NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) — “Then God showed up, and all hell broke loose.”
That's how William Willimon described Pentecost, but he added that it was a far cry from the lukewarm homilies found in pulpits today.
A Methodist bishop and former professor at Duke University, Willimon told ministers at a Nashville, Tenn., conference that while Pentecost led to powerful Christian preaching, too many modern-day pastors water down their messages. The church leaders had come from across the nation to the 15th-annual Festival of Homiletics, hosted by First Baptist Church.
“A lot of preaching today is in the proverbial mode,” Willimon said. “Basically the sermon becomes an announcement that, 'I have found four, three, five biblical principles that will help you at work or help you in your marriage.' I wish being a Christian were that easy.”
The festival drew more than 1,600 people, according to organizer David Howell. It was sponsored by Lectionary Homiletics and other publications that make preaching resources for ministers.
Since its inception in 1993, the festival has featured some of the top names in Protestant preaching. Among the speakers joining Willimon this year were Fred Craddock, professor emeritus of preaching and New Testament at Emory University, and James Forbes Jr., who is retiring as senior minister of the historic Riverside Church in New York City.
Speaking on the final day of the week-long festival, Willimon warned against sermons that reduce Christianity to tidy lists of principles for living — “Power-Point preaching” — instead of focusing on a God who is powerful, personal and unpredictable.
“Preaching is hard because it is an encounter with the living Christ,” Willimon emphasized. Quoting martyred German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Methodist bishop defined the work of a minister as “the gutsy willingness to let Jesus walk among his people.”
Willimon, who oversees 800 Methodist pastors in Alabama, criticized two well-known Christian authors to emphasize that the minister's task is to present a deity who defies all attempts to contain him.
He questioned the promise of spiritual fulfillment in the introduction to California Baptist pastor Rick Warren's bestselling The Purpose-Driven Life. If completing 40 days of spiritual homework will answer every question about life and faith, “don't bother with worshiping the Trinity,” Willimon said.
The Methodist speaker saw Warren's formula for success as “perilously close” to one offered by Christian author Marcus Borg, author of The Heart of Christianity. Willimon also questioned Borg's pledge of “a way of seeing Christianity that makes persuasive and compelling sense of life,” quipping that Borg seems to have discovered how to “help you keep Jesus quiet.”
Well-known author and former pastor Brian McLaren, another festival speaker, similarly bemoaned sermons that he said diminish the power of the Christian story.
“The tragic thing is to think how many churches this Sunday will be treated to safe, nice, harmless, insignificant, intramural, and trivial-pursuit sermons,” McLaren said. “There are going to be an awful lot of sermons preached in Christian churches … that actually probably help the world become a worse place. They will use the Bible, and God, and Jesus, to increase greed, to increase fear, to increase alienation, resentment, scapegoating, escapist thinking, fatalism, and an approach of abandonment toward the world.”
But McLaren also offered his audience hope in the form of specific suggestions for “transformational” Christian proclamation.
“Don't assume it will be easy,” he said. “Many of our Christians have been converted into consumers of religious goods and services. When you come to them with … a call to be disciples or agents of the transforming kingdom of God, they won't say, ‘At last! Thank you.'”
And he encouraged preachers not to miss the proverbial forest for the trees. Rather than preaching from a few isolated verses, pastors would do well to present the sweeping themes of scripture, he said. The core of the biblical message is the story of God's involvement in “our messed-up, self-destructive world,” McLaren said.
Pastors attending the Nashville festival said it provided an opportunity they seldom enjoy: the chance to hear sermons by other people.
Milton Barry, an Anglican priest and pastor of Grace Church on the Hill in Toronto, Canada, said he attended in order to be “stimulated by good preaching.” Frank Lewis, senior pastor at Nashville's First Baptist, called the speakers “top drawer.”
Lewis also observed that a “common denominator” among the different denominations represented at the festival was that all participants and their congregations stood to benefit from stronger messages from the pulpit.
“I think it was a very worthwhile bridge for us to try to build with others from around Christendom,” Lewis said. “We were there to promote good preaching.”
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