How should we handle the ‘crisis of the week‘ from the pulpit?
In my year of being a professor I visited lots of churches. I noticed a predictable trend:
Evangelicals never preaching on the news
Mainliners almost exclusively preached on the news
I made a decision (based on past experience) to go a different direction – and it has led to mixed results.
Do I need to change my sermon every time something happens in the news? If I did that, all I would ever do is respond to the ‘crisis of the week’ … but if I never do it, then I am not speaking to the issues of the day.
There are three types of churches when it comes to their ‘relationship to power’: [1]
Messianic
Therapeutic
Prophetic
Messianic churches look for ‘help’ from outside the system. Whether it is the 2nd Coming of Christ or intercessory prayer, there is an expectation of an intervention (even salvation) from a source outside of (or beyond) the current order. This is often an unseen realm.
Therapeutic churches help you adjust to the system the way it is. These churches want to help you have your best life now. The priority is to help you be the best citizen you can be (at minimum) or to excel in your field so you can be an influential person within your networks.
Prophetic churches are looking to change the system. They want advocate for those on the margins and the disadvantaged. They utilize advocacy, community organizing, and protest to leverage those in power to change public policy and legislation toward justice and equality.
Here is where it gets more interesting:
Each of the primary expressions has a secondary emphasis … and an unfortunate neglected element.
Messianic churches (change from the outside) seem to have a therapeutic element where they help people to adjust to the system as it is while they wait for deliverance from above (or beyond). Unfortunately, these churches often neglect the prophetic aspect (changing the current system) because it seems like ‘rearranging deck chairs on the titanic’. There can be a resignation or ‘other-world-liness’[2] as a side-effect of this approach.
Therapeutic churches (helping you within the system) seem to have a prophetic element which focuses on issues of ‘social-justice’ in order to change certain givens in the equation to variables that can be adjusted. Unfortunately, these churches often neglect the messianic component which believes that there are any resources available from outside the system (or established order). This can result in a generational (or personal) crisis that asks “who or what is it exactly that we believe in / pray to ? And what exactly are we hoping for here?”
Prophetic churches (changing the system) seem to have a messianic element which looks to a power ‘beyond’ or ‘above’ that will supply a needed element of transformation in order to bring justice and deliverance to those in need. Unfortunately, these churches can neglect the therapeutic component of religious belief and practice. This lack often leads to participants feeling worn-out or burned-out, depleted and discouraged. Hope in the messianic aspect, without the therapeutic, becomes even more vital.
When I present this in the seminary classroom I give examples of each:
a Therapeutic/prophetic church (like I am at currently) that struggles with messianic spirituality because the ‘interventionist’ view of god seems problematic.
a Prophetic/messianic church that does protest and ‘action’ but struggles with therapeutic spirituality because it is soft or too ‘me’ focused.
Messianic/therapeutic church (like I use to be) that struggles with prophetic action because of ideas like the ‘2 kingdoms’ which has the spiritual realm (or kingdom of god) as over and above the kingdoms of this world.
Here is an introductory video. Please let me know you thoughts, examples, concerns, and questions.
[1] Power is alternatively known as: the ‘system’, the powers that be, the man, institutional power, and the status-quo, among other things.
[2] NoTW – ‘Not of This World’ is an odd consumer expression of passages like Romans 12:1-2, John 15:19, John 17:14 & 16, John 18:36, Colossians 3:2, Philippians 3:20-21, Ephesians 6:12, and 1 John 2:15-17.
Mad Magazine is ceasing its publication of the print edition. This is going to be a huge loss.
Mad Magazine used parody, caricature, and satire to lampoon the ridiculous elements of our age.
This was the role of parables in Jesus’s age.
We have been taught to read parables poorly. They have been neutered, sanitized, and de-fanged.
Many of us were taught to read parables as:
Aesop’s Fables
Proverbs
Allegory
Parables are none of those things.
Parables are small stories about birds and farmers, widows and foreigners designed to come in underneath the listener’s radar to that their defenses are down … and then once in, to interrogate assumptions and undermine (subvert) the status quo.
Both Mad and Jesus’s parables utilized irony, skepticism, exaggeration, and satire to poke holes in the hypocritical and unjust elements of the establishment.
Mad’s legacy has now passed to TV shows like the Simpsons, South Park, the Daily Show, and even Saturday Night Live.
Here are two great articles about the end of Mad Magazine (one in the LA Times and one in the NY Times) .
Our orientation and posture toward a romanticized notion of the past is problematic. The impulse toward nostalgia is a real danger. I have written about the danger of ‘Re’ words and the pastbefore.
In this 10 minute video I talk about the importance of being fully present and looking for both better questions as well as different answers.
This week we finally go all the way to Church 2.0 with my current congregation! We have been practicing the component parts and building a culture of conversational listening for 2 years. This Sunday we put it all together for the first time.
This September we are going through both the Gospel of Luke (Sundays) and the book of Job (Wednesdays). I had pointed people to NT Wright’s Luke for Everyone as a resource for our study.
It was pointed out that NT Wright is conservative. While he is certainly more conservative than I am (and most at Progressive Bible Study), it does merit a look at why we would use his work as a launching off point.
The key is that many of our participants are ‘post-evangelical’ and so we are being careful to not ‘define ourselves by what we don’t believe’. It is a danger that many ‘exvangelicals’ and former evangelicals (and even post-christian folks) are more sure of what they don’t believe than what they do believe.
We are on a journey together and so NT Wright provides us a launching off point because he is the foremost popularizer of contemporary Biblical scholarship.
It is not enough to know how you don’t want to read the Bible but we want to provide something to start with about what a passage may mean before we run it through our ‘progressive lens’.
It is also why I always pair it with a more adventurous (and usually academic) resource. For Luke I have chosen “Mark & Luke in Poststructuralist Perspectives: Jesus Being to Write” by Moore. It is a wild look full of daring ideas.
Admittedly, it is not for everyone. It does, however, allow me to come around the back door and sneak in some alternative perspectives. I also use Postcolonial Bible Criticism by R. S. Sugirtharajah
I hope that helps to clarify my comfort with utilizing NT Wright’s ‘Everyone’ series.
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 