The Future, or Non-Future, of Preaching

It seems everyone complains about their preacher. His preaching is boring, declining, or not as good as x random internet/livestream preacher. I've attended numerous churches, and complaints about the congregation's preaching are seemingly everywhere. To be honest, I've never much cared for preaching. I rarely learned anything from the two sermons I once sat through every Sunday. I've felt bored during sermons as a child, as a college student, and as a young adult. I used to imagine that one's appreciation for preaching somehow improved with age. I figured my parents must feel encouraged or educated by the sermons in ways I'd only come to experience when I reached their age. Now that I'm in my late twenties, however, I think I can safely say that preaching will never improve for me. It will always be a bland mix of stale oft repeated jokes, references to TV shows that aired before I was born, repetitions of Bible stories I've learned twenty interpretations of on the internet, and the one millionth identical take on the "plan of salvation" (you know what I'm talking about if you're Church of Christ).

Despite all the whining about "this preacher," the problem seems to cut across almost all preachers. I'm not saying there are zero good preachers out there, but I am saying that they're so rare that I've almost never encountered one. I've also never had a particularly bad preacher. The preacher I grew up hearing at my local congregation was above average, but he still couldn't turn preaching into the kind of thing I wanted to sit through during worship service. He couldn't turn preaching into something that inspired or educated me.

This might sound like a radical suggestion, but what if the problem is not with "this preacher" but with the very concept of preaching that we've all grown up with. What if filling the largest part of our worship assembly with one man pontificating from the pulpit while the rest of us try our best to avoid being seen on our phones is just a bad idea? Why do we need to sit through forty or fifty minutes of one guy droning? Personally, I don't understand how anyone can avoid feeling self-conscious about making an entire audience of people sit through their internal dialogue twice a week. Sure, it might be OK for a Youtube channel, where the viewers can tune in or drop out or split up their watch time, but in a live action worship assembly it basically constitutes a spiritual hostage situation.

The classic Baby Boomer comeback whenever a young person complains about a long sermon is: "Paul preached until midnight!" But Paul was an inspired apostle traveling through the area and had important stuff to say. It wasn't like he was getting paid to force feed us his brilliant insights on a weekly basis. He probably wasn't filling time with apocryphal stories about "this one thing that allegedly happened in West Virginia fifty years ago and only vaguely relates to my broader topic."

I do believe there was once a time when preaching really worked. I've heard many older people talking about how great the old preachers used to be: "I wish you could have heard VP Black or NB Hardeman preach, they were so incredible!" (they always have initials). But really… how great could they have been? Is there some deficiency in our modern water that makes contemporary preachers inferior? I do believe these men were powerful speakers to an older generation, but my faith in the "power of preaching" is pretty weak (at least in the mid-century American sense of preaching).

I imagine that technology has pretty much displaced traditional preaching as a spiritual medium. I can get on Youtube and hear almost anyone talk about almost anything, and that includes anything religious or spiritual. I can search the internet for any article or essay written on any topic. I can scroll through someone's Twitter feed if I feel like ingesting some great one-liners. In short, why would I need one guy to preach to me from the pulpit, about a topic I've undoubtedly heard a thousand times before, when I could just listen to a deep theological podcast on my commute to work? Preaching, as a medium of communication and education, doesn't makes sense in the digital world. It's just inefficient.

Millennials and Gen Z have come of age with the omniscience of technology at our fingertips. We know how to access whatever information we need. We're also the loneliest and most isolated generations, and the last thing we want is to sit still and quiet while someone preaches down to us. We have unlimited access to one-way "conversations" online, why would preaching have any appeal to us? Younger generations don't need one-way conversations but deep discussions that help internalize complex spiritual truths in relational ways. Relationships are in greater demand than knowledge. Knowledge is literally everywhere, and we can get it whenever and however we want. The kind of flexible internalized wisdom that we need to live out our faith in a hyper-diverse world is the kind that's built with dialogue. I can count on one hand how many sermons I can remember, but the number of meaningful conversations I've had, the kind that opened my eyes to new ways of thinking, are vast. 

The kind of professional full time, twice a week, preaching that we've grown accustomed to will soon be put under pressure by demographic forces. Churches are shrinking. Churches of Christ are becoming older and dying. As I've written elsewhere in detail, the Church of Christ is collapsing as a widespread moneyed institution. The young are leaving or becoming increasingly ecumenical, and for them preaching is just an afterthought as they seek out meaningful community in the liquid postmodern world. How will congregations be able to pay preachers with Millennial/Gen Z's significantly reduced incomes? We will never be as rich as our Boomer parents and grandparents, and the Church of Christ has never been a very wealthy group to begin with.

As far as the worship assembly, why are we still insisting on rigid formal one-way church gatherings with so few people in the pews? I once attended a church with a weekly attendance ranging from 5 to 20, and yet we still sat facing the pulpit and barely whispering to our neighbor. We're so stuck in our ways that even when we've shrunk to nuclear family type numbers we're still operating on a medieval model designed for cathedral crowds the size of towns. I don't think this is a uniquely Church of Christ problem, but I do think that our rigid ecclesiology, which often degenerates into a theology of righteousness by correct worship, has locked us into stylized church services that cannot be deviated from, despite most of us knowing that Christians hold worship assembly in other ways throughout the world.

Personally, I worship in a Chinese house church. The Church of Christ is illegal in China, and meeting in a formal church building is out of the question. The sermon, if it could be called that, is an informal exchange led by a volunteer. Everyone sits on couches and kitchen chairs as we sing back and forth in a circle. Communion is literally cooked up in the kitchen and brought out by whoever owns the apartment. We once had a guy from the Memphis School of Preaching come to work with us. He had a breakdown because he couldn't understand how to apply his patternist view of worship to our house church. He argued with us about tiny irrelevant issues, condemned us in front of local Chinese Christians, and wrote desperate emails back to Memphis trying to conjure up support for his efforts to re-formalize everything we were doing. There were times during the "sermon" section of our worship in which he'd usurp everything and give long monologues about irrelevant topics like "the Baptists…" just so that he could feel like he had given a sermon. After months of dysfunction, and his repeated attempts to seize control of everything, we finally told him we couldn't work with him. His response? "I now have to tell the Chinese that ya'll are false teachers." The last I heard he'd succeeded in convincing a local Chinese church to let him rule over them for a few months before even they, so passive towards foreigners, booted him from their fellowship. Please, let's become more like Chinese house churches and less like the Memphis School of Preaching. 

Many will protest that preaching is "one of the five acts of worship" and cannot be discarded. I fully understand that preaching has its place. However, I want us to rethink what preaching is. Does preaching have to be one guy standing up and droning for forty-five minutes twice a week? What is the meaning of "preach?" Biblical preaching is just proclaiming, and its primarily a proclamation of the gospel. When Jesus gave the Great Commission, and told his apostles to preach to every nation, he wasn't saying: "Go to every nation and give a long speech in which no one can interact with you and everyone is bored." He was telling us to deliver the message of his death and resurrection to the world.

In conclusion, preaching as we have known it is becoming irrelevant and ineffective in a digital age soon to be dominated by Millennials and Gen Z. We are seeking community over one-way conversations claiming to pontificate the truth. Sermons were once effective communication mediums, and they no-doubt inspired generations of Christians into deeper faith and commitment, but those times are fast disappearing. It's time to look to the future and develop new forms of assembly and communication that will do a better job of proclaiming the gospel of Christ.