is itself recreative of Christ himself when it is held in his name. “The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name . . . will bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you . . . . Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (John 14:26).

So let the preaching of the church. be not the responsibility of one person, but let that one conduct the conversation about Christ so as to bring to bear the witness of the generations in order that we may see and hear Christ, our eternal contemporary, re-enacted in the miracle of sign and symbol, word and sacrament, our mutual life in his love. Only so can we protect ourselves from dead-end biblical head trips and be addressed in the whole person by the Word.

When contemporary Christians gather to read the Bible together and seek to be addressed by more than the surface meaning of the words, they need to leave much time for mutual reflection, sharing and prayer. This exciting process can be accelerated for English-speaking congregations if they read together from several different translations.

To Expand Our Understanding

“Working from a single English translation,” writes Lamar Williamson, Jr. (“Translations and Interpretation: New Testament,” Interpretation, April 1978), “is like listening to a high-quality stereophonic recording on a single-track instrument. The melody comes through all right, but its quality is limited by the capacity of the machine.” He suggests reading from three translations. One of them should be based on “formal correspondence” to the original text and two on “dynamic equivalence.” Most recent translations are of the latter kind. The first retains the ambivalence of the source; the second seeks to use the word which conveys the meaning the translator believes the original writer most likely intended.

The comparison of translations can be done easily by anyone who can read at all. It should be done not in order to decide which is “correct” but, according to Williamson, “to expand [one’s] understanding of the text, to hear its several nuances. . . . Listening to several translations at once . . . enables the interpreter to hear far more of the richness of the original stereophonic recording.” The depth and height of the text are immeasurably expanded, and we discover that it may address depths and heights in us we did not suspect. The Bible then is enabled to become for us far more than an ancient document. It strangely and wonderfully addresses the whole person and more.

In a recent preaching class one of my students -- a Lutheran -- stood up to read the lesson before the other class members (all of whom happened to be United Church, Presbyterian and Methodist). As he stood looking at us imploringly, silently, we wondered at the hesitation. Then he motioned for us to rise and said: “In our church we stand for the reading of the Gospel.” As we stood there, I thought how this was more than a gesture of deference to the Holy Scripture. The body as well as the mind was asked to be attentive; every part of us was asked to submit to the discipline of the reading.

However, if we are to hang together in our reading, every group needs a skilled interpreter of the Bible. The role of the professional minister is to help make the Scripture accessible to the people. Luther maintained that the ministry, with all its warts, was God’s gift to the church. Indeed, it provides for the church’s continuity, and for an unending conversation about the Event we call Jesus Christ. Such a definition of ministry excludes no part of it -- pastoral administrative, preaching -- but gives it unity and coherence. Toward that end, I believe that our churches should once again urge as normative for ordination a working knowledge of biblical Hebrew and Greek.

Shattering Our Expectations

So there are three guidelines for reading the Bible as a Book of Faith: hang loose, hang in there, and hang together. For the fourth and last, we break the rhythm and utter a jarring phrase out of keeping with expectations: “Well, I’ll be hanged.” That outdated expression was once used to convey intense surprise. We heard unbelievable news and expressed our shock and consternation when we said, “Well, I’ll be hanged!” or “Who would have ever believed it?”

If this fourth phrase jarred you, caught you unawares, it has served its purpose and well represents the substance of this fourth guideline. If we are to read the Bible in such fashion that it can become the Word of God to us, we must not be turned from the pursuit when its message does not match our human expectations. If it is the Word of God, it is the word of God who says: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” (Isa. 55:8).

After his wife’s death, C. S. Lewis wrote, in A Grief Observed: “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence” (Seabury, 1961).

Dominic Crossan, a New Testament scholar who has done particularly “iconoclastic” work on the parables, draws our attention to the evidence that Jesus’ parables often have that reverse twist that shatters “our ways” with “his ways.” He believes that we often miss the punch line, so to speak, because we don’t understand the cultural presuppositions of those to whom Jesus spoke. Crossan cites the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan and our assumption that its purpose is to teach Jesus’ disciples to love their neighbors, even, if they are strangers, even enemies. But, he asks, “if the story really intended to encourage help to one’s neighbor in distress or even to one’s enemy in need, would it not have been much better to have a wounded Samaritan in that ditch and have, a Jew” (to whom the story was addressed) “stop to aid him”? (The Dark Interval [Argus, 1975], p. 104 f.).

In the parable the one who performs the good act is the one least expected to do so. The hearers’ expectations are turned upside down, their structure of reality is broken. To make that parable heard in Italy today would require that it be addressed to the establishment, with the role of the Samaritan given to a terrorist -- then the hearer might recognize that such an outcast is capable of compassion. To have it heard among theological students would require that the role of the Good Samaritan be taken not by a radical woman of whom risky good deeds for the injured are expected, but by a white, middle-aged male, or by the minister of an affluent congregation or, better, by his church’s wealthiest and most conservative trustee -- all of whom are supposedly resistant to doing high-risk good deeds. What a surprise! What a twist! What a shattering of our perceptions of reality!

The Word of God comes to us in surprises so we say again: “Well, I’ll be hanged. I would never have guessed it.” The surprise is offered not to make us jittery or uncomfortable, but to keep us open and expectant and prepared. “Watch, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour” (Matt. 15:13). That watchfulness is reserved not for the final hour, which no person can miss, but for the moment of illumination which can easily be missed. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (I Cor. 2:9-10).

To be surprised to have our illusions of reality broken by the Word of God, is not to be destroyed, but to be saved. If we expect from the Bible the setting forth in clear terms of the absolute nature of reality, a final truth, then we shall be disappointed. The Word that comes is not a detailed description of a completed, final absolute. Rather it is a Living Word and it allows no such final word.

Expectations will be shattered to make room for the possibility of the experience of that mystery and for the invasion of that peace which passes all. . . understanding. The Word overflows all categories of the intellect because it is in absolute alliance with that God who in Christ shattered our one certainty, death, and has thus made possible all the eternal possibilities of him in whom is every beginning, every ending and no ending at all.

Finding the Good at Garden Grove

“How did I ever get talked into this?” I wondered as I ate my first early breakfast at the Robert H. Schuller Institute for Successful Church Leadership. On one side of me was an affable young minister of the Church of God. Across the table was a quietly troubled Assembly of God clergyman, and on my other side were a couple of weary middle-aged mainline types. The meal was accompanied by flourishes of gospel chords reverberating from a piano. Not only was it the first breakfast I had eaten for a long time with other ministers and gospel music; it was the first segregated public meal I had had since I was a boy in YMCA camp. In this institute the women and men were separated from each other for the three breakfasts. The assumption appeared to be that the men were the ministers and the women were ministers’ spouses. Therefore, the small group life arranged at the breakfast table would prosper better in the short time allowed if the ministers were isolated! Perhaps. The groups did work well, but I was glad that my woman ministerial colleague had not come.

It did not seem a very promising beginning, and I was worried. I had cajoled others from our Berkeley church 500 miles away to come with me. Our moderator was there -- a woman, recently interim director of the University YWCA in Berkeley. Our moderator-elect had come too; a San Francisco actuary, he was leaving his business for four days in a rush season. Also with us was a lay program associate who had recently chaired an important task force for a somewhat radically oriented ecumenical center. I wondered how they were doing as the song leader pulled us along in singing, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

Several times we had almost canceled our reservations. We read a New Republic article, “Jesus in Tomorrowland” (November 27, 1976), which was devastating in raising questions about Schuller’s operation. “His critics contend,” the article said, “that Schuller has done for Jesus what Colonel Sanders has done for the chicken.” I rather like what Colonel Sanders has done for chicken, so this did not alarm me; but the writer, T. D. Allman, also pointed out that “it is a matter of record that Schuller in the past avoided all comment on Vietnam and Watergate.” We also read a somewhat cryptic article in the Wall Street Journal. Then some of us saw Schuller’s “Hour of Power” on television, with the smiling minister affirming everyone’s potential for success while upbeat singers sang and visiting firemen gave testimony. We were sure that a Robert Schuller Institute was not for us.

We decided not to back down, however, because we couldn’t forget the energy we had received even secondhand when two other mainline ministers of our acquaintance told of their experience. Both had been worn down in their work -- one by a resistant, divided, charismatic-afflicted congregation, the other by long years of courageous fighting on all the issues -- Vietnam, gay liberation, Watergate. Both of them had returned with tremendous energy for their ministry, and neither appeared polluted by the “positive” environment. So we had come anyway.

I bear witness only to my own experience, but this I must declare: I have attended scores of pastor’s conferences, most of them in connection with our most prestigious theological schools; yet I cannot think of a single one that was as directly helpful to me as a parish minister as this one. How can that be explained? Part of the explanation lies in the well-designed “Self-Study Guide” participants are requested to complete well in advance. It is an excellent and revealing instrument. But at the conference itself the secret really may be Schuller himself. That was my biggest surprise.

Our delegation had begun to waver again as we neared the tower of Schuller’s Garden Grove Community Church, rising above Disneyland and the Anaheim Stadium and Knott’s Berry Farm. As a final pep talk I had warned the group that we shouldn’t expect much from Schuller himself. He would probably turn us off as he had on TV, but he undoubtedly had corralled some experts in evangelism and music and stewardship and parish management who would be helpful. Well, he had and they were helpful, although they offered little that could not be collected piecemeal elsewhere -- but Schuller was the surprise.

The institute director, Wilbert E. Eichenberger, an able, friendly and ever-present person, warned everyone early in the institute not to go home the first day, writing the whole thing off as an “ego trip” for Schuller -- although that would not upset Schuller, who teaches that every person needs ego-fulfillment. The warning was not needed. The institute is undoubtedly an ego trip for Schuller, and so is many a classroom lecture and magazine article and editorial column for you and me, but he came through time and again during the conference as a decent, warm, ordinary and enthusiastic human being. He also delivered direct, clear, common-sense material of inestimable help to any pastor or lay leader who can get through the Disneyland trappings and the Jesus lingo of the environment (not of Schuller), learn the principles underneath and translate them into his or her own situation.

Within the Protestant ecclesiastical scene in California there are not many contrasts more colorful than that between Berkeley and Orange County: the University of California and Disneyland, an adult class using Bread for the World material and one deep into the Bethel Bible Series, a Georgian church building hosting the Earl Lectures (Tillich, Niebuhr, Bennett, Marty, Lehman et al.) and a 14-story Tower of Hope hosting preachers and teachers of “possibility thinking.”

Those contrasts were stunning, but there is another not to be overlooked. That northern California church, still vital and holding its own, uses some of its empty rooms to shelter another nearby Protestant congregation which can’t continue to support its large and empty building, while the Orange County outfit is so swamped with people that neither additional services nor additional buildings can keep up with them. The hurts of the people in Garden Grove may not be as sophisticated as the hurts of the Berkeleyites, but Schuller claims that any church will grow if it understands the needs of the community in which it is planted and acts realistically “to heal human hearts and fill human needs” through the power of God’s love in Christ.

Many churches like ours have applauded a theology of nongrowth. Growth has been seen to be as vulgar and plastic as Disneyland and, furthermore, sure evidence that the gospel is not being preached with its radical claims; e.g., “Blessed are you when men revile you . . .” (Matt. 5:11). Such defenses seldom recall the text which says, “The common people heard him gladly” (Mark 12:37). Applause for the theology of nongrowth will not last long, however, because it is almost impossible for a drowning community to clap. If the no-growth churches will cast off the burden of pride that is pulling them down, Bob Schuller can be of great help to them.

Indeed, they might in return be able to help Schuller and the evangelicals who follow him, for he has no more grasped the whole gospel than they have. Evangelicals and nonevangelicals alike need to be admonished to “speak the truth to each other, for all of us are parts of one body.” What he does well, we do poorly; what we do well, he does inadequately -- or so it appears to me. But if we do not learn to do better what he does well, how well we do what we now do well will be a matter of irrelevance.

III

The principles Schuller urges must not be confused with the way they are applied in Orange County by a minister who left seminary equipped with expository preaching and heavy prayer meetings as models of church style and strategy. He has learned on his own that the gospel does not reach the hurting people in Orange County initially by those means. The liberals of my generation had already learned that from Harry Emerson Fosdick but then lost for a while the biblical base and ended up giving self-help lectures instead of sermons -- whether they were “social” or “personal” in emphasis.

The “Hour of Power” comes through as pretty thin gruel to Christians in our church and our tradition. But its style and substance are not designed for us. That service is designed for people who live in or near Garden Grove, Orange County, California, and elsewhere and who have no moral or religious commitment and who are outside the church. It is designed to get them within earshot of the gospel. Schuller says, as I understand it, that they can be reached only in terms of their culture and their experience.

Schuller’s avowed first goal is to reach the unchurched, not to provide a chapel for the already converted. The evidence is convincing that he is bringing the unchurched within hearing distance of the Garden Grove Community Church. In the long run the usefulness of his principles and the test of that church will be the quality of Christian life of those who respond and are “enfolded” into the full and regular life of the congregation.

The institute describes the extensive program of enfoldment for those who do respond and join the Garden Grove Community Church: lay training for ministry, small-group work, pastoral care, involvement in mission, education. Schuller is critical of evangelists who have “little interest in the nurture of . . . souls other than to ‘put a Bible in their hands.’” The pastor must not only convert lost souls; he must organize the church to assist all persons who respond to the gospel in building “their faith and life and applying their faith to society.” The “mainline” churches have much to share with Schuller at this point, and I for one hope he and his associates will listen. I hope such enfoldment will increasingly heighten awareness of the social nature of sin and provide moral energy and direction for realistic Christian citizenship in the world. But for the likes of me and most ministerial readers of The Christian Century, our need is to be humble enough to learn from a genius like Schuller about getting people within earshot in the first place. Most of us have been preaching the gospel to each other long enough.

Questions abound about Schuller’s operation. He feels that he has been unfairly criticized by some members of the theological establishment and their journals. He told me privately that he would grant an interview to anyone at any time if the editor would agree not to delete anything from his replies to the questions. There are other concerns: my delegation strongly felt that his organization needs to have its consciousness raised about sexism. One woman indirectly connected with the institute angrily charged that we must be part of some kind of unisex movement because we and a Methodist campus minister questioned the male-dominated scene. (Schuller wisely suggests that churches should not touch off the “hang-ups” of the unchurched. Well, our delegation had a hang-up on that subject which the institute touched off despite the fact that Schuller is reputedly fighting for the ordination of women in his own denomination.)

Schuller’s concept of local-church government, as I understand it, explains the absence of congregational participation in the decision-making process at the Garden Grove Community Church on the basis of the church’s size -- a position which I think is hard to defend. I suspect that Schuller’s drive and genius would make it difficult for him to live with a more democratic system. The Garden Grove Church is governed in accordance with the Constitution of the Reformed Church in America, and the president of the local church is the senior installed minister. Inasmuch as he does not establish the budget, autocracy is avoided, but the style looks pretty strong-handed to me. That may mean more efficient management, and Schuller is an efficient and effective manager. The church is governed in such a way as to get big decisions made quickly without getting hung up in trivia. I envy that. After all, congregationalism is not the only form of church government.

Yet the dangers in such centralized control are great, primarily for any “president” who forgets the corrupting nature of power. When one senses Schuller’s delightful ability to laugh at himself and to maintain a vigorous kind of personal objectivity, one is reassured. But what of the future? It is not, I think, a system of local church government which augurs well for the long run. I think he needs to reread Reinhold Niebuhr.

The implicit equation of success with numbers and money in Schuller’s operation hides the sound and Christian idea he expounds that feeling successful comes from having high self-esteem -- and that self-esteem comes from the awareness of God’s love for one in Christ. “All of us have ego needs,” he said, “because we have royal blood. We are sons and daughters of God . . . and in Christ the greatest fulfillment is losing our lives in someone else’s problem.” I find in Schuller a theological concern and understanding and creativity absent from Norman Vincent Peale, and I wish there were more understanding of the great distance between the two. I have never known Peale to grapple with atonement, grace and justification, and anyone who has completed, even in his student days, a 300-page topical index to Calvin’s four-volume Institutes of Christian Religion -- as Schuller did -- is scarcely ignorant of the issues in Reformed theology.

Yet I wonder if Schuller’s theological-psychological interpretation of success and failure does not risk a kind of “justification through works.” This suspicion grows when he jokingly asserts his intention, God willing, to live to be 100. It would be good to discuss such questions with Schuller; my experience suggests that he would offer a lively, theologically well-informed and creative response.

The most persistent liberal criticism of Schuller involves his attitude about preaching on social issues. That was ably discussed in an earlier Century article (“The Pros and Cons of Robert Schuller,” by Wilfred Bockelman, August 20-27, 1975). I believe that Schuller is appropriately uneasy in this area and has a long way to go. Although I agree that the pulpit is not the place for partisan political statements, there are specific moral issues that must not be avoided. Surely even the unchurched would respond positively to expression of conviction on moral principles, even if they disagreed about the obvious applications: e.g., idolatry and Watergate. Schuller says that such issues are handled in the Sunday evening Bible study sessions where there is opportunity for discussion and, conversation. I am largely in agreement with him on this point -- but surely there are public moral concerns which in their offense to Christ deserve a public word, especially when one addresses millions in Christ’s name.

The “Hour of Power,” pretty much as televised, is one of the morning services of Garden Grove Community Church. It is all deliberately planned to be upbeat. I questioned the capable and alert minister of music about the absence of any of the penitential themes in the service. “Surely,” I said, “some of the greatest musical literature we have arises from the passion themes.” He explained that such themes are not used in the big morning services because those services are designed to renew people and to give them hope. Schuller had indicated that the crowds came to have their dents pounded out and not to have new ones inflicted.

That philosophy is a sorry commentary on much Protestant worship. It reminds me of a man who said to me about his refusal to join in a prayer of confession in our church one Sunday, “Hell, I’m not that bad!” Schuller understands that man’s feeling. But does he understand the deeper pain and sorrow of the race which are not intensified by the solemn, sad words and music of the Divine Passion and of human confession, but released and liberated thereby? I think even a horn-honking drive-in congregation might discover that such words and music speak to and release sadness and hurt. The sorrow in Christianity does not batter and dent us more but is the prelude to profound restoration. I thought I saw a heaviness in the eyes of Schuller himself that made me wonder if he, too, like most ministers I know, had a longing for the Agnus Dei as well as the Jubilate Deo.

There is another, question. Schuller’s gift to the contemporary church is largely in his genius for winning a hearing from the unchurched. Regardless of our theology or our polities or our location, we can learn from him. At his Institute for Successful Church Leadership we met Christians from a Lutheran church in a midwestern city, from a Four Square Gospel church in a mountain town of 12,000, from an Assembly of God church in a great Canadian city. All of them reported that their churches had been turned around from being self-centered or fractured congregations to new life as strong, growing, outreaching churches. But do most mainline churches and their ministers and mentors really want such a turnaround?

On the first day the members of the institute were loaded into cars and taken to the Orange Drive-in Theater where the Garden Grove Community Church began. Schuller climbed up on the roof of the refreshment stand to address the assembled automobiles and their occupants, including our carful of embarrassed skeptics. He said, in effect, “You will never be the same after these four days are over. You will be changed.” I thought to myself, “Well, these others here with their pious bumper stickers and naïve enthusiasm for this religious huckster may be changed, but not I!”

At the close of the final and moving session our delegation left the church and walked toward the parking lot where we had been caucusing periodically in safe separation, as Berkeley would often like to be separated from the rest of California. No one said anything for a long time. Finally, one member said, “It sure is hard to have your presuppositions shot to hell.” We all agreed.

Not All Mothers Are Angels, Not All Angels Are Mothers

If you are a male minister, you will find that there are many wonderful and unexpected advantages in having a ministerial colleague who is a woman and a mother. One of the advantages is that you have an irrefutable preacher to throw into the arena that women’s liberation has made of Mother’s Day. In recent years at our church we have taken this way out of an increasingly difficult Sunday. But it’s really a male cop-out and a cowardly solution.

Last year we tried another approach: we put the burden on the Scripture. We read aloud the famous folk tale of Solomon’s wisdom in dealing with two harlots, each of whom claimed to be the mother of the child they were quarreling over. That story about mothers can’t be called unduly sentimental. If it seems like a strange text for Mother’s Day, I defend it on two counts.

First of all, it makes clear that not all mothers are angels. Webster’s fifth definition of "angel" is "a person regarded as beautiful, good and innocent." This story then exposes the fiction that "mother" equals "angel." Ever since word got around that Abraham Lincoln credited all he was or hoped to be to his "angel mother," mothers have been in trouble -- and stepmothers too; because if he actually said any such thing it was probably his stepmother he referred to.

If Solomon and women’s liberation can conspire to free women from the burden of the automatic angelhood that reputedly descends upon them as soon as they are wheeled triumphantly out of the delivery room, they will be liberated indeed. So will men. And little children. Neither before nor after attaining motherhood are women automatically angels by virtue of their sex or some marvel of spiritual obstetrics. They are persons and wish to be viewed and treated as such.

One of the most amazing evidences of the spiritual genius and human courage of Jesus is the way he transcended the male-dominated culture in which he lived and saw women as persons. He touched women others would not permit into their presence, and he talked to women across the racial, national -- and sexual boundaries which carefully divided his society and his time. He knew that women, mothers or not, weren’t necessarily (or even probably) angels. It is a great advance for all persons when no one is put into any category by reason of race or nationality or sex -- not even a category of goodness.

This tale of Solomon’s wisdom can be defended as a Mother’s Day text on a second count; namely, that it reminds us not only that not all mothers are angels, but also that not all angels are mothers. Indeed, not all angels are even female! So far as the Bible is concerned, I can’t think of a single angel who is a woman. Yet those of us who think about angels at all generally think of them as vaguely female in form and disposition. The biblical angels have masculine names -- Gabriel and Michael and Raphael. But when we picture them doing their important deeds -- indicating to Moses the special character of the burning bush, escorting the Israelites through the wilderness, warning Joseph to take his little family and flee into Egypt -- we think of them as more like well-disciplined airline stewardesses than like big, strong traffic policemen. Maybe because angels in stained glass and Christmas pageants have for so long been equipped with flowing robes and long hair. Well, if those are the credentials, women no longer have a corner on the angel market.

However, that may be far too superficial an explanation of why we tend to think of angels as female. The first meaning of "angel," both in the dictionary and in the Bible, is not "a being especially beautiful, good and innocent," but "a messenger of God." Perhaps we think of angels as female because we sense in those who are messengers of God some particularly feminine quality. This truth comes through that rough story of the two harlots quarreling over one child. Here a woman who is neither good nor innocent is an angel. The story reaches a climax and the king says, "Fetch me a sword." They bring in a sword and the king gives the order: "Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other." At this the woman who is the true mother, moved with love for her child, cries out to the king, "Oh, sir, let her have the baby; whatever you do, do not kill it."

So a person neither good nor innocent is moved by love for a child and is thus a messenger of God, an angel. Divine wisdom was disclosed through the test of love. Insofar as that kind of love is a feminine quality, self-sacrificing and spontaneous, we may be responding well to reality by tending to think of angels in the feminine mode. But this instinct of ours must reform the biblical idiom until we see that angels are neither male nor female but both. Qualities like love and self-sacrifice do not belong exclusively to mothers or to women, but to all kinds of persons. If most societies and cultures recognize them in the intense feeling a mother has for her child, perhaps it is because God in his wisdom has particularly exposed them in a model which no man or woman, girl or boy can altogether escape, since practically everyone has a mother.

So I defend this story of Solomon and the two women as a Mother’s Day text on the grounds that, first, it may help liberate all of us, especially mothers, from the illusion that "all mothers are angels"; and second, it reminds us that "not all angels are mothers," that even the so-called feminine qualities are not the exclusive property of women. To be an angel, a messenger of God, is a vocation toward which all persons who love God aspire. The biblical sexism that makes all angels male and the contemporary fiction that makes all angels female are alike a disservice to the God of love who in Jesus Christ transcends every such distinction.

III

This text has an even more profound justification on any Sunday when we think especially of the love we experienced from or were denied by our own mothers -- a love to which the human race bears almost universal witness. In this text it is the mother who is the angel, the messenger of God. The New Testament speaks of the witness by women which even the intensely and perversely narrow male culture of Israel could not conceal. So Alicia Faxon reminds us (Women and Jesus [Pilgrim, 1973]) that when history came to its trembling center, when the ultimate power of love over hatred, of life over death, was put to the test and the crucified Master broke the grip of evil and became the Risen Lord, it was women to whom he was able to make himself known first, women who had souls and hearts open to hear him, women who were free first to proclaim the Good News, to be the first angels of the gospel.

It is astounding that even the report of such an experience by women has come down to us. The pious Jewish man of Jesus’ time thanked God daily that he had not been born "a slave, a pagan, or a woman." Women were usually not to leave their households and were not to be spoken to on the street. One first century rabbi taught that it was better for the Scriptures to be burned than to be entrusted to a woman.

To have survived that kind of repression and censorship, the evidence must have been overwhelming -- the evidence that it was women who were first enabled to be filled with the sense of Christ’s presence after his resurrection and to be messengers of that Good News, angels for all the ages. As Ms. Faxon reminds us, all the four Gospels agree on the primary role of the women in the post-resurrection events.

But what sort of women were they? What quality did they possess that enabled them to fulfill this high calling? Gentleness? Meekness? Perhaps. But one thing they had in common -- and all the four Gospels agree on this too: in the darkest hours of the crucifixion when all the disciples fled, these women stayed to the end.

It is said that the disciples, the men, fled in fear, or to save their own skins; or because, as hardheaded male pragmatists, they knew a lost cause when they saw one. Perhaps. But the women stayed. And Jesus died. And then as soon as they could, as soon as they were allowed, at the very first moment, they were back, They came to anoint the body, to do what they could, hopeless as it might seem. They came to grieve the grief which is love’s way of loving still even after death,

Here were demonstrated qualities that characterize particular persons open to God’s self-disclosure, able to be his angels, his messengers -- "feminine" qualities like the capacity to endure pain and to be loyal to the right even when it seems a lost cause and to follow the instincts of the heart. But, alas, we have told boys that it is unmanly to show feminine qualities! And we have inherited the whirlwind, a world of war and Watergates.

Inclusive Language, Women’s Ordination, and Another Great Awakening

I first felt the keen edge of the feminist critique many years ago at the hands of two exceedingly able and determined women who often shared a pew and a hymnbook in services at the church where I was pastor. In that church the offering was received near the end of the service, well after the conclusion of the sermon. I began receiving in the collection plate every Sunday an offering from the two women, meant just for me. It was a copy of the order of worship for the morning with all the "hes" "hims," "Fathers" and "mankinds" crossed out and inclusive terms substituted. Around the margin of the "cleaned up" order were strong suggestions about needed revisions in the language of the sermon. So, like or not, my consciousness began to be raised about inclusive language.

This happened in a congregation that had long since ordained and called a fulltime woman minister, a congregation that more than once had elected a woman moderator and which had successfully importuned a woman to head up a major capital fund drive. The parish had taken most of that in stride. But inclusive language was a different matter.

Many congregations' intense resistance to inclusive language does not mean that they are simply stiff-necked. The roots of that resistance, acknowledged or not, lie very deep in religious experience. For words and other symbols are the lifeblood of the church. When we change words we invite a changed perception of the reality to which the words point. To demand that the words of faith change is to demand that one's faith change. And in changing it can either grow or shrivel, blossom or die.

One important way of guarding against alienation is to take care that new, inclusive language does not call undue attention to itself. This is certainly possible to accomplish, but it does require much preparation and creativity.

I have worked at such efforts myself. In revising some early sermons, I realized that they were much improved by translation into inclusive language. However, it is also clear that no one would be particularly aware of how they were improved; the revision does not scream out, "See how inclusive this language is!"

The argument is made that when inclusive language is conspicuous it bears witness to the sin of sexism. However, the purpose of language in public worship is not to disseminate propaganda -- not even Christian propaganda -- but to "unhide" and re-enact in the present moment the saving event of Jesus Christ. Therefore unless a congregation dares to exclude from that experience everyone who is put off by sexist words for God -- either masculine or feminine -- it must chart a careful course. It must devise inclusive language so graceful and so functional that it does not stand out.

A growing number of congregations are battling sexism in the church. They are encouraging women to prepare for and seek ordination, and they are trying to be open to considering women as well as men for positions of lay leadership. Nevertheless, they find that changing the language used in public worship is such a painful task that they wonder if it is really worth it. To what is it all leading? Will this change bring enrichment, or death?

This struggle brings to mind a comment made to the pope during his recent San Francisco visit. A nun who was addressing the pontiff on behalf of her sisters in the church lamented the necessary preoccupation of women religious with, "internal issues at the cost of mission." Churches tackling the issue of inclusive language may also wonder if it is really worth all the groaning and the pain. Is it, along with women's ordination, an "internal issue" confronted at the "cost of mission"?

Speaking of how "the people of Israel groaned under their bondage," Walter Brueggemann refers to that groaning as "the public processing of pain." Dean Thompson comments that when pain is publicly processed it becomes energy, and when pain is not publicly processed, it becomes resentment and despair." We know well that when the pain of Christian feminists is not publicly processed, it issues in resentment and despair. But is it true that publicly processing that pain produces new energy? Will congregations that seek to rout sexism by reaching for inclusive language be energized by that pain for a divine purpose? I believe that the answer is Yes. At least there are grounds for seeing in the implications of inclusive language -- along with the unique effectiveness of women pastors -- the seeds of renewal for mainline churches.

Many of the congregations that are willing to tackle the problem of inclusive language appear to be ones in which public worship has been intellectualized into sterility. The sacraments are often humanized or sentimentalized, and the sermon is regarded merely as a religious lecture, without sacramental potential. Many members admit that they attend services primarily to see their friends or for the study group, task force or coffee hour. The lives of such congregations often appear to be centered in the consequences of the gospel -- peace and justice -- not, in the heartwarming experience of God's saving love in Christ Jesus.

Yet such congregations often have a profound spiritual hunger. And in the midst of their struggle, over inclusive language they may come to recognize the reality, mystery and power of Christian words and symbols.

Once I showed a congregation the photograph of a woman many of them knew and loved, someone they had not seen in person for years. Then I spit on it and tore it in two. There was an involuntary corporate gasp. People were shocked; some were angry; some were personally affronted. "But why?" I asked, "if it is only a symbol, if it is really only a piece of paper?" They were then ready to consider the question crucial to all public worship: how much of the reality of that which is symbolized is somehow present in the symbol?

A congregation that has groaned over inclusive language has been traumatized by the power of symbols. As they understand that wounding, they may be freshly prepared to participate in words and symbols as more than just words and symbols. They may be open in a radical way for the invasion of that divine reality, the Word made flesh, which the words of the sermon and the symbols of wine and bread are meant to convey. They may be prepared to receive and not only to discuss the undiscourageable, saving love of God which is the good news of the gospel.

A profound Christian revival of local congregations might be too much to hope for as a consequence of coming to grips with inclusive language, if there were not another factor common to most of the churches that have taken inclusive language seriously: they are also the churches most likely to be open to the ministry of ordained women. My experience with women ministers has convinced me that they are uniquely positioned to invigorate the church.

First, women ministers, especially as leaders of public worship, have more credibility than men in guiding the church away from unfortunate excesses in inclusive language. I refer not so much to bruising contortions of expression, which any sensitive pastor would seek to avoid, but to those language substitutions and accommodations that depersonalize God and hence make God less accessible. In his lively commentary on Genesis, Gerhard von Rad argues winningly that all those wonderful human descriptions of God which we dismiss as primitive anthropormorphisms are deliberately risked. The tellers of the Genesis narrative would rather compromise the greatness of God than diminish by one iota God's accessibility.

In trying to make room for the full personhood of God, inclusive language does sometimes diminish God's accessibility. It asks us to address God as a function. But, as someone once reminded me, when a child falls down and is hurt, he or she cries out, "Mommie!" not, "Caregiver!" To abandon God the Father in our doxologies in favor of God the Creator feels more like loss than gain to me. The whole church needs help in avoiding the depersonalization of God as we seek to overcome the limitations imposed on our Christian experience by male-oriented language. Women pastors who are concerned more for their people than for any ideology are less suspect and therefore probably better able to help us around the grave theological and liturgical hazards in God-language changes.

Second, women pastors may be more effective in dealing with the feminization of the local church which has taken place increasingly, and which troubles many mainline congregations.

Certainly it is true that until recently the church has generally been a patriarchy. However, in my experience of 40 years in ministry in New England, the Midwest and on the West Coast, I have found churches to be more like matriarchies than patriarchies. Until recently, they were officially dominated by males, but great power lay also with female parishioners. They had power not only because they were the majority or because church work was seen as women's work, but also because men supported the myth that women are somehow morally superior. The local church was often actually run by women members, but indirectly, and hence without either accountability or credit.

Catharine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, argued against women's suffrage on the grounds that "women could influence public affairs very satisfactorily without recourse to the ballot box, by the simple expedient of influencing the opinions and outlook of those who did have the vote -- their husbands and sons" (Reay Tannahill, Sex in History, [Stein & Day], 1980, p. 389).

As Reay Tannahill points out, this "was the exercise of power without responsibility -- the same type of power women exercised in churches. In the local congregation where women did not ask for and were not allowed legitimate power, there was present this other "behind the scenes" power and its demeaning sexism. Thus the inevitable parish conflicts often took on an underhanded air and were more unpleasant than conflicts brought into the open.

A woman pastor can help the church recognize, in ways a man cannot, that both men and women have been responsible for the growth and nurturing of sexism. She can make clear that the situation has not always been one of good, abused women versus bad, dominant men. Then the "I'm OK, you're not OK" game can be exposed and ended, and women and men can work together to repair the damage they have done together.

Some observers think that the feminization of the church, evident in the declining percentage of men taking part in church life, will be aggravated if inclusive language is employed or, worse, if a woman is called as pastor. Such an eventuality, some say, amounts to admitting that all aspects of church work really are "women's work." However, Lyle Schaller reports in It's a Different World (Abingdon, 1987) that men are showing up in substantial numbers in churches that display eight or ten of 18 characteristics, one of which is that "the pastor is a mature female. "

Third, women pastors, and the experiences they bring to ministry, may reflect more clearly our justification by faith. They are likely to make clearer the gentle, nurturing aspect of God's eternal person, and to call on both men and women to reflect it adequately.

When one of my daughters became a mother herself she was unalterably committed to breastfeeding, which in turn meant that she was always available to her children. When her children cried they never found her absent. Indeed, she cared for them in a fashion I thought neurotic. "The day is going to come," I instructed her loftily, "when that child won't have you at hand and she will be an impossible brat. No one will be able to stand her and she will be miserable."

But Holli thought nothing was more important in those first years than being there for her children. If the child learned to trust her, she claimed, then she would not be afraid to move out into the next and subsequent passages of her life. I was not convinced. "Let them cry it out," I said. "Let them learn disappointment now while they are young, to prepare them for real life."

A few years later I received a post card. "Dear Dad," Holli wrote. "Today was the first day of school. I took Cassie down to the corner to meet the school bus. As that big yellow monster whisked her away, she waved happily to me until she was out of my sight. Then I went home and cried."

Is that not the human paradigm of the divine love which the pulpit proclaims and the communion table re-enacts? We are saved by faith, made whole, corporately and individually, by God's holding us to God's own breast by the love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. How could we have ignored for so long the need for female experience in the clergy if the ministry is to be fully perceptive and balanced?

Infant baptism discloses through symbols this determined, loving aspect of God's character. Nowhere is it clearer that God's love is not won by our good works than when the person declared to be loved by God is a totally self-centered and often noisy, smelly baby. The love celebrated in the sacrament of infant baptism is love flowing freely from the person of God without regard to human merit or achievement. How much that symbol may be enriched if the infant, held there for baptism in the arms of the church, is sometimes held in female arms. As we see and remember the nurturing feminine side of both men and women, we ourselves may rest more profoundly in the nurturing arms of God.

If inclusive language and the ordained ministry of women can help change our image and experience of God to include the God who loves us like a mother holding her baby to her breast, that may be the Great Awakening in our time. It is remarkable to contemplate but surely not beyond God's mysterious ways: mainline congregations, delivered from the twin perils of routine worship and works righteousness, moving in the vanguard of another powerful Protestant revival. In the process inclusive language will be inescapable. "0 for a thousand tongues."

Preaching on Ethical Issues

Whether reacting to a bumper sticker or listening to a radio talk show, deciding how to vote or where to invest time and money, recoiling at the prejudice a child has picked up at school or squirming under a company policy that seems unfair -- people cannot escape ethical issues.

What is right? What is wrong?

Sometimes the answer seems obvious. And it is. But often the choice that appeared self-evident proves upon closer inspection to be entangled in multiple perspectives and values. Still other times, the situation is ambiguous from the start. People want to do right, but what constitutes the right is not clear to them.

But even when we are not consciously making moral decisions, our very being is involved in a fabric of values and power relationships. Our daily work, our spending habits, our life styles -- all are interwoven with the moral character of society, its justice and injustice, its compassion and its violence. To exist as a human being is for better, for worse to be an ethical creature.

Where, then, are we to turn for moral guidance?

People can, of course, turn inward. There is power in personal prayer, and in the struggle of individual conscience to discern what is right and good.

However, the formation of conscience is never purely the work of the individual. It happens in communities -- families, churches, schools, work places -- that teach and embody values. And one of the marks of a healthy conscience is an awareness of one's own limitations, a desire to test one's beliefs in a larger arena, to draw from the best that a religious tradition has to offer, to feel that one is not isolated and alone in the face of great moral perplexities.

How will the church respond to this hunger for guidance? And more specifically, how will preachers respond?

Obstacles to Preaching on Ethical Issues

If questions about right and wrong are everyday struggles, why are we so reluctant to preach about them? Why are sermons about ethical issues so rare?

First, the preacher may assume that he or she is supposed to "take a position" on the issue and the preacher may feel ambivalent about which position to take. Or they may worry their position is contrary to that of many in the congregation. Better, then, just not to say anything.

Sermons on ethical issues may sometimes need to express a position. But this is not the only way to approach the challenge. For instance, thinking about God's ways with humankind in general can open us to insights and understandings about an ethical issue. How can people in the pews be helped to better appreciate the human experiences and consequences of moral dilemmas? Can the sermon illumine the issues in ways that do not simply repeat the media messages of television and newspaper? In other words, moral answers may not be the message so much as the perspective and resources which faith can provide.

Second, the preacher may assume that he or she is supposed to criticize parishioners for moral blindness or moral failure. Preaching on ethical issues is often associated with angrily pronouncing God's judgment. One must be morally courageous, "prophetic," an Amos delivering a stinging rebuke against the unfaithfulness of God's covenant community.

It is understandable why preachers back off from preaching on ethical issues if this is their image of what they should do. We know pastors who think that because they do not want to do this they are lacking in courage. Maybe they are. But maybe, more to the point, they have compassion for their parishioners, regard for their relationship with the congregation, and an honest recognition of their own moral failings. As someone has put it: just because the congregation is angry at you, does not mean you are being prophetic!

Again, sometimes sermons on ethical issues will need to challenge parishioners and point to discrepancies between the lives of church folk (pastors included) and the path on which we are led by Christ. Sometimes these sermons will need to risk angry reactions from some parishioners. But "prophetic" preaching is not defined by accusations and condemnations. One does not have to relish feasting on the failures and guilty consciences of parishioners to preach on ethical issues. Genuinely prophetic preaching will help Christian communities to discern the signs of these times, and open us in a fresh way to God's future.

The Temptation to Silence

In light of these complexities we may be tempted to remain silent about ethical issues, to say as one preacher did in an advanced doctoral seminar: "Preaching is not about ethics. It is about salvation through the gospel of Jesus Christ." He went on to talk of arrogant, moralistic sermons he had heard before he was ordained, preachers speaking as if their role granted them some moral perspicacity not granted to lesser mortals.

This preacher had a point. The Bible reveals that claiming to speak in God's name is no guarantee that the claim is true. Jeremiah, for example, threw himself with passion against the facile absolutisms of the temple establishment, and Jesus challenged the rigid moralism of the self-righteous. Scripture recounts the stories of prophets and preachers who turned out to be wrong, who in the name of God convinced people to take positions and actions that were in truth against the will of God.

The story of preachers misleading people does not stop with the Bible. There is a tragic legacy of invoking the name of God to reinforce moral positions that we now find repugnant: preaching that slavery is ordained by God, preaching against the jews, preaching to condemn the Copernican revolution, preaching against the small pox vaccine since the illness was the will of God, preaching that anesthesia should be denied women in labor because it is their divinely sanctioned curse to suffer.

The list could go on, but there is enough here to serve as a sobering reminder of the capacity of religious authorities to think themselves right when in fact they are promulgating what is cruel and unjust. And there is no reason for us to take a superior position regarding our ancestors in the faith, as if we ourselves did not suffer from limitations of perspective and from a keen ability to disguise our self-interest in moral respectability.

But if we allow the fear of our own limitations and self-delusion to silence the moral voice of the pulpit, that will not change the facts: there is plenty of evil in this world, and it is not being faithful to God to leave it unchallenged. Furthermore, there is a hunger in the heart for moral guidance, a hunger that is born of the Spirit and that is an essential part of our human character as creatures made in the image of God. Therefore, instead of concluding from historic abuses that the pulpit should be silent about moral issues, we find that the past encourages us to refine and enrich our preaching about ethics.

*How do you feel about preaching on ethical issues?

*If you have preached on ethical issues, what responses have you received? How have they affected your feelings and ideas about future sermons?

*If you have not preached on ethical issues, reflect on the reasons both in terms of your own feelings and experience and in terms of your sense of the feelings and experiences of your parishioners.

*What do you believe the purpose of preaching should be in the church generally? How does preaching on ethical issues fit or not fit into that purpose?

Contexts for Preaching on Ethical Issues

Preaching on ethical issues requires drawing on the resources of Christian ethics. How are we to think through the moral implications of our faith for perplexing questions? What moral qualities and purposes are integral to congregations as communities of faith? As a field of study, Christian ethics helps us reflect about these questions. At the same time, bear in mind that Christian ethics is not a set of disembodied principles. Incarnation is central. Moral requisites of faith are to be enfleshed in selves and communities. The Christian life is lived in the specificity of contexts: in this way in this person, in this congregation, in this society. We take contexts seriously. And so must our preaching.

The preacher

First, let's consider the context of the preacher. Liberation theology has helped us understand the importance of social location. In other words, what we see depends on where we stand. The preacher bears in her or his life story certain particularities of human existence: rural or urban experience, race, class, gender, nationality, age, etc. Each of these characteristics impacts the way we understand life, society, and indeed our understanding of the Gospel itself. Our view of the world, of Christian faith, is not value neutral.

Preachers bring themselves to the preaching act -- whether or not they are aware of it. The socialization process is exceedingly important in moral development. We approach ethical issues with already formulated perspectives and reactions, shaped by values and experiences that have constituted our history. The first step is to recognize our social location, the concrete influences that have helped shape our ethical perspective. Then we can make decisions about what to claim, what to seek to change, and what might be helpful to share with parishioners as we preach about ethical issues.

Social location is a fact about the preacher's existence. It may be a bridge to new and vital moral realities or it may be the basis for unacknowledged prejudices and rationalized self-interest. But more needs to be said. Although we will always be influenced by our social location, we are not fated to be imprisoned by it. Social location is not just fate but also choice. By imaginative role taking, we can discern a sense of what it means to live in a different location, we can begin to be present with people whose life experiences are different. For example, justice in the Christian sense means not only unbiased regard for the needs and right of others. It also means a bias toward the claims of the poor and the powerless. It means to be able to see the world through the eyes of the paupers rather than the princes. This kind of critical and transformative awareness of one's own social location and that of neighbors who are different can be a rich resource for preaching on ethical issues.

The congregation

Second, let us consider the context of the congregation. We tend to think of ethics as bringing values and principles to bear on moral choices. That is certainly a part of ethics. But ethics is also reflection on the moral ethos of persons and communities. By ethos we mean the habits, mores, customs and prized character traits of a people. Each congregation manifests an ethos in this sense. Each congregation does in fact embody a particular ethical perspective in its own patterned ways of being. To be able to diagnose this ethos is a very important task of the preacher. The congregation's ethos -- warts, beauty spots and all, is its way of bearing the Christian faith in its life and its relation to the world.

The preacher needs to be a keen moral detective of the congregational ethos. This is very contextual knowledge. If one is pastor to a church which ministers to a large number of people who are unemployed, there is little doubt about addressing issues of economic justice from the pulpit. But resistance to such a discussion may be considerable in upper middle class congregations. Or, as another example, the ethos of many African American congregations welcomes explicit support for particular candidates for political office whereas in most mainstream Anglo congregations this is regarded as highly inappropriate.

Congregations are not just collections of individuals but corporate bodies with their own distinctive characteristics. These characteristics should not be seen only as constraints on preachers. They are also opportunities. The congregation's communal ethos is the very stuff with which to work in dynamic and intricate combinations of obstacles and possibilities. Preaching on ethical issues needs to be aware of and address these contextual realities. One is not preaching to "everyone" but to "this people" in "this setting" as an ongoing part of the congregation's struggle to be faithful to the God who has claimed their lives in a special way.

We have heard frustrated pastors complain that their congregations are not "ready" to hear a sermon on an ethical issue. Sometimes this may be used as an excuse for the pastor's own reluctance to take on the challenge. But it can also be a matter of genuine disappointment. Yet, before one accepts this as an unchanging reality, try to analyze the ethos out of which these attitudes emerge. Diagnosis or analysis can help the preacher dig underneath the presenting problem to figure out what the resistances are. With analysis can come some clues about what might be done. Address not only the issues but also the context in which those issues are embedded.

One additional example. We frequently hear the critique of "mainstream" Protestant churches that their members are not concerned about people on the margins of society. This critique suggests that the problem is rooted in a lack of compassion. But perhaps the chief difficulty is something else. Perhaps the apparent indifference is because the social world of the congregation just does not interrelate in an integral way with the social realities of the world's poor. Imaginative preaching will help members begin to make those connections even as pastoral leadership will explore concrete ways for members to experience these connections.

Social context

Third, it is important that we attend to the larger social context. Here, also, moral detective work is essential. Take clues from the culture and probe underneath to determine what they tell us about "the state of ethics" in our society. Christians' responses to particular moral issues will be too ad hoc and superficial if churches do not seek to understand the soil from which these issues spring. Preachers need to develop an eye for reading the cultural ethos.

For example, if a preacher decides to preach on the upsurge of violence in American cities, an "ain't it awful" sermon is mere moralizing. By moralizing, we mean lamenting what is terrible without attempting to understand root causes or formulate responsible courses of action. Why is violence increasing? What is happening here? How does our faith help us understand and respond to this alarming trend in our society?

It is commonplace today to complain about the breakdown in morality in the United States. It does not help very much just to repeat the complaints. If morality is eroding, why is this happening now? What is going on here? Maybe it is not just perversity or permissiveness. Maybe there are convulsive shifts taking place in a post-industrial world of huge disparities in power and privilege. Maybe our very ways of working, playing, and relating contribute to a breakdown in moral community. Dig deep. There are a number of plausible explanations. They need to be probed and tested as churches seek to be faithful witnesses to God's love and justice in today's setting.

In our contemporary situation, there may be no more important issue to preach on than race and racial diversity. Affirmative action programs are being challenged; attitudes toward immigration have taken a restrictionist turn; and many white families seek to place their children in schools with few children of color. What is going on here? It is not helpful just to preach against racism with a broad brush. What, concretely and contextually, is happening in relations between whites and communities of color? What is God challenging us to do as agents of racial justice and reconciliation? A sermon on race requires probing reflection on our societal ethos and context. A sermon should help us discern both the character of our predicament and possibilities for change.

*Identify and describe some of the key elements that make up the contexts within which you would be preaching on ethical issues. Examine all three contexts listed above: that of the preacher, of the congregation and the larger social context.

*Reflect on how you might become a better "moral detective" able to discern and speak to the moral ethos of your congregation and your community. How might you become more conscious of your own social location and its effects?

New Understandings of Preaching

Homiletics (from the Greek homilia, "conversation") is the branch of theology that deals with the theory and practice of preaching. Throughout most of its history the major focus of homiletics has been the development and delivery of sermons, how preachers can persuasively present the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But in the last three decades homiletics has studied more and more the interactive nature of preaching -- how a sermon is not simply something delivered, but how it is received and processed by the congregation. Notice here that we do not use the words "spoken" and "heard," because studies in communication have shown how much depends not only on explicit verbal content, but on appearance, gesture, and facial expressiveness as well as vocal tone and inflection, and how all of these are interpreted through the ethos of a particular congregation.

The result of this more interactive model is a greater appreciation for preaching as a community-centered, rather than preacher-centered event. We find ourselves considering the impact of the sermon upon the members of the congregation in light of the personal situations of its members and its life as a community of faith. We no longer assume that the preacher's sermon will be the same for each parishioner. The preacher may deliver a single message, but its meanings and implications will vary widely among the members of the congregation.

These observations about the nature of communication between preacher and congregation have implications for preaching on ethical issues. They alert us to the fact that it is not adequate for preachers simply to clarify their own moral position. The have to consider how people in different life circumstances will receive and process the message. Although the sermon seems clear enough to the preacher, the way it comes across may be at odds with the preacher's intention. In short, sermons are not self-contained messages, but are a form of contextual, interactive communication.

Contextual, Interactive Communication: A Case Study

To clarify the process let us imagine a case in which a preacher is preparing a sermon about abortion, and let us describe a few people who will be present in the congregation, their names fictitious but their situations true to life.

Ruth: an unmarried pregnant teenager struggling to decide if she will have an abortion or carry the child to term.

Anna: a married woman who, with the full support of her husband, had an abortion because the financial and emotional burden of yet another child was beyond their resources. When she shared what she had done with some church women she thought she could trust, they called her a murderer, and their accusation touched off suicidal tendencies.

Louise: a woman in her late 40s who thought her childbearing years were over but got pregnant, and in light of extreme medical complications had an abortion, an act for which she later gave thanks to God.

Karen: a mother of five, absolutely opposed to abortion.

The list is in no way exhaustive. It does not cover the large number of people present in most congregations who have complex, mixed feelings about abortion, and who are discouraged that polarization over the issue often preempts any helpful discussion.

Let us now consider how the different personal situations of these congregation members will vary the nature of the sermon as a piece of contextual, interactive communication. For example, if the preacher is convinced that abortion is morally acceptable and proclaims that position without any hesitation, what is the impact for Ruth, the pregnant teenager struggling whether or not to have an abortion? The preacher's absolute sureness might push her to question her doubts and to act in a way that later causes anguish if her doubts return, especially following an abortion. Would such preaching actually encourage pro-choice or would it short circuit the choice process in an adolescent who is unduly pressured by the symbolic action of the pulpit's assurance?

Or what happens if the preacher is absolutely convinced that abortion is wrong and announces that those who practice it are murderers? What does that do to Anna, who has met the same accusation from her church friends, and who subsequently exhibits suicidal tendencies? If the pulpit, representing the church's moral authority, fosters the woman's self destruction, is that pro-life?

So far we have only considered two of the listeners, and only two possibilities for the sermon. But already we can see that the preacher has an ethical, pastoral responsibility to consider the impact of the sermon upon particular persons. The entanglements of interpersonal communication may shape the preacher's message in the listener's consciousness in ways that complicate, and may even contradict the preacher's moral vision and principles, no matter what position the preacher takes.

*Reflect on the case study outlined above. How might this preacher address the moral dilemma of abortion in ways mindful of the personal circumstances of these congregation members?

*Come up with a case study of your own. Take a difficult moral issue that impacts your congregation and your community and imagine how you might preach on that issue. Identify the different ways parishioners might receive your sermon given their personal situations. What might you say -- and how might you say it -- so that the sermon is true to your moral position but allows congregation members the space to do their own moral discernment around the issue?

Some Further Reflections

We have been emphasizing the importance of personal, congregational and social contexts to the task of preaching on ethical issues. Let us share briefly just a few more observations.

First, preaching a sermon on an ethical issue is not the same thing as writing an essay. We are not suggesting that you present to the congregation the complete text of your social analysis. Rather this is a form of preparation. This is the kind of "thinking thought" that needs to take place in preparing the sermon. Some of your insights will be shared but in an oral/aural form that is appropriate to preaching.

Second, we believe ethical reflection emerges from pastoral experience. By this we do not mean just the experience of the pastor. We mean the specific, perplexing, often agonizing moral struggles people experience in their lives. Ethical issues are also pastoral issues. People try to figure out what to do about a problem pregnancy, terminal illness, public education, welfare policies, availability of guns, youth alienation, multi-racial tensions. These are not just issues "out there" someplace but are often experienced in very personal ways.

Third, ecclesiology is an exciting way to think about the connections between preaching and ethics. How can congregations become settings for moral reflection, discussion and action? More often than we realize churches do serve in this way. Sometimes the conversation is rancorous, painful, awkward and divisive. But pastoral leadership, including preaching, can do a lot to cultivate an environment for serious and healthy moral deliberation. There are not many places now in American society where the ethics of particular issues are discussed. Preaching can take place in the context of an ongoing conversation within the congregation about moral matters that matter a great deal.

Finally, one of the ever-present questions about preaching on ethical issues is the role of the Bible. How does one draw on the Bible for illumination and guidance? We realize, of course, that the Bible rarely settles a moral question. The Bible is used in many different ways to support many different moral stances. There are numerous contemporary ethical issues that the Bible simply does not speak to directly. And ones that the Bible does address emerge out of a very different context from our own. Contemporary Christians are challenged to carry on a lively dialogue both with the Bible and our own contexts.

In preaching, one style is to give extended attention to the way the Bible deals with a particular moral issue. For example, if the preacher addresses the issue of homosexuality, he or she may deal with the specific texts that say something about homosexuality. But this is not the only way. Important moral teaching in the Bible may be found in other texts -- those that give us a picture of human relatedness that mirrors God's love. James Forbes, pastor of Riverside Church in New York City, recently preached a Biblically centered sermon on homosexuality which focused on Matthew's rendering of the Golden Rule. The message was not whether homosexuality is right or wrong, but examined the challenge to treat others as we ourselves wish to be treated.

The Bible may be most helpful as it provides a perspective or angle that enables us to see issues in a different light. Diverse Biblical texts, even unsettling ones, can fire our imaginations and open us to insights that we might otherwise miss. It is important to realize as well that the Bible communicates something of the moral disagreements and struggles of earlier faith communities, not simply unambiguous and unfailing conclusions. What is the role of women in the church? "In Christ there is no male nor female" or "women are to be silent in church?" The Bible is an invitation to join a community that seeks to embody a people's covenant faith in their own time and place. This is a dynamic process -- and one to which preaching can make a powerful contribution.

A Community of Moral Conversation

We must always keep in mind the contextual and interactive nature of preaching. It is an illusion to believe we can deliver a message that exists in some perfectly defined and absolute state. Instead of focusing exclusively on what we want to say, preachers need to consider the reality of the congregation members' worlds.

Such a strategy encourages the church to be a community of moral conversation. The burden of finally making hard decisions remains, but now it is done in a setting that recognizes the ambiguity of multiple perspectives and the human cost of any difficult moral action. For the absolutist who wants clear and unbending pronouncements, a community of moral conversation is probably not a satisfactory understanding of the church. It may sound to some people who are hungering for certitude as if the church is promoting a faith that lacks moral discipline, debating but never deciding for right against wrong.

Talk that goes in circles and never ends in action is always a danger. But in truth, the preaching that we have in mind and the moral conversation that it encourages demand rigorous intellectual and spiritual discipline: a readiness to question our basic assumptions and values, a willingness to consider how we may have dressed our own self-interest in moralism, and a commitment to supporting one another in embodying the values that emerge from our conversation. Preaching that creates a community of moral conversation is a rigorous discipline! It asks a lot from preachers and from congregations. It demands that preachers be honest and thorough in preparing to address ethical issues. It demands that parishioners not threaten to withdraw support or attendance when preachers make them faithfully uncomfortable about their own lives.

If the church were purely a voluntary association, a social or political club, the demand would be more than it could bear. But the church is drawn together by the Spirit of Christ, who binds us to one another and who seeks to lead us toward a life that is more compassionate and just. Therefore, we approach the discipline of being a community of moral conversation, not only with our natural human anxieties about conflict and change, but also with the hope we have in God's grace, our belief in the power of the Spirit to work through and among us.

Preaching Lawfully

The title for this message was inspired by 1 Timothy 1:8, which may be translated, "We know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully." Today I would like to extend that idea to preaching and add that the law is good and should be preached lawfully. Whether we understand "lawfully" to mean "according to the rules" (2 Tim 2:5) or "in line with the character of biblical law," we who teach must model sound preaching from the law, and we should tell those who will preach to do the same. When I speak of preaching from the law, I mean preaching that takes as its source the texts of Torah, but I also want to include all biblical texts that speak in the imperative voice, texts that teach what we are to do and what we are not to do. Preaching that engages these texts and their function as instruction makes lawful use of the law; we must encourage it. I say this because, in reaction to erroneous and harmful preaching on law, many seminarians and pastors avoid preaching law altogether.

At its root, this concern for harmful preaching is not too different from Paul's worry about teaching in the First Letter to Timothy. Those who want to be "teachers of the law" have forced the issue of the law's rightful use. As they teach, they show that they do not know what they are talking about. They do not understand (v. 7). Understand this, Paul says, the law is not for the innocent, it is for the lawless, disobedient, godless, and sinful (v. 9). This is a forceful statement, and the list of vices that follows is no less so. Whether it is inspired by the Ten Commandments or the lists of vices we know from classical literature, the words are strong, harsh, and stinging. They burn the ears and leave a bitter taste on the tongue. We recoil from them, and wonder where we are to stand in response. Would we identify ourselves with the innocent? No, we know that no one is innocent before God; we affirm this every time we ask God to forgive us as we forgive others. But who wants to be numbered with killers, fornicators and liars? How do we hear this text and respond to it?

Some solve the problem by taking the words to mean that the law is no longer binding on the Christian, but this misses the point. Paul's point is that the law is used lawfully whenever behaviors that are "contrary to the teaching that conforms to the gospel" are called what they are. The law is not about myths, genealogies and speculations, it is about the divine training or plan, the oikonomia that is known by faith (v. 4). It is about behaviors and the attitudes that motivate them. The law is good and is used lawfully when it is used to name behaviors that are out of hannony with the gospel, even if it is unpleasant to hear. The law is binding on Christians along with all others who face its claims.

Paul's words seem intended to polarize, to divide people into camps, the way Paul has just separated Timothy from the false teachers. If we had to chose sides between good guys and bad, we would choose Paul and Timothy over the lawless. Are we caught by surprise then, when in vv. 12-13 Paul numbers himself with the bad guys? The man God entrusted with the gospel, strengthened, judged faithful, and appointed for service was also a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. Paul describes himself as lawless; are we surprised?

Perhaps not. We've heard Paul's story before, and we know the sad irony that he persecuted the church of Jesus with what he thought was holy zeal. But Paul is saying more. Notice how the rush of negative and positive terms flow together in vv. 12-17; Paul's ignorance and unbelief are overcome with overflowing grace, faith and love in Christ Jesus. Tenses move about from past to present so that Paul could say, I was a blasphemer, persecutor and man of violence and I still am the foremost of sinners. Moreover, this foremost of sinners lives on as the foremost example of Christ's mercy (vv. 15-16).

Here is law used lawfully. It named Paul as lawless, but it did more. It brought him to mercy, it delivered him to grace not just at some time in the past, but in one ongoing moment of judgment and grace. Yes, there was an event in time on the Damascus Road, but there is something more here, a way of life, a way of trusting and acting. It is well described by Richard Lischer:

Christians now experience the law through their relationship with the gospel. The two tones are sounded together.... Thus the death of Jesus reveals God's wrath and love; the call to discipleship both stings and encourages the Christian; the parable of the Pharisee and the publican sends a delicately mixed message, depending on the character with whom we identify.¹

Encounter with the law can be a part of the Christian's past, but it continues into the present and future experience of grace. Bruce Cockburn puts it in verse:

Fascist architecture of my own design

Too long keeping my love confined

You tore me out of myself alive

Those fingers drawing out blood like sweat

While the magnificent facades crumble and burn

The billion facets of brilliant love

The billion facets of freedom turning in the light

Bloody nose and burning eyes

Raised in laughter to the skies.²

Paul's use of himself as an example tells us three things about preaching the law lawfully. We have already seen that the law names behaviors for what they are and sounds the harmonious tone of grace. Paul's self example also says that law is for me-first. The journalist and historian Paul Johnson tells of a time he was attacked in the press, the attack so severe and unfair that he planned to write a scathing reply.

But as it was Sunday morning, I went first to church. The lesson was from

Ecclesiasticus: "Resentment and anger," it read, "these are foul things. He who exacts vengeance will experience the vengeance of the Lord." The service continued with that famous passage from St. Matthew's Gospel in which St. Peter asks Christ how often he should forgive a man who wrongs him. Should it be as many as seven times? Christ answers: "Not seven I tell you, but seventy times seven." My critic had wronged me not seventy times seven, or even seven, but once. I did not write the article.³

Law is preached lawfully when it is for the preacher before it is for anyone else. In corporate worship and private reflection, preachers relive the experience of the apostle as they submit themselves to the law and believe the good news. As sins are named and sinners are received, law and grace are lived before they are preached, and they are preached with compassion and conviction.

To preach law lawfully, one must submit to law. Otherwise, the result is at best hollow and at worst ruinous. This is why Paul calls Timothy to faith and good conscience twice (vv. 5, 19) and follows each exhortation with negative examples. Those who have rejected faith and conscience end up with nothing but bad teaching and shipwrecked faith (vv. 6, 20). A look at the structure of Paul's discourse on law shows that he begins and ends by urging Timothy to decide. By associating the false teachers with Paul's lawless past and inviting Timothy to emulate Paul's grace-filled present, Paul has set up the choice between faith and false teaching, between conscience and meaningless talk.

Now, at last, we who hear this text know where we are to stand; Paul's rhetoric on the good law and its good use forces us to choose sides. We who would identify with Timothy must choose Paul's way of law and reject the way of meaningless talk and blasphemy. Paul would have us identify with his life in grace, not with his earlier life of blasphemy, as the blasphemers Hymanaeus and Alexander have done (vv. 13, 20).

We know where to stand. Like it or not, we are not the innocent, perhaps not guilty of the crimes Paul lists, but certainly capable of "whatever else is contrary to sound teaching," in word or deed. Paul knew it from his own life, and he saw it in the lives and teaching of those he hoped would listen. To Timothy (and we who would identify with him), Paul says, would you become like I was and they are? If you would, just reject conscience and faith. Use the law for something other than self examination. But if you would become as I am now, join me in saying, the law is for me. Let it search you. Let it bring you to grace.

Paul not only invites Timothy to join him in submission to the law, he calls him to teach it lawfully, so we must return to the need to preach biblical law rightly. The statement may seem obvious at a conference on law and liberty; why state what we already know? Here's why. Most of us here today are involved with the theological education of pastors and ministers of the church. We have done a good job of warning them against the dangers of moralism and of preaching law without grace. But sometimes, in sermons and in conversation, I find people guilty of the other extreme-preaching grace without law.

It is true that preaching from the laws of Moses, the commands of Christ, or the imperatives of Paul can depart from the context of grace and fall prey to the dangers of authoritarianism and legalism. Principles and guidelines can be crowded out by oppressive lists of do's and don'ts. But does this mean that we refrain from telling people how to live?

No, the opposite of preaching law badly is not avoiding law or moral instruction, it is preaching law lawfully. Scripture typically gives directions for everyday living in public and in private, at work and at worship. Appropriation of these ancient texts requires a responsible hermeneutic as we hear the message for that day and adapt it for our own. This call to interpretation gives us reason to remain faithful to scripture's imperative voice, not to avoid it.

With this in mind, I will risk telling you what to do to preach lawfully. First, our preaching should become more simple. By simple, I do not mean that our ideas should be simplistic, but that our words should become more clear and direct. Robert Wuthnow has observed that "Liberals are fond of charging fundamentalists with oversimplification and pointing out the need of complexity." He goes on to show how complex thought gets translated into complex and incomprehensible sermons. He quoted one sentence of seventy-one words! Another sermon by another preacher shows the same movement from simple to complex.

The sermon opens with a four-word assertion: "Everybody loves a parade." Its main point, which comes only two sentences from the end, is expressed this way: "To those to whom truth has been revealed, who continue in the tradition of the Holy One's followers, the call is not only to offer words of praise, confessing that Jesus is Christ the Lord, but to offer our lives as the instruments of this Lord of peace and justice." You get the point. Or did you? The sentence has five major clauses involving forty-nine words.⁴

Here is a preacher telling the congregation what to do, to work for peace and justice, but the message is lost in the sea of words.

Second, our preaching should become more specific. It should name, it should call behaviors and attitudes what they are, and it should point to grace. In April of 1995, a group of students at Steinmetz High School in Chicago were suspected of cheating in the statewide Academic Decathalon by receiving the answers beforehand from their coach. Both coach and students denied that any cheating had taken place until a week later, when the students confessed and the teacher was fired.

A pastor at one of the city churches took the opportunity to talk about telling the truth. Expressing his sadness over the Steinmetz situation, he told the church how truthfulness builds up relationships while lying tears them down. He held up truth telling as a way we can love others, and warned that it is easy to let lies creep into our relationships. He challenged his listeners to live lives of truthfulness in the power of the Spirit.

When incidents of racial hate took place in the neighborhood, this pastor's church hosted a joint service for racial reconciliation. He did not preach, but the pastor who did denounced racism and told those present what was wrong about those acts of hate. He made the surprising claim that God used to be a racist (because God favored Israel) but changed his mind. However we may judge his premise, his vision of racial reconciliation in the kingdom of God helped those present examine their attitudes and consider what they might do in response. In both cases, the preachers spoke simply and specifically.

Finally, we should preach with love. Both sermons assumed that if God had brought those people to listen, then God would move them to respond. There was no brow-beating or parental tone. The preaching was in accord with 1 Timothy 1:5: "But the aim of such instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith." These preachers understood that they were preaching to sinners, but sinners in whom God was at work. Because law and grace are inseparable, they preached law with a voice of love.

Moreover, preaching lawfully is itself an act of love. It is loving to talk directly and specifically about behavior. It is loving to teach right from wrong as we preach. We need not shy away from it because it has been done poorly. The flood of talk shows and self-help books tells us that people are looking for help in living their lives. There are plenty of voices to tell people what they should and should not do. A recent issue of Vital Speeches of the Day is revealing. The Chair of the Federal Communications Commission called for legislation to mandate increased children's educational programming. An executive in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints entitled his address, "The Integrity of Obeying the Law: I Have an Individual Responsibility"; the Vice President for National Issues of the National Audubon Society urged citizens to demand that the government stop giving away our public lands.⁵ You get the picture. Our public discourse, our daily diet of media and advertising, and our everyday interpersonal interactions are loaded with persuasive messages. A thousand times a day we are told what to do and what not to do. In this aspect, preaching is no different from all other forms of communication. We are in the business of telling people what to do.

The law is good if we use it lawfully. We are called to preach the law with love, to risk telling people how to live as an act of love, even as our Lord looked with love at the man who asked, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"

NOTES

1. Richard Lischer, A Theology of Preaching: The Dynamics of the Gospel (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1981), 56-57.

2. Bruce Cockburn, "Fascist Architecture," from the album, Humans. Millennium Records, BXLI-7752,1980.

Paul Johnson, "Why I Must Believe in God," Readers Digest 126 (June 1985), 124-125

Robert Wuthnow, Christianity in the Twenty-first Century: Reflections on the Challenges Ahead (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 128-129.

Vital Speeches of the Day LXI, No. 22, (September 1, 1995).

Reading Scripture Aloud

DISCIPLESHIP RESOURCE

MATERIALS FOR GROWTH IN CHRISTIAN FAITH AND LIFE

P.O. Box 189 Nashville, TN 37202 Phone (615) 340-7284

[Please note: this document was scanned by computer for the Fourth Fosdick Convocation on Preaching and Worship, The Riverside Church, New York City, 1997. All apologies for any misspelled words, deleted words or formatting errors that may have occurred. Riverside Staff]

PREFACE

How do we plan for worship? How can our ushers and greeters do their jobs more effectively? How can I lead congregational singing? How can I more persuasively read aloud scripture? As a choir member, what should I know? How do we plan for our marriage?

These questions and many others confront pastors, musicians, and other worship leaders each week. And leaders of worship provide answers to these questions.

"Your ministry of . . . " series is one approach to helping pastors, musicians, and others develop and enhance their liturgical skills. Each booklet is written for lay persons and clergy in congregations. Each will focus on one particular skill needed for effective worship leadership. Each is written by a person with distinguished worship skills. And each will provide practical advice that will improve the worship in your local church.

Richard F. Ward's Reading Scripture Aloud is directed at lay persons and pastors who need to encourage full participation in the worship ministries of your congregation. You will learn the proper techniques of oral interpretation for a biblical passage. You will be amazed at the satisfaction which comes from sharing the words of God in your services of worship.

This series is for all those leaders of worship who wish to expand their skills as they offer themselves to God and others in worship. We now offer it to you with the hope that you will use it to offer Jesus Christ to all persons through your ministry of worship.

Andy Langford, Assistant General Secretary Section on Worship, General Board of Discipleship

Why Me?

The phone rings. You are busy but you decide to pick it up. You recognize the voice. It's Mr. Jackson, chairperson of the worship committee at your church. Immediately you are on your guard. You know that he is calling to ask you to do something, and you feel you do not have time to give. What might it be?

"We're getting ready for Advent," he says, "and we are putting together some special worship services. We'd like it if you'd be willing to participate."

"Well, I'd like to do my part, but my time is limited," you say cautiously. "What did you have in mind?"

"You have a good voice and you're very good with people. We'd like to know if you're willing to read the lessons in worship."

You think to yourself, Why me? Isn't the pastor supposed to do that? 1*11, there has been that interest in more lay involvement. I myself have supported that. Besides, reading scripture would be easier than some other things.

"I guess so; yes, I could to that," you hear yourself say.

"Great, Lu! We will look forward to it. We know you will do a good job. Thanks."

You hang up the phone, vaguely disturbed about your commitment.

This book is for you. Reading scripture does not have to be a chore but can be a satisfying ministry that draws upon your gifts, while helping you to grow in your knowledge of the Bible. Reading Scripture Aloud will acquaint you with a process of preparation and rehearsal. We hope it will enrich your experience of performing scripture.

Why Work at It?

One day a church member stopped her pastor after worship. The look on her face suggested that she was very excited about something. "I have a wonderful idea I want to share with you! " she exclaimed. "I know how we can cut out 10 minutes in worship every Sunday! " The pastor was naturally curious and anxious to hear her idea, and was quick to tell her so. "We could just do away with reading the scripture! " she said.

Sadly, this is the way most people feel about the reading of scripture in worship. It is one of the least interesting aspects of the service. Parishioners see it as a "warm-up act" for the sermon and do not take it very seriously. Perhaps there is a good reason for this attitude. Mark Twain was quick to comment on the way scripture was read in the churches of his day:

The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example... the average clergyman could not fire into his congregation with a shotgun and hit a worse reader than himself, unless that weapon scattered shamefully. I am not meaning to be flippant and irreverent, I am only meaning to be truthful. The average clergyman, in all countries and of all denominations, is a very bad reader.'

How different was the attitude among the early Christians toward reading! Scripture reading was central to the worship experience.

Pliny, a keen observer of life in the first century AD noted the importance of recitation in the early Christian community. In a letter to the Roman Emperor Trajan he wrote:

But they declared that all their fault or error amounted to was the custom of meeting on certain days before daybreak and singing a chant to Christ as to a god, taking turns, and binding themselves by solemn oath not to commit any crimes.2

The word for "chant" is dicere carmen, which more appropriately describes the act of reciting a set form of words than it does singing. "Taking turns" refers to antiphonal recitations Justin Martyr, a pagan converted to Christianity in the second century, composed the First Apology and sent it to his Emperor, Antonius Pius. His treatise includes a description of the early church's liturgy:

And so on the day called Sunday, there is an assembly in one place of all who live in the cities or in the country; the memorial of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time allows. After the reader has finished, the presiding officer verbally instructs and exhorts us to imitate these shining examples.

This practice of reading in Christian worship had its roots in Judaism. The first record of the use of oral performance of texts is in 2 Kings 22:3. In the eighteenth year of the reign of King Josiah (which is dated 621 BC), the Book of Deuteronomy was discovered in the Temple by Hilkiah, the high priest, and was given to Shaphan, Josiah's secretary. Josiah heard it read aloud, then ordered it to be read aloud to the people:

Then the king directed that all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem should be gathered to him. The king went up to the house of the Lord, and with him went all the people of Judah, all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests, the prophets, and all the people, both small and great; he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord. The king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the Lord, keeping his commandments, his decrees, and his statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. All the people joined in the covenant (2 Kings 23:1-3).

In 605 BC Jeremiah dictated and Baruch wrote a scroll which recorded, as the Lord God had instructed Jeremiah, "all the words that I have spoken to you against Israel and Judah and all the nations, from the day I spoke to you, from the days of Josiah until .today" (Jeremiah 36:2). Baruch's reading of the scroll provoked the wrath of king Jehoiakim, who heard it read:

Jehudi read it to the king and all the officials who stood beside the king. Now the king was sitting in his winter apartment (it was the ninth month), and there was a fire burning in the brazier before him. As Jehudi read three or four columns, the king would cut them off with a penknife and throw them into the fire in the brazier, until the entire scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the brazier (Jeremiah 36:21-23).

It is clear from these writings that, in contrast to current attitudes, the oral reading of scripture was vital to building up the community of faith in ancient Israel. For example, one of the first official acts upon commemorating the rebuilding of Jerusalem, following the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile, was a public reading:

When the seventh month came-the people of Israel being settled in their towns-all the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses which the Lord had given to Israel. Accordingly, the priest Ezra brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. This was on the first day of the seventh month. He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday (Nehemiah 7:73b-8:1-3).

These vignettes from the history of the community of faith in Israel help us understand the importance of oral reading of texts in the emerging Christian community. Services of worship were organized for the public reading and oral interpretation of scriptures.

In the services of worship in Judaism, a-strong connection had always been made between the act of reading the sacred word aloud and the praise of God in the worshiping community.5 Jesus ' for example, chose this important act of oral reading to inaugurate his public ministry:

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." All spoke well of him, and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth (Luke 4:16-22a).

Jesus' reading reflects the established convention of oral interpretation in worship. Public reading was a privilege shared by all men. By the middle of the first century, any male might be called upon to read, whether he be a minor, a beggar, or even a blind man! 6 Members of the community performed the scriptures by chanting them together.

The Apostle Paul certainly expected that his letters should be read aloud in worship, and he wrote them with that understanding. At the end of 1 Thessalonians, Paul instructs "that this letter be read to all of them" (5:27), and in Colossians, Paul says, "when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea" (4:16-17). Oral reading was so important at this time that silent reading was often forbidden! One Jewish rabbi admonished another as follows: "O keen scholar, open your mouth and read (the written tradition), open your mouth and repeat (the oral tradition) so that (your knowledge) may be maintained in you and that which you have learned may live." 7

In I Timothy 4:13, Paul exhorts Timothy to "give attention to the public reading of scripture" until he arrives. One scholar believes that the reading of 1 Thessalonians was an "event which contributed to the formation of the Christian church at Thessalonica.118 First Thessalonians is an example in early church history where an act of public reading "allowed the believers at Thessalonica to come into existence as the church of God."9 Public reading of the apostolic letter was aimed at "building up" the "Body of Christ"! (1 Corinthians 14).

If the readers of texts in both the Jewish and Christian communities took their responsibilities seriously and understood that they were making a significant contribution to worship, we too can recapture the enthusiasm for public reading which the early Christians enjoyed!

Each of us has spent much time learning and practicing how to read in silence. To read the words on this page you have mastered a set of rules designed to teach the art of reading in silence. Now you are interested in learning specific guidelines on how to enhance the meaning and experience of a text for your faith community.

Your experience as a listener in worship is your best guide to what you should work toward as an effective oral reader. You have already been in situations where you experienced readings that enriched worship for you and many more of those that distracted from worship. The best readers were those who prepared!

How Do I Prepare?

I attended a service of Christmas carols and readings in our church once on Christmas Eve. You probably have such a service in your church. Christmas is a time of expectation, wonder, joy, and surprise. I cannot think of Christmas without thinking of music. Musicians through the ages have been able to catch the spirit of the season through their art so that at any music program given at Christmas, the story of our Lord's birth is richly portrayed through a variety of musical texts. Those of you who sing in choirs know how important preparation for such an event is. Soloists and choruses practice for hours so that when they sing the story of Jesus' birth, it is done with dignity and joy! That was the case with this particular service. The singers performed with skill in a humble spirit which served the story. Not so with the readers! It was apparent that those who read had not prepared their text, reading as if they thought their contribution was not as important as the music. As a listener, I had to endure inaudible voices, mispronounced words, solemn faces, and distracting mannerisms in the reading of the story. Needless to say, the meaning of the story was lost on these readers and on their audience! How absurd it would be for someone to be asked to sing a solo for worship and then not practice! Yet that is often how it is with reading scripture. Readers must prepare!

The first sign of a prepared reading is one that is loud and clear., All of the meaning of a text is lost unless the congregation hears and understands you. Even though worship depends heavily on singing, liturgy, and sermon, most churches are difficult places for readers. Thick carpets, rugs, and seat cushions absorb sound. Some churches have acoustical tile in the ceilings, making it very hard for the reader's voice to carry in the space. Other churches are so large that the sound of the reader's voice is swallowed. In spite of these obstacles, the reader who works for audible, clear speech is remembered for her or his contribution to worship.

A second sign of a prepared reading is the. reader's familiarity with the text. There is a basic difference between reading' an "recitation." In a recitation, the text is internalized through memorization; in an oral reading, a reader occasionally refers to the text itself. Some texts, such as narratives, lend themselves to memorization. Others, such as Paul's epistles, were intended to be read orally. Even though the reader is not working for complete memorization, one must be so familiar with the text that one does not stumble over words or phrases, lose a place, or otherwise distract from the listener's experience of the text. A well-prepared reading is one that is free of breaks in the listener's concentration on the text as it is read.

Finally, and most important, the goal for the reader is to "know" the text. Any reading is an interpretation, your interpretation. If you have not adequately prepared yourself, you communicate the message that "this text was not worthy of my attention, so it is not worthy of yours." Or "I did not have the time or interest in preparing this reading; you need not prepare yourself now to hear it." Our knowledge of a text goes far beyond whether or not it is delivered properly through clear speech. Our task as readers is to remember and serve the intentions of those communities of faith who preserved these documents, to nourish the conviction that they are authoritative in our lives today, and most important, to communicate their worth as resources for our lives. We will not reach this goal until we enter into a dialogue with the text and allow that text to penetrate and inform our experience.

A student was pastoring a church while attending seminary. For his final presentation in class, he had chosen to work on a reading of a section from 2 Corinthians 11, where Paul speaks of his "weakness" as an apostle of Christ. This student had a fine, well-trained voice, and he had researched the circumstances in Paul's life which caused him to write this text. Paul was facing a severe test in his ministry. There were those in Corinth who challenged his credentials as an apostle, mainly because there was no evidence in his life and ministry of power to perform miracles. Consequently, the Corinthian Christians were now turning against him and were starting to ridicule his apostolic ministry. In the face of this terrible situation, Paul found the strength to claim his "weakness" as a sign of his identification with Christ.

On the day this student was scheduled to perform, he received a call from the church and heard some tragic news. One of the parishioners had murdered all of the members of his family, then had turned the gun on himself and had taken his own life. I asked the student pastor if he would like to postpone his reading. He declined my offer, stating that he "needed to read it today." Then, just before he left to offer comfort in that terrible situation, he stood and read these words of another beleaguered apostle:

But whatever anyone dares to boast of-I am speaking as a fool-I also dare to boast of that. Are they Hebrews? So am 1. Are they Israelites? So am 1. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am 1. Are they ministers of Christ? I am talking like a madman-I am a better one: with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Jews the for@? lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked. And, besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I am not indignant? If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus (blessed be he forever!) knows that I do not lie (2 Corinthians 11:21a-31).

That student "knew" his text, and his audience "knew" his experience. Paul's words became his words because of his experience in ministry. His reading taught the lesson more fully than a teacher ever could. When a reader identifies with what she or he reads, the audience, as well as the reader, is transformed.

The first step in "getting to know" a text is to establish a dialogue with it. Have a piece of paper handy when you start to prepare a text for oral reading, or better still, keep a journal or notebook for developing your impressions of the texts you select. Another idea is to keep an audio cassette with you. Some persons like to record whatever ideas, questions, or impressions come to mind when they encounter a particular passage. In any case, do not plan to keep inside you all of your thoughts about the scripture selection. Find some way of writing or recording the ways the text affects you as you begin to read and study it, even if at first you do not receive much from it!

Read the text aloud. At this stage, you are not primarily concerned with "analysis" or "interpretation." You are simply gathering impressions, sensations, questions, or noting possible problems. At the first reading you should write out words that you will have trouble pronouncing or that you do not understand. (If you do not know how to pronounce a word, or if you do not know what it means or refers to, how can you expect your audience to know?)

One person decided to prepare a reading of the first chapter of Matthew. This chapter contains the entire genealogy of Jesus and can make for some very dull reading. In fact, most readers and some pastors may even avoid it because they think it is so difficult to get through! This person knew that the chapter was full of meaning and featured the rich, evocative sound of names, names which mean very little to a contemporary audience but names of people who were a vital part of Christ's story. In preparation, the reader researched and practiced the pronunciations of the names in the genealogy. Then the person consulted a Bible dictionary and began to find out who these people were and what they meant to the audiences that heard the passage recited. One Sunday during Advent, this reader stood and read the genealogy. Many listeners said it was one of the richest events of the season! He had prepared himself so well b@ practicing the sound of the names and by getting to know their stories, that he was able to create a sense of anticipation in the audience's experience.

How Do I "Get to Know" My Text?

During and immediately after your first reading of a text you should write out or record your questions. These questions will be the pathways for your personal study. Take the story of Zacchaeus, for example, in Luke 19:1-10.

He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today." So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner." Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man came to seek out and to save the lost."

This may be a very familiar story to you and to your hearers. One of your tasks will be to make the familiar unfamiliar during your preparation! You may feel that you know the story so well that you overlook some of the contrasts that appear in the story! For instance, consider the fact that Zacchaeus was chief among the tax collectors. Even though tax collectors were hated by those who heard this story first, Zacchaeus' position suggests high standing in the Roman order. Yet the writer depicts him as so "small of stature" that he has to climb up a tree to see Jesus pass by! Writing or recording that kind of impression during your first reading helps to sharpen your eye for interpretation. Look at the story again. Are there other questions that come to mind? Why is it such a scandal for Jesus to be a guest in Zacchaeus' home? Who is Jesus addressing at the end-Zacchaeus or someone else? Why is Jesus so specific about calling Zacchaeus "a son of Abraham"? How is that designation meaningful to today's audience?

These questions show that you have entered into dialogue with the text. As you begin to work more fully with it, you will begin to find answers to some of your questions, while other questions will surface. This lively process is the sign of a vital relationship which you are having with a story, a letter, a psalm, or whatever form of biblical literature before you. Now that this process has begun, you can begin to go outside the text to find some of your answers and to uncover some new questions.

Many people will have different ideas about what sources you should use in preparing your reading. I suggest that you have at least one good single-volume commentary on the Bible available for your use. The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary on the Bible, edited by Charles M. Laymon and published by Abingdon Press, is a fine resource for the lay reader. At this writing, an excellent study guide is being prepared by Harper and Row. The Harper Bible Commentary has just been released as a companion piece to the Harper Bible Dictionary and the Harper Bible Atlas. Whatever sources you choose, your intention for your preparation at this stage is to penetrate the "world" or context of the scripture lesson.

One common mistake we make in oral reading is overemphasizing what the text means to us personally. In our personal involvement with scripture, it is easy to forget that these texts were written by authors who lived in a time, a place, a historical and cultural setting very different from ours. Their writings reflect the values, the conflicts, the questions, problems, and witness operative in their community. While we recognize the universal application of these writings to our situation, much of their meaning is lost on the reader and hearer when we overlook the importance of context. A study of the context of a passage helps uncover vital clues to the set of meanings in a lesson. The most obscure and difficult texts start to come to life in our experience.

For example, I was once working on a very perplexing passage from the Epistle to the Romans. Some have called this epistle "the Gospel according to Paul" because it is the most complete statement of Paul's system of beliefs in the New Testament. If you have ever tried to work with Romans, you know how taxing it can be to read aloud or even to hear! I had been assigned a passage out of Romans 11:13-33 to read at a conference for improving Jewish Christian relations. Here is a portion of that lesson:

Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I glorify my ministry in order to make my own people jealous, and thus save some of them. For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead! If the part of the dough offered as first fruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; and if the root is holy, then the branches also are holy. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the rich root of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you. You will say, "Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in." That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe. For if God did not spare the natural branches, perhaps he will not spare you.

This passage raised many questions for me. I simply did not have enough information to interpret it orally until I investigated the context of this letter. Most scholars believe that Paul was in Corinth when he wrote this letter and hoped to stop at the church in Rome on his way to Spain. When this epistle was written (AD 54-58), Claudius was emperor of Rome. Claudius became angry with the Jews in Rome and began expelling them from the city. This set up a crisis in the Roman church which was made up of both Jewish and Gentile believers. Some Gentile Christians wanted to protect themselves from Claudius, so they began to disassociate themselves from their Jewish brothers and sisters in the faith. The Gentiles started developing "theologies" which cast aspersions on Jews, claiming that the Jews' rejection of Christ allowed Gentiles to be included in the kingdom of God. Therefore, Gentiles had superior standing in the community of faith.

Paul found these ideas unacceptable. To respond to these aberrant "theologies" Paul uses the image of the olive tree, a very familiar plant in that part of the world and in Palestine, and a common technique of cultivation. The keeper of an olive grove would improve the output of his cultivated olive trees by cutting away unproductive branches and grafting shoots from uncultivated olive trees onto the stump. Now we have enough information to bring this image to life for the hearer. Paul is saying emphatically that the Gentile "branch" that grew in the wild is dependent on the Jewish "stump" for its growth and productivity. It is absurd to think that a wild shoot can grow independently from the tree to which it was grafted. Therefore, it is unthinkable that Gentile Christians can exist apart from their Jewish brothers and sisters.

Once I had gathered this important information from a study of the context of the passage, I was better able to serve the occasion of reading the text in the conference setting. I might also add that I was changed in the process of researching and reading this text aloud. I came to a clearer understanding of the Christians' indebtedness to the Jewish community and am now more committed to improving the dialogue between Jews and Christians.

What Is My Goal and How Do I Reach It?

Transformation of both reader and listener is the goal of any reading of scripture. Whenever a reader has a meaningful interaction with a text, the reader is changed! The ongoing witness of Christians throughout history is that this collection of stories, poems, prayers, epistles, and prophecies, which we call "scripture," has the power to transform lives and situations. As you work at bringing these scriptures to "oral" life, note how your mind changes, your heart is sensitized, and your love for God deepens. The devotional values are certainly a part of preparing scripture for oral reading. But how do I work to effect such transformation in the minds and hearts of the hearers?

One dimension of "silent" reading, which is also apparent in "oral" reading, is the presence of the voice and body of the reader. The effective reader is the man or woman who lends her or his voice and body in serving the text. For most oral readers, this is the highest hurdle to overcome in the process of becoming effective oral interpreters. As long as we can work alone and in silence with a text, we feel fairly safe and comfortable. When we face the prospect of being on our feet, we get anxious. We need to learn how to relax our bodies and voices so we can provide the text with a supple instrument for coming to life through speech and gesture.

The first rule of successful preparation for oral reading is get on your feet and practice as soon as possible! Find a place in the church or your home where you can lay the text out in front of you and stand comfortably. Begin to be aware of the points of tension in your body. When you stand, do your shoulders begin to tense up? Your neck? Your back? The rehearsal period is the best time to become acquainted with the factors causing "butterflies" in the reading before an audience. First, remember to accept the nervousness as a good sign. Your body is telling you that it is ready to energize your reading. Your task is to learn to channel that creative energy to work for you rather than against you. We are all aware of those readings where we were distracted by twisting hands, shifting weight, or stiff bodies. Practice the following exercises during your rehearsal period When the time comes for you to present your reading, you will have a comforting routine to prepare you to do your best. First, breathe deeply and easily. Breath is a natural stimulant and also relaxes tension. Imagine that the breath is going into those places that are tense. Let go of the tension in those places. Next, begin to roll your head around very slowly. Think about stretching those muscles easily; do not force them. Pretend that you are waking up after a long nap. Stretch as if you are getting up out of bed. Bend over and "spill out" all the tension. Imagine that your vertebrae are on a line in your spine. Then come up very slowly and easily, as if you are floating. Try to picture each vertebra fitting on top of another.

Once you have "warmed up" your body, work with your other instrument, your voice. Imagine that you have a huge piece of gum in your mouth and "chew" it. Push the "gum" into different parts of your mouth and work it. Form your lips into an "o," then stretch your face to make an "e." Go from the "o" to the "e" and exaggerate the movement.

Now begin to practice reading the text aloud. Since you have already done your homework, you will begin to get a sense of which words and phrases ought to be emphasized, what the mood or attitude of the author is, and what response the text invites from the hearers. During this period of working with the text, you may get some specific ideas for gestures or movement. For example, the remarkable story in 2 Kings 2:1-22 has some definite clues to the reader for movement. Elijah is taken up to heaven in a whirlwind, an action which Elisha witnesses. Here is a part of that dramatic story:

And Elijah went up by whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it and he cried, "My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!" And he saw him no more. Then he took hold of his own clothes and rent them into two pieces. And he took up the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and went back to the bank of the Jordan. Then he took the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him and he struck the water, saying, "Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?" And when he struck the water, the water parted to the one side and to the other. And Elisha went over. (Paraphrase)

There are a number of clues to speech and movement in this passage. Elisha looks up to see the "chariots of Israel and its horsemen." How absurd it is for the' reader to have his or her nose buried in the text at that point! He also "cries" out. Is there any doubt how that line should be rendered? Elisha then takes his own clothes and tears them into two pieces, a gesture easily pantomimed by the prepared reader. Finally, Elisha takes the mantle dropped by Elijah and strikes the water with it, crying, "Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?" When the reader imitates this action, the listener "sees" the mighty prophet Elisha in his or her mind's eye!

Suggesting these vocal and physical actions makes the dramatic images vivid in the reader's presentation of the text. Sometimes there are clues or "stage directions" in the text itself, and we overlook them, largely because we have become more adept at reading silently. Most of the time the spirit, the author's attitude, and the ideas presented in the text all give us clues on how to use our voice and body in our presentation. Without such limits, we must trust our knowledge and understanding of the text and trust the process of practicing it on our feet before presenting it. As you begin to work with the lesson, you will start to establish patterns of vocal and physical emphasis. You will find that your intuition serves you well here. You will sense that particular gestures are appropriate, that certain words and phrases stand out in your practice readings, and that various meanings of the texts will be coming into sharper focus. You will also discover that you will never completely grasp the full complex of meanings or spirit of the texts you read. This ambiguity should not discourage you but rather inspire you to appreciate the richness of the scriptures that continue to be spiritual resources for our lives.

How Do I Develop a "Concept"?

Once you have arrived at a "concept" for the reading, you are ready to go before an audience. A "concept" for a reading is your idea of how the text is to be read. It includes your understanding and interpretation of the passage and how that text is to be rendered through physical and vocal patterns of emphasis. A reader arrives at his or her concept in a spirit of humility. No reader ever works to achieve the "right" interpretation of a text. Many readers are guilty of imposing themselves and their interpretations onto texts without considering the context of those passages. The result is a distorted presentation of the ideas presented by the texts. Other readers present more of their own personalities in a reading than they do of the text. If you are a reader who cares more about communicating the message of the lesson, and you trust the process of preparation as outlined here, then you are on your way to becoming an effective public reader!

Take 2 Corinthians 11:21-31, the passage of scripture mentioned earlier (pp. 10-11), and work at a "concept" for reading it aloud.

First, type this passage on a separate sheet of paper.

Second, read this text aloud once or twice.

Third, begin writing out (or recording) your questions about this text. One set of questions immediately surfaces: Of whom is Paul talking? Who are the "Hebrews," "Israelites," "servants of Abraham," and "servants of Christ" in the passage? Even though the focus of this passage is on the things Paul is saying about himself, we certainly will need to know to whom he is comparing himself. Another important question emerges: Why does Paul use the terms fool and madman to describe himself? These words are particularly important to the reader because they suggest Paul's emotional state as he reviews his situation. Is Paul presenting a caricature of himself to the Corinthians? Why is he prompted to exaggerate his self-presentation? Is he deranged and incoherent? There are some definite clues here for the reader's delivery of the text.

Fourth, if you look carefully, you will see some clues to how this text should sound when read aloud. Paul liberally uses the term boast to describe this letter. You need to find out the meaning of that term in the context of the situation. There are many other questions we could ask of this text, but we have enough direction for developing our concept.

Fifth, we want to consult our sources. The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary gives an excellent profile of the city of Corinth in Paul’s day. We get a picture of Corinth as a thriving commercial center, enjoying renewed prosperity after being destroyed in 146 BC. Because it was so important to the commerce of the ancient world, many different kinds of people settled there and found their way into the church Paul had established. A cursory reading of 1 Corinthians reveals that life in the church was often turbulent, to say the least! There is also the indication that there were many different factions in the church and that these factions competed for apostolic authority. Corinth was at a crossroads in the ancient world, where many missionaries of different persuasions were eager to establish a following.

One interesting feature of the cultural life of Corinth often goes unnoted. Corinth was near one of the most important centers for competition among oral performers or artists in the ancient world. The Isthmian games were held barely ten miles from the city and attracted not only athletes but oral poets, rhetors, and singers anxious to build reputations for themselves. Members of Paul's church were certainly familiar with and probably appreciative of the speech arts. Paul admits in 2 Corinthians 11:6 that he is "unskilled in speaking" and in 10:10 that it is said of him "his speech is of no account." Whoever Paul's opponents were, they certainly exploited his "weakness" in the area of public speaking. We have already seen how important reading was in the early church; in the Corinthian church there was an even greater appetite for skillful renditions of texts. According to the Corinthians, Paul was woefully inadequate as a speaker. Yet as this passage shows, Paul was able to use the form of the letter to express the deep hurt and outrage he was feeling at the time when 2 Corinthians was written.

Sixth, the level of Paul's emotional involvement with this text is a good place to begin "feeling into" this passage. Can you remember a time when someone you loved and respected betrayed you? When someone accused you of being inadequate? When you found it necessary to defend yourself by pointing to all that you had done as a friend? Church worker? Employee? By reflecting on those painful episodes, you will begin to catch a bit of what Paul was feeling as he was writing this letter. In spite of being stung by the charges leveled against him, Paul manages to "boast." He feels "foolish" (as one is likely to feel when defending oneself) but also firmly believes in the legitimacy of his call to the apostolic ministry. As you begin to practice reading this letter, note the weaving between "foolishness" and strength of conviction and character that emerges from the text.

The wide range of emotion in this selected passage will affect each reader's voice and body differently as he or she rehearses. You may find yourself wanting to lash out at Paul's opponents in one reading; at another reading you will feel the brokenness and hurt Paul is experiencing at this writing. This kind of engagement with the text as it is rehearsed will suggest vocal variation and bodily movement. Learn to be selective in your choices, but do not be afraid to improvise in your preparation.

Now you are ready to give vocal and physical expression to Paul's "voice" in 2 Corinthians 11:21-31. You have learned something about Paul's situation and realize what is at stake for Paul at this point. You have identified with his feelings and have begun to show those attitudes through the language of gesture and movement as well as the rendering of the powerful words. From here you will learn on your own how to engage a text in dialogue, how to give it form and expression through your body and voice, and how to introduce your audience to a lively experience of a sacred writing. All@ art-and the art of oral reading is no exception-requires discipline and commitment. However, there is nothing quite like having a fellow church member smile at the end of your reading and say, "I've never heard it quite like that before! " There is no better way to do honor to the scriptures that we all hold sacred.

Notes

1. Mark Twain, Tramp Abroad, Chapter 7, Vol. 2, p. 92.

2. Herbert A. Musurillo, The Fathers of the Primitive Church (New York: The New American Library, 1966), 105.

3. lbid., 106.

4. Ibid., 104.

5. George W. Buchanan, "Worship, Feasts, and Ceremonies in the Early Jewish-Christian Church." New Testament Studies 26 (1980): 290-91.

6. Roger Beckwith, "The Daily and Weekly Worship of the Primitive Church in Relation to Its Jewish Antecedents; part I." Evangelical Quarterly 56 (1984): 80.

7. Quoted in Thomas Boomershine, Jr., Biblical Storytelling. Unpublished manuscript, 1985, 40 (forthcoming from Abingdon Press).

8. Raymond F. Collins, "I Thessalonians and the Liturgy of the Early Church." Biblical Theology Bulletin 10 (1980): 64.

9. Ibid., 64.

Appendix

How to Organize a Lay Reading

Ministry in Your Church

An effective, ongoing lay reading ministry can grow out of existing programs at your church. The adult and/or youth choirs, small groups, Bible study groups, worship committees, or Sunday school classes are just a few "seedbeds" for this type of ministry. How do you take that first risky step into a new activity?

We can learn a lot from the story of Gideon (Judges 6-7). Gideon defied conventional wisdom in organizing his plan. Most people would think that the best way to succeed is to involve as many people as possible in a project-not Gideon. Under the leadership of God's Spirit, Gideon started with a very small band of followers on whom he know he could count. Those who signed on with Gideon knew what was expected of them and dedicated themselves to it.

If you want to organize a lay reading ministry, remember Gideon, who started with a handful of people. Can you think of some in your choir, Bible study group, or Sunday school class who would be interested in this idea that you have? Once you have identified them, you are ready to start.

Step One

Plan a time when you can all come together and discuss your overall objectives for a lay reading ministry. How many times would you like to perform a longer program for the church in the coming year? How many times will you meet to prepare? I suggest that for every major performance date, you have at least two meetings. During the first meeting, study the issues related to the texts so that you understand them. The second meeting should include a rehearsal period where you critique each others' readings and make suggestions for improvements. Mark all of these dates on the church calendar. Notify the pastor and church musicians of your commitment to present the texts at those times. Look at the lectionary for those dates and determine what texts are appropriate for the occasion and decide who will be responsible for each text.

If your congregation will permit lay readers during the Sunday worship services, plan to meet each quarter. Work with the worship committee and the pastor to establish a schedule for lay readers who use the lectionary. Post that schedule in any weekly or monthly mailings which go to the church membership. Identify the lay reader(s) in your Sunday bulletin. Though the pastor may often read the scripture in your congregation, the reading of scripture by lay persons, that is, lay ministers, can reap great rewards by developing leadership and encouraging full participation in the presence of God.

Step Two

At training sessions, make a covenant with each lay reader of the group to read over the assigned or chosen text, become aware of the issues, dialogue with it in a journal or notebook, then become prepared to "teach" that text to other members of the group. Lead a discussion on the text and see if you can arrive at a concept for presenting it. Is this text best presented as a solo reading? Or is there a way to include other readers? Take the story of the temptation of Jesus (Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13). What might be gained if the Tempter is given a voice? Indeed, does the Tempter speak with one voice? Or three? It depends on your interpretation. A solo reading can leave one impression; an ensemble reading can leave another. Once you have made these choices you are ready to put the text on its feet.

Step Three

Arrange a time when you can practice as a group. Before coming to a practice meeting, rehearse your text two or three times. Be prepared to ask questions and get help from the group with your reading. They will be able to tell you what is or is not clear to them, what words and phrases need work, and whether your concept is comprehensible to an audience. This is the kind of feedback you will need before presenting your text.

Now you are ready. You have prepared yourself and each other for a remarkable ministry of the Word. You will find that other members of the congregation will come up to you and tell you how "different" your reading was from any they have heard. Some will want to know how to become involved in this ministry. All of a sudden, you are the authority!

There are many ways to adjust the basic steps outlined here. I suggest that you allow some time to pass between meetings. You may, however, discover that you can accomplish your objectives by holding workshops on Saturdays or by preparing a unit on oral reading as an adult Sunday school class, which can also recruit lay readers. However you decide to do it, you will soon learn how you, your group, your church, and your public life in the community can benefit from the lay reading ministry.

Preaching as a Communicative Act: the Birth of a Performance

Introduction

I am a practitioner of performance studies who, by choice and circumstance, keeps professional company with those who teach and practice preaching. My colleague David Bartlett has written that anyone's approach to preaching and the teaching of preaching must be subjectival; one must make one's biases explicit. This article tells how one set of biases grew up and became convictions about preaching as communication and art.

Bartlett's statement is indicative of the conceptual openness that the study of preaching currently enjoys. Homiletics these days allows itself to be approached from many different angles, biblical, theological and occasionally historical but only if one assumes the posture of humility that Bartlett suggests. Performance studies also reflects interdisciplinary and expansionist tendencies. It is based on the conception of humanity as homo performans, that is, creatures who define themselves to themselves and others through verbal and gestural, individual and communal, ritual and aesthetic acts. It resists those tendencies in the humanities to narrowly and perjoratively construe "performance" as mere fakery, sham or pretense. The question is: what kind of relationship can we forge between performance studies and homiletics and what do we gain from such a dialogue?

I think about preaching as communication, which means I focus on the field of relationships that finally affect the transaction between preachers and their listeners. I am growing more restless with the term "delivery" to describe the act of speaking a sermon. It reflects a view of the transaction of preaching as an opportunity to "deliver" theological goods by an effective use of the voice and body. "Performance" is a richer, more integrative schema for putting the elements of language, action, and form, together with speech, gesture, and embodiment in the event of preaching. When we are emphasizing preaching as "art", we point to the way that a preacher leads listeners into an experience of the Word through her use of language and imagery, designing the sermon into a coherent and organic whole. "Communication" usually describes the ways that the voice and body are used in preaching.

"Art" and "communication" are two terms that describe what we aim for but I think we would all agree with Elizabeth Achetemeier:

I think it is true to say that preaching at the present time is rarely artistic, because many preachers, while good journeymen, have not become true masters of the English language. Involved in the artistic use of English are timing and rhythm and sound, and many preachers have no knowledge of the importance of these characteristics of speech for riveting attention and carrying along a congregation and touching their hearts as well as their minds.

Performance studies' legacy of creating, evaluating, and doing performances is a resource for homiletics because it addresses this problem of integrating language, sound and movement in an oral, interpretive act in human communication. Like preaching, its concern is with the interrelationships between different forms of human utterance, framed variously as literary texts, human speech, or rituals, and embodiment. Like theology, performance studies takes an interest in the ways that human beings address each other and God. One of its core metaphors is "logos", or, the image of Word becoming enfleshed and acknowledged as the presence of the "Word's Body". By depicting human communication as "dramatic", it shows forms of human speaking as an "anguished striving for authenticity" and emphasizes as central the role of speech and gesture in the creation of shared meanings, mutuality, and dialogic engagement.

A Bias Emerges Between the Cracks of Church and Theatre

There is a hymn that often plays itself over in my memory:

Sing them over again to me, Wonderful words of life

Let me more of their beauty see, Wonderful words of life

Words of life and beauty, Teach me faith and duty,

Beautiful words, wonderful words, Wonderful words of life

Beautifuls word, wonderful word, wonderful words of life.

I first heard this paean to language as a boy growing up in the Southern Baptist churches my parents served as pastor and spouse. The words, of course, were of God's offer of salvation through Jesus Christ. Philip Bliss' hymn tune and lyric were laden with "sweetness" and sentiment (as the name "Bliss" might imply!), but it would be a very long time before I understood its inadequacies as poetry and theology. Not only did hymns like these teach me "faith and duty", they pointed my attention in a direction that came to consume my life: to the role that aesthetic speech plays in the communication between God and humankind. My childhood fascination with the beauty and wonder of words, and the power unleashed when language, action, and form become transformed as speech and gesture, became a passion of my mind and heart.

Much later, as a graduate student at Northwestern University's School of Speech, I began to develop some tools for investigating intersections between language and action, angling toward such forms of aesthetic expression as oral reading, acting and directing in the theatre, and storytelling. Performance studies was developing, at that time, into a discipline of inquiry within communication studies that acknowledged many ancestors in its family tree including rhetorical theory, dramaturgy, and literary criticism. Its immediate forebear was "oral interpretation" which had come by the 1950s to focus on the art of returning literary texts (conceived of by Walter Ong as "arrested utterances" and by Wallace Bacon as "poems") into modes of speech. Aesthetic texts, so went the claim, present an experience which is shared between an author and a reader in the communicative act of reading. Debates about the field's fundamental nature waged between those who described the oral performance of literature as "art" or "communication", as "acting" or "interpretation". In any case, the focus was clearly upon literature after the 1950s. The oral performance of literary texts gave an experiential dimension to textual study for both oral interpreters and their audiences.

My attraction to literary aspect of the discipline arose out of my interest in both church and theatre. In the first place, I looked to the discipline to provide clues to why oral reading of biblical texts in my church seemed flat and dull when so many other forms of expression (such as preaching and singing) were so lively! I wanted to learn and to teach a method of publically reading scripture, for example, that respected the intrinsic value of studying biblical texts while enhancing their communicative value in worship.

Secondly, I was looking for ways to relate "art" to "church" (in my case to Protestantism) and uncover the reasons why they were so uneasy with one another. Even though it was on the wane by the time I was entering graduate school, the religious drama movement that had once flourished at New York's Union Theological Seminary articulated my concerns about the relationship between "drama" and "church". Theologians such as Tom Driver resisted efforts to reduce drama to "tools" which were available for "use" in speading a message or "selling" Christian doctrine. Rather, religious dramatists in this movement respected the integrity of the dramatic form as the kind of union between action and word that Protestants claimed in their theologies of Word and worship. Driver and company also interpreted worship in dramatic terms, noting that Christian worship arises out of an impulse to act together, "to do something which either changes the relationship to the Divine or express it" Finally, there was a need, again arising out of the religious drama movement, for material that was appropriate for production in church. "Christian drama" was an elusive category and few good playwrights attempted it. However, I believed that Northwestern's methods of staging non-dramatic literary works for both individual and solo performance had great promise for opening up this vein of "ministry". As a drama professor at a conservative midwestern school, I knew what it was like to work with a restricted canon. Imagine adding short stories, poetry and even biblical material to one's performance season at a "Christian" university or church!

What happened during my time at Northwestern was no less than a revolution in the discipline. The emphasis shifted from the oral study of literary texts to the performative dimensions of human communication in culture. "Performance studies" displaced "oral interpretation of literature" as the rubric to describe this expansionist impulse. By the time I had graduated, the field had become "one that maintains its interest in literary texts but explores all forms of aesthetic speech and that views performance as an art and recognizes its communicative potential and function" There were three challenges to those of us graduating with doctoral degrees in this discipline: 1) to locate which performances within art and/or culture we would focus our attention on as scholars and performers; 2) to interpret the core concepts generating from the cultural turn in our discipline to other studies of culture and human communication and 3) to develop "performance-centered" methods of research and instruction in whatever parts of the university we found ourselves. I did not fully realize how difficult this challenge could be until I was well into my first assignment: teaching "speech communication" at the Candler School of Theology at Emory. Eventually I came to regard this work as a professional failure. It is worth revisiting this site, however, for what we can learn about the status of "communication" and "art" in the study of preaching and how performance studies promises conceptual replenishment in these areas.

Praxis: A Bias Breaks and Opens

"Speech communication" is usually defined in the seminary culture as a set of skills for improving "effectiveness" in the performance of Word and Sacrament. Those who teach speech communication in the seminary do the work of preparing ministers for the oral, interpretive work of preaching, the public reading of Scripture and the performance of liturgical texts. To make these practices communicative in and through specific cultural contexts, those of us who teach ministers to become "servants of the Word" have encouraged them to become aware of aesthetic conventions and put them into practice in public communication. Our intention for instruction is to lead student ministers to "understand and love God more truly". Each theological school has its own point of view on the direction such instruction should take. Kelsey calls the picture of Christian life that a particular theological school paints its "Christian thing". A "Christian thing" is revealed through the administrative structures and instructional practices of those schools. Candler is an example of a theological school which construes the Christian thing as "an offer, as news about the possibility of new and fulfilled or blessed life that one may appropriate for oneself". "Sanctification" is a potent theological concept in this learning environment. A cluster of terms are associated with it, "set apart", "moral fitness", "purification and perfection", and "cleansing". Sanctification describes a "process of development into which conversion is the entrance" and its end is "conformity to Christ". In contemporary practice, it usually refers to the manner in which one chooses to lead a life of commitment to Christ. The essential task of theological education at Candler is to intensify a student's reflection on the nature of that commitment to Christian life and to the practice of Christian ministry. Candler's "Christian thing" helps us understand how and why the speech program there was conceived of as it was.

Praxis: Assessing 'Assessment' at Candler School of Theology

Candler's program was built upon a diagnostic exercise called "speech assessment" and a cluster of courses in voice, sermon delivery, and diction. Speech assessment took place, surprisingly not within the introductory homiletics course, but during the orientation period for matriculating students. Incoming students were required to prepare a five to seven minute speech on a topic of choice and deliver it to a group of peers for evaluation. The exercise was designed to evaluate the oral communication skills of incoming students, assess whether each student was competent enough in this area to enroll in the introductory preaching course, or, if not, require the student to enroll in a remedial course in public speaking. The speeches were evaluated by an assessor, a professional in ministry who was particularly adept at oral communication.

As assistant professor of speech communication, my primary responsibility was the design and implementation of this exercise. I prepared an instrument for the assessors to use, supervised the work of four or five professional ministers who helped me perform the assessment, and recommended to the faculty and administration what course or courses each student would be required to take in speech communication in order to become 'competent' pulpit performers. I would then offer the courses in remediation to those students to enable them to enroll in introductory preaching or at least hold students to homogeneous standards of effectiveness, perceived to be floating about in the school's culture.

Candler's assessment and remedial speech program revealed both its Christian thing and the image of "communication" that persisted in the school's memory. In a theological school where 'affection' is a dominant means of understanding God, and 'sanctification' of the individual is a potent concept, one is purified or 'perfected' in one's faith and ministry by acquiring 'practical' knowledge through the performance of actions. The theological student 'acts' in worship and preaching, by loving one's neighbor, or by denying oneself in order to better contemplate an unchanging God. One develops one's skill in order to love and serve God more completely. "Taken together, these actions make up the way of Christian perfection and are in the service of and subordinate to contemplation". The speech assessment exercise became one more action in the service of "contemplation"; it pointed to an individual's need for 'perfection' or 'purification' by getting minimal instruction in 'effectiveness' before studying the more complex, theological act of preaching.

A gap soon opened between theological vision and institutional practice. Learnings generated in the speech program did not often lead to theological reflections of any sort, on either the "perfection" of the preacher, his or her role in proclamation, or the meaning of communication. Instead, they were quickly stigmatized in the school's culture as 'remedial'. Speech instruction was therefore marginalized and instilled a sense of shame, not empowerment, in those students who were required to take it. In 1993, the programs in both assessment and remedial instruction were discontinued.

I would like to offer two reasons why the speech experiment failed to take root at Candler: 1) my inability to identify, claim and integrate my emerging performance perspective on preaching with the dominant image of communication in the theological school. (I knew I was in trouble when I was greeted by one of the aging churchmen in residence: "Welcome, welcome to our elocutionist!") and 2) a lack of structured, theological reflection on "communication" in the curriculum. The "performance-as-communication" persepctive I represented was rooted in two complementary analogues in the study of human communication, aesthetic and cultural; the program at Candler was grounded in a "broadcast transmissions" or "mechanical" model.

The Growth of Perspective Through Expansion and Contraction

An aesthetic analogue of communication takes in the whole range of art as valid for communication study. It resists any casual association of "communication" with discursive, linear, or logical categories in human discourse. "The aesthetic image allows for a more existential aspect of communication and raises questions of self-understanding and identity through expression". A "cultural" analogue for communication insists that communicative activity cannot be abstracted from patterns of meaning-making in culture. It evolved out of concern for the impact that telecommunications was having upon society and human culture and treats how human consciousness is shaped by media. Instead of looking exclusively at the trajectory of speaker, message, to listener, scholars view communication from this perspective "as a process through which a shared culture is created, modified, and transformed".

These two images opened up the field of communication studies, allowing it to overcome its isolation in the social sciences and investigate the relationship between expressive forms and the social order. For preaching this means that communication is not solely interested in the way a preacher affects persuasion, attitude change, behavior modification, socialization through the transmission of information, influence, or conditioning. Communication is a much richer term than that. Guided by these two analogues, the homiletician is freer to examine the relationships between preaching and other expressive forms--literature, storytelling, drama and art, for example--and also focus on those sites for ceremony and ritual in our culture where persons are drawn together in fellowship and community. These "aesthetic" and "cultural" polarities define the basic terrain of a performance-centered perspective on human communication. It treats all modes of human speaking as potentially aesthetic while holding to a concern with the historical, societal, and political forces that shape the preaching event.

Candler's speech program was organized around a "linear-transmissions" model which arises from information theory, which can be stated as follows: "The essential feature of all messages is information, and people use the information in messages to reduce uncertainty and thereby adapt to the environment". Its pattern is the familiar sender-message-receiver configuration and it is not conversational but unidirectional--messages move from a single source (a preacher, e.g.) to many simultaeous receivers (listeners in a congregation). The purpose of communication according to this view is the transmission of messages at a distance for the purpose of control.

The implication often is that by substituting a short word for a long one, or a colloquial term for one dated, or a topical allusion or illustration for one drawn from an older context, we "get across" our meaning or appeal".

Candler's approach typified the way "communication" was imagined in other theological curriculums. Jurgen Hilke in his 1985 survey of 198 theological schools which offered communication courses bears this out. He concluded that since the overwhelming emphasis of these courses were upon skills acquisition and refinement, rather than any serious consideration of theories or theologies of communication, "the discipline is not considered important enough to warrant exclusive attention" in theological education.An overly pragmatic concept of speech instruction illustrates what Amos Wilder once warned against while developing his Theopoetic:

All such recipes and programmed strategies fall short of accounting for the full mystery of language where deep calls to deep. The textbooks of rhetoric provide only an outside equipment. Any fresh renewal of language or rebirth of images arises from within and from beyond our control. Nevertheless we can help prepare the event, both by moral and spiritual discipline and by attention the the modes and vehicles of the Word.

My experience at Candler taught me that the models and images of "communication" that reside in homiletical consciousness need reexamination from a number of perspectives if they are to account for "deep calling to deep" in the transactions between pulpit and pew, between preacher and biblical texts, and between preacher and congregants. The images that usually form our approach to preaching as communication blind us to the many permutations that the study of human communication has recently taken.

Preaching as Performance: Enacting the Perspective

My hope is to fashion from the polarities of art and culture in performance theory approaches to the preaching event which locate "speakers", "texts", and "audiences". One such approach imagines the process of preparing and performing a sermon as a "speaker's drama" in which the preacher is an "actor". This approach addresses the varying roles that a preacher plays in the process of bringing a sermon forward as utterance and embodiment. The second describes the preacher as a "ritual" performer in the "cultural performance" we Christians know as worship.

The term "speaker's drama" arises out of the oral study of literature for interpretive performance. It is built upon the Burkian assumption that "the human situation created in literature is essentially dramatic" and devised as an analytical tool for students who would become "speakers" of an author's aesthetic text. A preacher is both speaker and author of a sermon. She or he is also, in the first place, an audience to those authors, narrators, characters, and Holy Spirit who "speak" to him or her through the medium of a sacred text.

"Staging the speaker's drama" can become an image for preaching because it takes these several roles into account as a preacher prayerfully and critically reads, formulates, then embodies the sermonic text. Too often the process is broken in two: first the creation of the content and only then its "delivery". The speaker's drama in preaching is both a search for a language of lived experience and for a way of speaking sermonic texts that are "believable" at a time when coherent, theological frameworks have collapsed. It is a drama that unfolds in several contexts at once: within the historical context of a "great cloud of witnesses", that is, in relationship to all of those who speak (and have spoken) as "Christian preachers"; within the context of the speaker's own human existence in relation to other statements of faith collected as "Christian theology" within the time and space set aside for the performance of Christian liturgy.

"Congruence" is a god-term in post-liberal homiletics. It refers to a qualitative relationship between what the preacher says is true and how the preacher says it. Theology is voiced and bodied forth in the speaker's drama as lived experience. It is both a "doing" and a "showing", an en-fleshing "enactment" that makes a preacher radically present in the worshipping community. An equation for congruity is borrowed from Shakespeare; action is suited to the word and the word to the action (Hamlet, III, ii).

At the place in the speaker's drama called "preaching", the preacher looks in the direction of "theatre", that is, any site where words and images, arranged as aesthetic texts, are transformed into speech and gesture and are put on display. Preachers in post-liberal, post-literate culture will not be able to escape their traditional identification with canonical texts nor their role as authoritative readers and oral interpreters of such texts. Therefore they do well to return texts to human speech in order to better hear themselves being addressed by God's Spirit.

As primary actors in the speaker's drama they stage in pulpits, chancels, or at Table, preachers first play roles in the speaker's dramas present in the canon as biblical texts. To find the language and structure of their own sermonic texts, they will re-oralize biblical ones. To find their own participatory presence in the drama they will form relationships with those "speakers" who are both hidden and revealed in the thick surfaces and structures of the text by entering into the human sensorium disclosed by a text. Preachers as actors in a text's drama "strive to see what the text sees and feels and how the text feels about what it sees and feels.

To display the preacher's own persona for the preaching event, he or she will fashion a sermonic text from the standpoint of one addressed in the biblical speaker's drama. Preachers who imagine themselves as actors in their own speaker's dramas will work toward congruity by working toward embodiment, the realization of theological truth through voice, body, and display in the moment of utterance. As actors, they are "doers of the Word, and not hearers only" (Letter of James, 1:22).

Making and Breaking the Word: The Preacher as "Holy" Performer

Preachers will not be able to escape their connection to texts nor their roles as ritual performers. From this vantage point, the preacher realizes that the speaker's drama that he or she is staging is not an end in itself. "A sermon belongs to ritual and shares in its ambiguities". What makes a sermon "dramatic" is not whether a preacher decides to portray a biblical character. What is "dramatic" about Christian liturgical performance is the pull of this (an order of worship) against that (the structures of everyday life) in a way that open up "holes in the fabric of things, through which life-giving power flows into the world". As a "doer of the Word" the preacher "acts" with an eye toward "fullness", that is, the "completion" of the performed, embodied sermon. Performance is first an act which makes the sermon. Performing it as a liturgical act, however, is an act which breaks it. Preaching is the creation of a finite form (sermon) that is brought to the assembly in order to be broken by a holy God who is radically other than festival, ceremony, or even ritual performance.

The preacher as an actor in a holy ritual, seeks the emptiness of "holes" that liturgical performance opens up. The pull toward this (the embodiment of the speaker's drama) against that (the creation of empty space in liturgical structures) is a necessary dynamic in the new poetics of preaching. Without the theatricality of the performed speaker's drama we have liturgy performed poorly. Without an awareness of its location in ritual performance, we veer dangerously toward "entertainment with too little efficacy".

The central paradox of Christian liturgy is that it uses ordinary things (bread, wine, books, cloth, fire, and water) to speak of the Holy. The preacher becomes radically present in the assembly as a "holy" actor when he or she stages the speaker's drama of the sermon as an "ordinary" thing. That is, as an aesthetic object which finds completeness in performance but which is brought into the liturgical frame in order to be broken by a different, but related "language of actions, a language of sounds". It is in this breaking that a Divine Presence acts and is therefore known in the "holy theatre" of liturgical performance.

Conclusion: Performance Studies Breaks and Enters Homiletics

Performance studies is an emergent discipline that can break open the words "art" and "communication" in fresh ways for homiletics and help it to tread on new conceptual ground. First, since it is based in art, performance studies' rich tradition of creating, evaluating, and doing performances offers insights and strategies for intermingling verbal and literary aspects of the preaching event. Secondly, by linking "art" with "communication", performance studies helps homiletics resist those impulses in the church and/or seminary cultures to devalue the human imagination in favor of "practicalities" and overemphasis on affect and affectation. It offers support to any effort in homiletics to locate "aesthetics" as a starting point for understanding human expression. What it invites is critique from theology; its claims about human nature and its status in relation to divinity call for elaboration.

The primary bias that I have disclosed here is that I sense a particular urgency in the teaching of preaching to sustain and develop an emphasis on the role imagination and creative expression plays in the proclamation of faith. Performance studies uses some of the raw materials of incarnational theology to imagine human speaking; preaching approaches the disciplinary terrain of performance theory by emphasizing relationships between orality and writing, between reading and speaking, and the evocative power of ritual speech and gesture. My aim in my teaching is to push these reluctant partners onto new conceptual ground together so that the dance can begin!

Richard F. Ward

Yale Divinity School

Performance Turns in Homiletics

He always called it a performance, teasing the word with that mocking voice of his--

'Where do I perform tonight?' Do you expect a performance in a place like this?'--as if it were a game he might take part in only if he felt like it, maybe because that was the only way he could talk about it.

It would seem at first glance that homileticians and practitioners of performance studies are developing a common language and method. The vocabulary of performance is punctuating recent books in the field of preaching. For example, Charles Rice believes that the event of preaching becomes an "embodiment" of Word and Presence, a seminal concept in performance studies. Don Wardlaw, another teacher of preaching invites students to strive for "embodied delivery" when they preach (160). In many cases homiletical texts recommend a method of reading scriptures aloud to gain an experiential perspective on biblical texts and also to understand their bases in orality.

Similarly the preaching of sermons in radically diverse contexts of Christian worship are attracting a growing number of practitioners of performance studies as rich resources for ethnographic analysis. For example, Elaine Lawless has studied the contrasting stylistic devices in the performances of women evangelists and preachers in Handmaidens of the Lord: Pentacostal Woman Preachers and Traditional Religion. She follows the lead of Bruce Rosenberg's study of American folk preaching. In each of these cases, theorists define preaching as a genre of "cultural performance" whereby the deeply held values of particular communities of faith are reconstituted through ritual enactment. Sermons are cultural artifacts wherein structures of authority and symbol are revealed, subverted, lampooned, or refurbished. Worship becomes an occasion in which "sacred" texts are both revered and scrutinized through the playful processes of oral performance and homiletical interpretation. Performance phenomena appear as reflective surfaces which reveal deeply internalized communal "truths".

The Christian preacher is, of course, committed to a specific sets of beliefs about the Christian Gospel. As spokespersons for the community of faith arising from God's revelation in Jesus Christ, the Christian preacher aims to speak the "truth": the truth of his or her understanding of God as revealed in Jesus the Christ, the content of his or her own witness to the activity of God in the realm of human affairs, and offers personal and shared experiences as the context for the audience's participation in the message. Traditionally, though, "performance" phenomena have rarely been understood as "truthful" among preachers.

In spite of the best efforts of rhetoricians, communication scholars, anthropologists and folklorists, "performance" is conventionally but narrowly associated with theatrical imagery. Some even demean or belittle pulpit behavior by using the term "playacting" or "grandstanding." During an animated discussion with a colleague about a course listed in our catalogue entitled, "The Oral Performance of Scripture and Sermon," he turned to me and said: "You don't think of preaching as a performance, do you?" I could tell by the tone of his voice and by the furrows in his brow that he certainly did not think so! The opinion that preaching and oral performance are two disassociated forms of human communication still dominates contemporary homiletics research. "Performance" is suspect as rhetoric because it is it an artful, but fictive means of communicating "truth." In my colleague's way of thinking, talk about "authentic" preaching is tainted by the introduction of performance categories.

Homileticians support associations of preaching with "art", even the performing arts because film, visual arts, and even the theatre have the potential to open and deepen the impact of a sermon. Charles Rice's stimulating text, The Embodied Word: Preaching as Art and Liturgy, offers the preacher both an incentive and a method for reflecting upon the arts as resources for preaching. Yet even here, "performance" is problematic.

Early in his book, Rice defines "disembodied" preaching as that which is "motivated unduly by ego" and thus a "performance" for an "audience." The practice of "spotlighting the preacher and rendering the congregation passive . . . reflect the understanding of preaching that pervades our churches: The congregation is an audience and the preacher a performer" (42-43). Yet later he writes: "No performance can succeed without preparation, on the stage, in the concert hall, or in the pulpit. The question is not whether preaching is a performance--it obviously is--but how the preacher can perform in a way that forwards the liturgical work of the people" (134).

Rice's work demonstrates the need for clarifying how the term "performance" might best be used in talk about preaching.

As a practitioner of performance studies who teaches communication arts at a theological seminary, my aim is to challenge the casual way that others use "performance" is used to demean and devalue preaching and the other arts of ministry. My goal is to legitimize it as a key term in homiletics and to hold up the term "performance" for renewed scrutiny in the discipline of homiletics. "Performance" has the potential to be both a liberated and liberating term in homiletics' field of discourse; as both metaphor and method, performance-centered inquiry has proven its efficacy in such diverse disciplines as sociology, rhetoric,communication theory,and anthropology.

Accordingly,constructs derived from the "new" discipline of performance studies can 1) refine and deepen some conceptual impulses already present within the "new" homiletic, and 2) open space within the discipline of homiletics where its conversations with other disciplines of human communication are enlivened.

Language about preaching which trivializes performance restricts the insight and transformation that a performance perspective can yield. This essay certainly cannot exhaust the possibilities for dialogue between performance studies and homiletics. It will, however, put down some generative probes about its relationship to traditional homiletical theory.

Dwight Conquergood uncovers a potent meaning embedded in the etymology of "performance" to displace the usual connotations of performance as "sham" or "pretense." (1983, 27). Performance is derived from the Old French par + fournir which means "to furnish" or "to carry through to completion".

Alla Bozarth-Campbell's "incarnational aesthetic" uses a similar definition of performance. "Per/form"ing literally means "form coming through." Campbell's work at interweaving metaphors of Incarnation and performance emphasize the performance consciousness that lives at the very heart of Christian revelation. Yet the Church has treated performance as "dangerous" and "dirty," and therefore has traditionally pushed it out of the center of its purview. This is surprising when one considers how closely a metaphor of performance relates to the Church's own institutional self-understanding:

In Bozarth-Campbell's view, the form of a "poem" (which she defines as any chirographic act of the human imagination) achieves "completion" when it is "enfleshed" by means of the voice and body of the poem's speaker (2). Homileticians' interest in the ways that the literary forms, designs, and shapes of scripture "come through" in the design of the sermon can be complemented by understanding how a literary-rhetorical form, such as a sermon, comes through the body and voice of the preacher. For Campbell, the culmination or completion of this process is, in fact, the embodiment of the poem (7-8).

An appropriate image of this process can be drawn from theatre. Performance theorist Richard Schechner states that "an unproduced play is not a homunculus but a shard of an as yet unassembled whole" (120). Preaching is a context/specific act in which the "shard" of thought that is a sermon achieves its entelechy in the body and voice of the preacher. It is also an event when the personal, individual consciousness of the preacher is enfleshed, authorized, and legitimated in the community of which he or she is a part.

A performance perspective resists the narrow applications of theatrical imagery because it characterizes "all members of a speech community as potential artists, all utterances as potentially aesthetic, all events as potentially theatrical" (Pelias and Van Oosting, 224). Since the language of a sermon has a constitutive or "dramatic" function, preaching can be understood as an example of "aesthetic communication." A communicator is a performer in that he or she uses language artistically, not because he or she is an exhibitionist who displays verbal prowess and agility (Campbell, 9). These constitutive and constructional connotations of "performance" are gradually displacing the frivolous ones that have dominated in traditional scholarship.

The late anthropologist Victor Turner provided a conceptual starting point for performance centered research in the humanities. For Turner, humankind are "homo performans", that is, "essentially performing creatures who constitute and sustain their identities and collectively enact their worlds through roles and rituals" (Conquergood 1983, 27). Folklorists, rhetoricians, and theatre directors have followed Turner's leads to study the variety of ways that humankind "performs."

Currently the discipline of homiletics is undergoing a radical transformation. Richard L. Eslinger in A New Hearing notes that the "topical/conceptual" approach to preaching is "critically, if not terminally ill." Eslinger first defines this situation as a "crisis" for both preachers and homileticians and clears the way toward news ways of thinking about preaching by suggesting that "the way out, toward new effectiveness in preaching, is not yet clear" (11). This statement is an invitation to re-examine the relationship between communication studies and homiletics. "Public speaking" and "preaching" have always been amiable (but certainly at times contentious) bedfellows. But the constructs and models that once facilitated collaboration between the two are no longer enjoying currency. Preaching and communication textbooks once shared common assumptions about shaping public discourse. Eugene L. Lowry explains:

Most communication scholars have declared this "conveyor belt" approach to be "dead." It has been replaced by a variety of frameworks, among them a "vital movement in the social sciences which construes and explicates human reality in terms of the theatre and dramaturgy."(Conquergood 1983, 26).

Consequently, the task of teaching "speech" to student ministers has become more problematic. What dominates in homiletics is (1) an interest in rhetorical forms, literary shapes, and theological intentions of Biblical texts as organizing principles for sermons, (2) the quality of the preacher's critical and imaginative resources for meeting the text, (3) a concern for the liturgical context for the performance of the sermon.

The conventional speech textbook has offers little in this move away from mimesis and towards praxis and process in homiletics. One ensemble of homileticans recently has observed:

Making standards for "good speech" explicit to the beginning student of preaching has forced both speech teachers and homileticians to scrutinize their disciplinary boundaries, discourse, and practice. The discipline of speech communication resists being cast in the role of a "service" discipline to homiletics; homiletics holds to the theological integrity of its aim to "preach Christ" (1 Cor.1:23). "Communication-as-performance" offers constructs which will help students integrate their theological perspectives with the praxis of sermon preparation.

A performance-centered approach contributes to the poetics of preaching by placing emphasis on the ways that the selfhood of both preachers and listeners are reconstituted during the preaching event. Performances are not simply imitative but reflexive phenomenena, that is, in performance a human being reveals self to self. Turner states that "one set of human beings may come to know themselves better through observing and/or participating in performances generated and presented by another set of human beings (187). Preaching a sermon in the context of Christian worship is not only a genre of "cultural performance" but also a type of a "social" performance in which the sermon becomes reflexive. It is a means of remaking the world through the exercise of the human imagination. Not only does the sermon hold out the possibility for refashioning the world, but in the process of creating the sermon, the preacher invents and re-invents a persona that is congruent with other parts of the Self. Performance studies reveals how "self is presented through the performance of roles, through performances that breaks roles, and through declaring to a given public that one has undergone a transformation of state and status, been saved or damned, elevated or released" (Turner 187).

Not only does the sermon-in-performance make a "self" and a "world," it also unmakes them. The sermon is a "site" for performance where the preacher may enter a free space created for serious play and unmask established orders and structures. Conquergood explains:

This conceptualization of the "preacher as trickster" intensifies the political and ethical dimensions of the preacher's role as social performer and contributes to the prophetic function of preaching. In The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Bruggemann speaks of the ways that the preacher-as-prophet makes and unmakes the world of the listener in "dismantling" then "energizing" the people (109). The preacher creates a potent space where the personal experiences of the socially and politically disenfranchised are given a voice. "Because it is public, performance is a site of struggle where competing interests intersect, and different viewpoints and voices get articulated" (Conquergood 1989, 84). What "comes through" the body and voice of the preacher is neither an object called "a sermon" nor the singular, incongruous ruminations of an individual self. What might be heard are the echoes of the culturally silenced and marginalized. The preacher has the power to grant to those who would otherwise be "absent" a presence in and through the performed sermon but only if the preacher him or herself is "present" as performer.

In performance, the sermon permits preachers to explore and give voice to the "dark side" or "shadow side" of themselves. Kenneth Gibble in The Preacher as Jacob: A New Paradigm for Preaching emphasizes the value of tapping the "daimonic", that is, those repressed or neglected parts of ourselves in creating the sermon. He observes that "it is, I discover, the source of great power, this daimonic. When, instead of turning from it in fear, I turn towards it in loving, yet respectful admiration, I find it enabling me to draw on the creative gifts I have." (3)

This is a basis for addressing the issue of narcissism in preaching. As students struggle to find their own voices, styles, and witness in preaching, incongruities will become wedged between self and sermon. In learning preaching, beginning students regularly display "artifice" as "persona"; they may even construct a "preaching personality" that is essentially imitative. The goal of the teacher of preaching is to help students learn that

Accordingly, a performance perspective empowers and thus transforms the role of the listener, liberating them from being cast in passive, receptive roles. Listeners become as actively engaged in "making" sense of the sermon. They share in the task of invention by seeing new relationships between themselves and the world and by accepting or rejecting their perceived roles in relation to it. For both preacher and listener, the sermon-in-performance becomes the reflexive surface whereby "the persuasive telling of a story about the stories one has witnessed and lived" (Conquergood 1989, 83) is accomplished.

Equipped with constructs drawn from performance perspectives, communication scholars offer insights into the processes of preparing and preaching sermons. A performance studies approach can complement the effort in homiletics to reappropriate Aristotilean categories by making the sermon preparation process more explicit.

Basically there are five steps in sermon preparation and performance. We decide what we are going to say (invention), then, we arrive at a sequence (arrangement), and how to phrase our thoughts (style). Next, we get ready for speaking the sermon (memory) and finally preach it (delivery).

This distillation of the process becomes neatly linear in the classroom and initially satisfies an impulse toward ordering the chaos and disconnectedness of sermon preparation into some significant process. However, there is much in the process that resists such ordering and calls for a balance between cognition and affect (Turner, 185-86). The elegant lines drawn from classical rhetoric belie the more elliptical shapes and movements the creative process actually takes. Aristotilean categories can become a heuristic device for understanding the process of sermon performance. But they can also be read as containment of the more kinesthetic character of preparation.

A performance perspective within a "new" homiletic will treat the preacher's voice and body as tools for exploring and analyzing texts. Formerly, homiletics assigned the preacher's voice and body a walk-on part in the process of preaching. Once the sermon arrived at the end of Lowry's "conveyor belt," the use of voice and body helped the preacher convey the sermon to the listener. Once speech teachers were primarily charged with "delivery", that is, the task of equipping the preacher with enough vocal and physical techniques to release the sermon and Biblical texts from their moorings in print. Now, the goal of speech instruction at the seminary level should be to facilitate "control (of) vocal and physical gesture in order to involve others in a dialogue with texts and their various voices" (Bartow, 284-5).

In other words, the voice and body of the preacher is a primary actor in the drama of invention. Homileticians are coming to understand the value of allowing the voice and body to dance between the rhetorical categories in patterns not easily described by five sequential steps.

For example, Thomas Troeger teaches that one way of finding the "logosomatic" language of the sermon (i.e., "style") is to physicalize the images and movements present in the text (84). Clyde Fant's concept of the "oral manuscript" employs the act of speaking, not only as a way of finding the "arrangement" (dispositio) of the sermon but also to increase the preacher's capacity to remember it (memoria). Don Wardlaw's term "embodied delivery" (160) best captures the way that voice and body have become instruments of inventing the sermon and not simply vehicles for transporting it across the chasm between preacher and listener.

These impulses to "vocalize" and "embody" texts as well as the metaphor of "voice" are providing an intersection between homiletics and performance studies. Performance studies has long articulated the value of experiential understandings of texts, that is, that in the process of vocalizing and embodying literary texts, we come to a fuller appreciation of their artistry and meaning.

Up to this point, the discipline of homiletics has been primarily concerned with the nagging problem of the poor oral presentation of Scripture from the pulpit. In 1903, S.S. Curry introduced the theme which would guide most scholarship on this subject in this century:

At mid-century, oral interpreters of the Bible followed the overall trend in the discipline and turned their attention away from the minister's problems with "delivery" to focus on the study of Biblical texts themselves:

Thomas Boomershine's Story Journey: An Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling reflects the influence of this oral, traditional approach. Boomershine emphasizes the importance of reciting texts in order to arrive at questions of meaning. A first step toward identification and an enriched experience of the biblical story's "uniquely revelatory power" is to "internalize" the stories as they are encoded in print.

What guides the recent interest in "biblical storytelling" is the conviction that since Biblical literature existed as oral traditions which were then put into script, it was intended to be spoken in the faith communities. Consequently, the act of "telling" biblical stories becomes a form of "restored behavior" (Schechner, 35-116) that is richly laden with contemporary meanings. Speaking and embodying the texts is assumed by the biblical storyteller to be transformative. Similarly, oral interpretation has defined itself by an interest in enhancing or enlivening the experience of literature in performance and in doing so, restores a sense of the "original" engagement between author and audience.

Under the rubrics "oral interpretation," "expression," and "elocution," this performance studies has had much to say on how a preacher might improve his or her skill in the oral presentation of Biblical texts in Christian worship.

By refining its focus on "performance" as both cultural and aesthetic phenomena, the discipline formerly named "oral interpretation" has employed dramatistic and theatrical metaphors to broaden definitions of "texts," "speakers," "audiences," and "events" (or sites) in the study of performance activity. The reconfiguration of this discipline of inquiry has implications for homiletics. No longer is the preacher simply cast in the role of originator of discourse. Texts are treated as living, breathing polyphonic utterances, not as silent receptacles for theological ideas, lessons, or propositions. Neither are "audiences" mere receptacles for sermonic soliloquys, they too become "speakers" and co-creators of messages through the performance of liturgy. In order to become a "speaker" at the site designated for the performance of the sermon, the preacher must first stand at many other sites where "voices" are heard and "presences" are embodied and there learn how to listen attentively.

The aim of a performance-perspective in preaching is not to aggravate the preacher by aiming a spotlight at his or her vocal or physical agility, but it is for deepening our understanding of why we preach at all. Wallace Bacon has reflected on the value of performance-centered research in and for the study of human communication. In "A Sense of Being: Interpretation and the Humanities" Bacon states:

A performance-centered approach to preaching emphasizes that the aim of the preacher is to develop this "sense of the other" in the process and practice of preaching. Preachers invent and sustain "self" in preaching by enacting this "going out" from the constraints of imposed roles and into the "otherness" of not just "texts", but of God, Creation, and Christ. They are also given the opportunity to give voice and embodied presence to the Other as they experience it, giving it shape and spoken form in the sermon-in-performance.

A performance perspective stresses that as human beings we have an irresistable need to enter other worlds, other selves, other experiences. This point of view counters the narrow applications of theatrical imagery by emphasizing the constitutive and transformative impact of Word and resists the casual association between "performance" and narcissism by stressing that self is social and is constituted by "speaking", "acting" and "joining together" in communion. Sermons-in-performance are potentially potent sites where the marginalized can be given a "presence" through the preacher's voice and body. Similarly, a performance perspective treats canonical "texts" as polyphonic, that is, as richly diverse ensembles of voices available to the preacher as sound, gesture and image. Preachers are invited to encounter and dialogue with the Other, expressed as "text", "world", "God", or "Spirit" and embody and enact that Word in the community of listeners.

This article is written to honor Professor Fred B. Craddock on the occasion of his retirement from the Bandy Chair of Preaching at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

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