Tales from the Pulpit

By David Brown

When is a sermon not a sermon? For 25 years I was a Lay Preacher in the Methodist Church in the UK and during that time I developed a style of preaching that used narrative rather than discourse. I told stories about ordinary people and how their lives ran up against their faith and how they dealt with it. Sometimes it involved unpacking elements of Christian theology. Sometimes it meant exploring what their faith meant to them as individuals. Sometimes it meant challenging taken-for-granted assumptions. They didn't always sound like sermons, but they were written as the Word of God for that church so these are my Tales from the Pulpit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Brown
• Release date: Feb 22, 2014

David Brown

David Brown has 40 years of experience as a pastor and church planter in France, with a dozen books published in French. He is leader of the Church Revitalisation Network run by the European Leadership Forum, teaching seminars and mentoring pastors across Europe.

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Introduction

When is a sermon not a sermon?

Our society is currently changing at a pace not seen in any period of history and every indication suggests that if anything this rate of change will increase. As a people we are more educated, more questioning, more cynical than at any previous time. We are less likely to accept anything that is given to us as 'fact' and far more likely to query its foundation and its structure. And we are less patient. Our media breaks everything down into sound bites or dramas or illustrations. Short. Sharp. Focussed. It sometimes seems to me that we have almost lost the ability to engage in reasoned debate any more. In this context sits the Church of God, a stately organisation built on Tradition and Truth, pillars that have served it well for many hundreds of years. For most of that time change has been a gentle, gradual thing and the Church has stood proud and firm, a rock for people to anchor to. But suddenly the Church is on less stable ground. The taken-for-granted assumptions about what people want from a Church have become less clear and when the earth moves beneath them even the strongest pillars can shake. In an ever-changing world is it enough to simply keep offering the Word of God in the same way that has served us so well for so many years?

For twenty five years I was a preacher in the Methodist Church and for nearly all of that time this was a major concern to me. Even in those twenty five years I saw a difference in the way people responded to worship. Generalisations are always dangerous but are to some extent inevitable and speaking purely generally congregations have become at once more discerning and less so! They are more discerning than they once were in the sense that they expect the pattern of worship to be more varied and adventurous than it once was. The 'hymn sandwich' still reigns supreme in most churches but within that structure expectations about music, about the use of drama and movement, about the use of source materials other than the Bible have risen sharply. Most churches have responded to that challenge by extending their repertoire of songbooks and looking to the many excellent resources now available to widen the scope of their time together. Any church familiar with 'Partners in Learning' or any of the other worship resources, for example, will have found group activities for the whole church regularly creeping into the 'altogether' time when the whole church family is present in worship.

But at the same time congregations have become less discerning about preaching itself. At one time the sermon was the 'highlight' of worship. The great preachers of the last century and those before them drew crowds of people simply through the power of their oratory and churches were filled with congregations hungry to hear them teach the word of God. Churches were constructed to make the pulpit the focal point of the worship experience! But those days are largely gone. Whether the preachers changed or the congregations changed is a moot point. I suspect a bit of both. Certainly congregations have changed radically in the last fifty years, and I think the rate of change is increasing. In particular we are, as a society, less able to listen to reasoned argument than we once were. Listen to the radio and see how any debate or information is put across as a serious of short, sharp bullet-points. The assumption made is that listeners will not stay with a single voice for any length of time without something else to engage their attention and interest. The same is true for television programmes, even to some extent magazine articles.

In many of our churches we have fallen into a kind of resigned acceptance that the sermon will be about twenty minutes and will be 'worthy' rather than engaging. There are still many fine preachers, it is true, who can carry a congregation with them by the sheer weight of their personality and oratorical skills, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. Most Sundays in most churches we settle into our pews or chairs with little expectation of being moved or even engaged, and this in turn becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And this was where I was in the mid-eighties with my own sermons. Week after week I would preach the Word of God in twenty minutes of reasoned argument and illustration and mostly people would be polite afterwards. Comments would be made about whether I could be heard, what nice hymns I had chosen and how they, too, had caught the number 47 bus, or whatever the particular illustration of the week happened to be. But nothing more. And then it changed.

Quite by accident I wrote a sermon in the form of a story. It was an adaptation of a dramatised service I had presented with a student group and I wrote it up as a first-person narrative recounting a day when God actually dropped into worship. It was all gently tongue-in-cheek and the message was contained in the dialogue between God and myself but there was no overt sermonising. Yet to my surprise it produced a very positive reaction. I didn't think much of it since people often respond positively to something different, if only because it gives them something other than the hymns to comment on. Nothing much happened for a while therefore until one week, stuck for a sermon idea I thought of writing a sequel. Once again I wrote about God dropping in on worship, following up his last visit as it were, and once again the response was more than usual. And so I began to write stories regularly, always first person narratives, nearly always involving meeting God somewhere, and always containing the message somewhere in the text, usually in the words attributed to God. And I was encouraged to do so by the comments I received after worship, week by week.

Nothing stands still. It has been over twenty years since I first wrote a story as a sermon and though I left them for a while I eventually returned to the form, a little older and, I hope, a little wiser. I started using narratives in worship again but wanted to move away from the tongue-in-cheek style of my earlier encounters with God and explore some grown-up themes. I also wanted to get away from the 'fantasy' element of talking to God and write about ordinary everyday living. Having been deeply moved by the style and content of much that has come from the Iona Community I tried a more reflective style. My aim was to try and break away from the theological exposition of a traditional sermon. I wanted my sermons to speak of God, to illustrate some portion of Truth, but I didn't always want them to do so in an obvious way. I'm not entirely sure why I took this approach but I guess I wanted to see how people would react when the teaching was not necessarily presented on a plate, to see if they would work a little harder to extract a message. I also wanted to try and ground it in real life, to draw parallels between this and Biblical and Theological Truth, and I found myself becoming fascinated with the process of Truth, the ways in which people's lives become entangled with God and His Spirit. As I wrote therefore I found myself painting pictures of very ordinary people encountering God in their own small ways.

In 2003 I was lucky enough to have a collection of these stories published by SPCK as a book entitled ‘Coming to Life’. It did moderately well before it sunk without trace, but I was never really happy with it. SPCK had insisted I re-write the sermons as meditations, with introductions and post-scripts. To me it compromised what they were, but I had a lot of good feedback and had the pleasure of seeing my book on the shelves of my local Waterstones and still, if I care to look, within the ranks of Amazon’s offerings. But time moved on and over time the style of story-telling evolved and I became more interested in preaching theology – not so much ‘go out and do good things’ but more ‘what is it we believe and how does this belief change our behaviour?’ To a certain extent some of these stories should not have worked as sermons at all, some because they did not overtly present the Word of God. Indeed I sometimes looked at what I had written and worried that it was too obscure, that it was just a pretty story that would pass the time but not the Word of God. Others seemed overly ‘wordy’, full of complex theology that I worried would simply leave people baffled. And yet time after time I received the sort of feedback from congregations that told me this was not so. They told me how much they enjoyed what I said, (that rarely happened when I preached 'ordinary' sermons!). They told me how caught up they had been in the characters, how they had consequently understood what I was saying. And they told me how they could identify with what was going on, how it became real to them. But more than that, they told me that they had seen something of God within them. I suppose I should have had more faith. For years I had been writing sermons, trying to present the Word of God to congregations and never once had I received tablets of stone or heavenly messages telling me what to write or say. It used to worry me but gradually, over the years, I learnt to trust that when I sat down to write a sermon what appeared on the paper was what God wanted me to say. It may sound arrogant but it is essential as a Preacher that I believed I was offering the Word of God, albeit wrapped in my choice of words. And congregations act as the check. If you have spoken truly of God someone will mention it. It does not mean that my stories were universally loved. Indeed they were not to everyone's taste, but then neither was my previous style of preaching. As preachers we may preach the Word of God but it seems that rarely does it touch everyone present.

I don't offer what follows therefore as the answer to all the Church's woes or as the Future of Preaching. These are just stories, tales from the pulpit that, so I'm told, have spoken to people of the workings of God in this world. This is not the only way to convey the Word of God to people in the 21st Century. I'm not even suggesting it should be the way of anyone else. But it worked for me, for a time, and judging by the feedback that I got it worked for some of my congregations too.

I once likened one of my acts of worship to one of those children's 'join the dots' puzzles. Each of the different elements of worship - the songs, the readings, the prayers, the sermon - were all placed there for a reason. But I tended to leave it to the congregation to make the connections and form the wider picture, believing that if they were left to do a little work themselves it would be a more satisfying experience all round. My experience confirmed this belief but it did mean sometimes that the sermon was only a part of the total Word. Readings, both secular and Biblical, fed into the sermon, illuminating other shades of Truth.

Everything that follows has been preached as a sermon, because that is exactly what they are. However to place them in context I have noted certain songs that were central to the service. (If you don’t have them in your record collection try Googling the lyrics or heading over to Spotify and listen to them there). And always, of course, there is a biblical reference. Often these were the launching point for the tale, but not always. These are not biblical expositions. There are many people who write those and they were not my forte. These are tales that come off the readings at a tangent, which do not always seem to be directly linked to them. And yet in every case the Bible was the source of Truth that nourished the Tale, the spring from which ultimately the flow of narrative sprung.

These then are my Tales from the Pulpit. I hope they speak to you.

Everyday Glory

Inspiration comes in many forms and for me it often came as I was driving in my car, listening to music. A line or a phrase would catch my attention and sometimes, from as small a start as that a sermon and an entire act of worship would develop. So it was that I was driving along day when the line ‘rise from the ashes - a blaze of everyday glory’ set me thinking about Advent and our expectations. What emerged was a story of ordinary extraordinariness and how even the smallest of actions can have great consequences. Is it ‘Christmassy’? No. But then neither is Advent…

Readings:

Isaiah 64: 1-9

Luke 3: 7-18

Music:

Rush: "Everyday Glory" from the album ‘Counterparts’

Andrew winced as the windows rattled and a soft dusting of plaster rained gently over the desk. Outside there was a momentary, unearthly calm and then he recognised the sound of pandemonium. Voices raised, sirens in the distance drawing nearer, footsteps in the corridor. The door burst open.

‘Are you alright?’ Carol’s face was pale and her eyes darted around the room, looking for reassurance that the blast had done no damage.

He smiled as reassuringly as he could. ‘I’m fine. I think it was probably a couple of blocks away – sounded closer than it was. I just need a duster, that’s all’, and he wiped his finger across the desktop, holding it up so that she could see the white plaster-dust upon it.

She sank wearily into a chair and closed her eyes momentarily.

‘I know we’re supposed to be safe here’, she sighed, ‘assuming the Red Cross still carries any weight in these parts. But even so…’ her voice faded into a whisper, ‘it frightens me when another bomb goes off’.

He tried to sound more convincing than he felt.

‘The Red Cross has stood for neutral aid ever since its inception. Attacking us would do nothing to further their cause. Quite the opposite.’

‘Are we safe here? Do you believe the flag will protect us?’

The bluntness of the question shocked him into honesty.

‘I don’t know, Carol. I hope so. Let’s pray so.’

She pushed herself up from the seat.

‘Yes, well’, she said as she turned towards the door, ‘just occasionally I wish I could pray. Faith must be a great comforter, and I could do with some comfort right now’, and he sat in silence as she slipped out of the room.

It had all seemed so noble back in the village. His wife had hated the idea, obviously, and they had had yet another row about it. She hadn’t married him in order to watch him throw away a lucrative partnership to go and work for the Red Cross in God only knew where. And what was she supposed to do in the meantime? He needn’t think that she was going to up sticks and simply follow him around the world like a tied concubine. And don’t bother giving her any of that ‘it’s what God wants me to do’ rubbish. If God really was love He wouldn’t make her suffer now, would He? Well, would He?... In the end it was one more row and one more inevitable reason why the marriage was doomed to fall apart, which it had done not long after he went for the first interview. He had regrets, for sure. When he had made those vows he had meant every one of them - ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer’ – but maybe she hadn’t seen them in quite the same light. He grimaced to himself. He was certainly poorer than he had been, at least financially, and by most people’s definition his situation was probably worse. The Middle East really wasn’t a good place to be right now. But he had known that he could end up in a war zone when he had taken the interview and most of the time he felt that he had been right to take the job they had offered him. ‘We think you might make a difference’ they had said, and he had not argued the point. But make the same comment to him now and he would not be so quick to agree. The realities of war had a habit of sobering the most optimistic spirit. Here where bitterness and deeply entrenched hatred permeated the atmosphere like smog, here was where reality sunk her talons into you and raked for all she was worth.

His reflection was broken by a knock on the door.

‘Come in’, and the door opened as Douglas stuck his head tentatively round the corner.

‘Andrew. Hi. Um, do you, you know, have a moment?’

Andrew smiled and beckoned the young man in.

‘Of course. Here, sit down.’ He pushed