The Future Shape of Christian Proclamation: What the Global South Can Teach Us About Preaching

By Cascade Books

Christianity is turning brown and moving south. The Christianity the West has known is in recession and has all but dwindled out of recognition in the opening years of the twenty-first century. Well over half of the world's Christians now live in the Global South--Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They are, according to Aberdeen missiologist Andrew Walls, the new Representative Christians. What they think about Christianity will matter more and more and what North America thinks about Christianity will matter less and less. This massive shift in geography and theological point of departure will have a major impact on Christian preaching now and into the future. The Future Shape of Christian Proclamation seeks to begin the conversation about how preaching in the Global South will inform the whole of Christian preaching in the coming years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Aug 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781725252509

Book preview

Introduction

Cleophus J. LaRue and Luiz C. Nascimento

The Movement and Shape of Christian Preaching

Christianity is turning brown and moving south. Philip Jenkins notes in his book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, that by the year 2050, Christianity will be a religion of people of color living primarily in the southern hemisphere.¹ The Christian church, according to Mark Noll, has experienced a larger geographical redistribution in the last fifty years than in any comparable period in its history. The redistribution has been so massive that the typical late twentieth-century Christian is no longer a European man but a Latin American or African woman.² That movement is currently underway and shows no signs of abating anytime soon. Aberdeen Missiologist Andrew Walls observes that at the beginning of the twentieth century the heartlands of Christianity lay in Europe and North America. More than eighty percent of professing Christians lived there. Christianity, says Walls, was both a Western religion and the religion of the West.³ Today, Europe is no longer a Christian heartland. The Christianity the West has known is in recession and has almost dwindled out of recognition in Europe. Christianity is in decline in America, especially in the mainline churches. Owing to exponential growth in recent years, well over half the world’s Christians now live in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific.⁴ While Walls warns against declaring where Christianity will thrive in the future, he does point to its movement, diversity, and demographic transformation in the Global South as one of its great strengths.

Samuel Escobar notes in The New Global Mission that migration patterns and refugee movements have helped bring a multiplicity of cultures—as well as the different forms that the Christian church has taken among them—to Europe, the United States, and Canada. At the heart of European and North American cities, Third World cultures, as well as varied expressions of the global church, have taken root. From the missionary perspective, indigenous churches from faraway places have become sister churches down the street.⁵ This has consequences for Christians in Western nations because the form of Christianity that has developed in the Southern Hemisphere and has reached the great Western cities is a popular form of both Catholicism and Protestantism that we might call grass-roots Christianity. It is marked by a culture of poverty, an oral liturgy, narrative preaching, uninhibited emotionalism, maximum participation in prayer and worship, dreams and visions, faith healing, and an intense search for community and belonging. Evangelical leaders who have long emphasized the clear and correct intellectual expression of biblical truth and the rationality of the Christian faith especially need to be sensitive to this new expression of Christianity.⁶

The massive southward shift of the center of gravity of the Christian world described by Walls in his essay has been hailed by Swiss missiologist Walbert Buhlman as the coming of the Third Church.⁷ He points to the fact that the first thousand years of church history were under the aegis of the Eastern Church, also known as the Orthodox Church, in the Eastern half of the Roman Empire. Then, during the second millennium, the leading church was the Western Church in the other half of what used to be the Roman Empire. Those familiar with the history of theology also perceive how theological themes, language, and categories have reflected this historical situation. Buhlman goes on to say that the Third Millennium will evidently stand under the leadership of the Third Church—the Southern Church.⁸

Drive and inspiration to move forward and take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth, crossing all kinds of geographical and cultural barriers, is the work of the Holy Spirit. There is an element of mystery when the dynamism of mission neither comes from people in positions of power or privilege nor from the expansive dynamism of a superior civilization but rather from below—from the little ones, those who have few material, financial, or technical resources but are open to the prompting of the Spirit. Many Western missionary organizations started in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as humble and insignificant efforts of visionary people before they grew to become large, well-financed organizations. It is not merely coincidence that the form of Christianity that has blossomed in recent decades, especially among the poor urban masses, is that which emphasizes the presence and power of the Holy Spirit: the Pentecostal movement that started among poor, marginalized people. In the words of one of its historians, Pentecotalism is the vision of the disinherited.⁹ Another aspect of this new scenario is that while many non-Western cultures are highly receptive to the gospel of Jesus Christ, paradoxically, it is within the Western world that we find less receptivity to it. Lesslie Newbigin, a missionary in India for thirty years who then returned to minister among working-class people in Britain, notes that the most widespread, powerful, and persuasive among contemporary cultures, modern Western culture more than almost any other is proving resistant to the Gospel. Patterns of church growth prove the validity of this observation in the case of North America and Europe today. Several of the old mainline denominations show decline and fatigue with significant numerical losses. Are we here confronted not only with the resistance of Western culture but also with the impotence of the Western churches, crippled by a loss of confidence in the validity of the gospel or by a loss of creativity to change the forms of church life as cultural changes require? Escobar says that in cities where the gospel is preached in a relevant way, where people form a welcoming community and where structures such as house churches are created to respond to the urban challenge, the church is still flourishing. In many cases churches of ethnic minorities within declining denominations are also growing vigorously. This constitutes a tough new challenge to partnership in mission.¹⁰

Perhaps the single most striking feature of Christianity today is the fact that the church now looks more like that great multitude whom none can number, drawn from all tribes and kindreds, people and tongues, than ever before in its history. Its diversity and history lead to a great variety of starting points for its theology and reflects varied bodies of experience. According to Walls, the study of Christian history and theology will increasingly need to operate from the position where most Christians are, and that will increasingly be the land and islands of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. Shared reading of the Scriptures and shared theological reflection will be to the benefit of all, but the oxygen-starved Christianity of the West will have most to gain.¹¹ Jenkins, agreeing with Walls, notes that while the numerical changes in Christianity will be striking enough, there will also be countless implications for theology and religious practice.¹² Preaching will be one such practice affected by the movement of Christianity to the Global South.

This work is an effort to advance the discussion of what Christian preaching will entail in those different areas of the globe where Christianity is growing. It is not an effort to outline a theology of preaching for all to follow, or a one-size-fits-all homiletic as a gift from the Global South to the Christian West; rather, it is a tentative effort to identify and describe certain practices, emphases, and methods of preaching in different parts of the world where Christianity continues to grow—i.e., the Global South. This collection of essays is by no means exhaustive nor is it necessarily representative of all the cultures and areas of Christian growth in the world. It is a snapshot of preaching in various places that allows us to look in on homiletical practices among different cultures. In any number of places, the influence of contemporary Western homiletics will be apparent. In any number of essays the works of Western homileticians and especially American homileticians will be analyzed and incorporated into the theories and methods of the contributors to this volume. This volume is not an effort to deny those influences, rather it is intended to look at the ways in which Western homiletics is reshaped and refashioned to explain, illuminate, and/or clarify the practices of homileticians in the Global South.

Preaching at its best is always contextual. It is always directed to a particular people, in a particular place, in a particular time. It always takes into account the situations in life (sitz im leben) into which it is proclaimed. For much of the twentieth century, white, Western homiletical theory was deemed as normative for Christian preaching. What worked for the majority culture in America was supposed to work in every setting, regardless of the particularities of the contextual experiences of the listening congregation and world. Today we know better. While we certainly can draw upon and learn from the centuries of homiletical wisdom acquired by the Western world, it will no longer be the primary conversation partner at the homiletical table and most assuredly not the only voice at the table. We have much to learn from those areas of the world where Christianity is growing. Some years ago, Old Testament scholar John Bright declared that the church lives in her preaching. Always has and always will. No church, says Bright, can be any stronger than the Gospel it proclaims. Christian preaching is playing and will play a major role in the shape of the Christian witness in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. Andrew Walls describes the people living in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific as the New Representative Christians: those who represent the Christian norm, the Christian mainstream of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. He rightly assesses that what those Christians think will come to matter more and more and what the people in the Northern hemisphere think will matter less and less. He even speaks of a possible northern theology to describe the future of theological reflection in the world:

The most significant Christian developments in theology, for instance, or ethical thinking, or the Christian impact on society, will be those that take place in the southern continents, not those that take place in the West. The development of theological and ethical thinking and action in Africa and Asia and Latin America will determine the mainstream Christianity.¹³

There is a determination on the part of homileticians and preachers in parts of the Global South to stress the importance of one’s context, culture, and history in the preaching event. They also express a determination to say yes to the particulars of their socio-cultural environment even when the majority culture in America and the white Western homileticians in different parts of the world express apprehension in the name of normativity and so-called best practices.

Our writers are most definitely aware of white, Western homiletical theory, but they are not bound by it in the development of their own particular homiletic. They have little regard for anyone claiming their method to be normative or universal. They own up to the contextual nature of their preaching and expose the faulty normative claims of the Western world. They have neither tried to reinvent the wheel with respect to homiletical theory nor accepted completely the theories of white homileticians about the most effective means of communicating the Gospel in the twenty-first century.

Andrew Walls said you could never talk about the rise of Christianity, for it is inclined to grow in one area and die out in another. Thus, what we are describing here is the movement of Christianity with respect to preaching in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. We are not claiming to identify any noticeable trends or systematic movement in Christian preaching in the Global South. What we offer here are glimpses of how Christian preaching is being taught, practiced, and advanced in those countries where Christianity is growing; in those places where statistics show it is most vibrant and alive.

In chapter 1, Eliseo Pérez-Álvarez bases his essay on the metaphor of voltear la tortilla, which literally means the flipping over of the corn tortilla. Since most of the world thinks of North America as the top and South America as the bottom of the world, the bottom of culture, and the bottom of significance, flipping is necessary in order to affirm the cultural and geographical being of Abya Yala, which is the original name of the Caribbean and American continent. To further clarify his metaphor of flipping, Pérez references the 1943 painting of Uruguayan Joaquin Torres Garcia, Inverted America, which flips the map and places South America at the top. Pérez describes this as the first map with openly political overtones. In the voltear la tortilla metaphor, Pérez applies his liberating homiletic to six different areas of thought and action. In terms of preaching, flipping the tortilla means to permanently approach preaching from the place of oppression. The people of South America and the Caribbean must ask this probing question each time they preach: is the being of non-White people present in Sunday preaching? If not, then whose traditions, whose logos, and whose experiences are we preaching? He further states that voltear la tortilla targets post-colonial homiletics by honoring our own authorities while learning to pray ‘lead us not into imitation.’ A sermon entitled, "The Passion of the Christ? Or The Passion of Mel Gibson?" is included to show us what preaching looks and sounds like when the tortilla is flipped and imperial homiletics are set aside.

Brazilian homiletician Abdruschin Rocha argues in chapter 2 that preaching presupposes subjects whose language is deeply determined by historical-social conditions. Thus, the processes and conditions from which the production of language takes place must take into account human beings in their history. Owing to this epistemological reality, he believes the postcolonial discourse that continues to impact Brazil is inadequate and proposes a type of decolonial preaching in which experience and vulnerability become a homiletical locus—by which he means the context from which the sustaining discourse develops. Rocha out and out rejects the highly colonial discourse that currently sustains a way of being church in Brazil and is distilled in the preaching that is practiced in the pulpits of Brazilian churches. He believes decoloniality supposes a deeper project which is set in motion beyond the mere historical overcoming of colonialism and neocolonialism. Decoloniality, according to Rocha, has a spectacular and sufficient set of experiences capable of constituting it as a category from which to construct a new discourse capable of sustaining a preaching more liberating, more dialogical and more connected with the demands of our own place.

In chapter 3, Carlos Emilio Ham makes a case for the importance of biblical hermeneutics in the interpretive process for preaching. Hermeneutics for Cubans, Ham argues, is far from mere academic discussions with their philosophical and idealistic presuppositions; rather, it is the technique of reading out of their concrete situations in the light of scripture. The very survival of the Cuban people depends on such readings. The abrupt collapse of the European Communist bloc, a deeper imposition of the trade sanctions by the American government, and internal mistakes by the Cuban leadership thrust Cuba into a deep economic crisis at the beginning of the nineties, undoing the higher standard of living Cuba had enjoyed since the Revolution, with free health care, education, and so forth. Biblical paradigms help the Cuban clergy to be faithful to the Gospel in the midst of the crisis and offer hope for the future of not only the church but also the country.

Ham acknowledges the homiletical challenge is his claim that Scripture itself is not the Word of God, especially since the preacher is called to reveal Scripture as the Word of God through the sermon. However, he claims that Scripture’s message becomes the Word of God when it is interpreted and applied to the life of the congregation and lived by the community. So, he says, revelation comes not only to those who wrote the Bible but also is completed by the preacher who is bridging the message and applying it to the life of the community in its own context.

Carol Tomlin in chapter 4, an essay on the Hermeneutics of African Caribbean Homiletics, describes the movement of Pentecostalism from the United States, to the Caribbean, and finally to Britain. While acknowledging the African American founding of Pentecostalism in the States, she traces the movement of Pentecostalism from Jamaica to Britain to the mass migration of the Caribbean population to the United Kingdom during the post-war period. The early migrants, commonly referred to as the Windrush generation, were instrumental in developing African Caribbean Pentecostal churches in Britain.

Tomlin argues that the preaching event is the most prominent feature of African Caribbean Pentecostal ecclesiology. While African Caribbean preaching mirrors aspects of global Pentecostalism, there are distinct characteristics to the expression of Pentecostalism in Britain. She outlines ten broad areas particular to Caribbean Pentecostal preaching. Stressing the importance of preaching in context, Tomlin argues that preaching does not operate in a social, cultural, or theological vacuity but rather is appropriated in particular contexts. For example, Black Pentecostals approach the Scripture with various pre-understandings and suppositions that are inextricably linked with prior experience, which might impact their interpretation of the biblical text. She also makes note of the recent shift in British-Caribbean Pentecostal preaching away from an over-emphasis on end-time messages to preaching that addresses the socio-economic and political challenges facing African Caribbean communities in the United Kingdom.

In chapter 5, Catherine Williams, a native of Trinidad and Tobago who now teaches homiletics at Lancaster Seminary in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, argues for the recovery of an authentically Trinbagonian pulpit idiom. Invited to lecture at a regional Bible college in Trinidad and Tobago, the title of her lecture was The Gospel According to Calypso. The students were initially cool to her lecture, having been taught that the world of calypso was not a place where Trinidadian and Tobagonian Christians did any sort of exploration. In times, says Williams, the students came to see that much that may truly be called preaching is integral to this local art form called calypso. Students and active ministers had been socialized to dismiss this musical speech as homiletically worthless. Williams notes that such non-acceptance of the calypso art form and its cultural jewels predisposes the students of Trinidad and Tobago to the continued wholesale esteem for and use of imported, ill-fitting homiletical patterns and styles of preaching. I believe, says Williams, "that somewhere in the pile of post-missionary, post-colonial, Trinbagonian rubble there is a homiletical gem that is the gospel according to calypso." In an effort to make Trinbagonian preaching unapologetically contextual, Williams outlines five specific characteristics that stand in contrast to preaching that has greater ties to a colonial homiletical legacy. These traits are: (1) pragmatic content, (2) a hermeneutic of experience, (3) the sermon as communal, (4) the use of vernacular, and (5) robust affect and embodiment.

Johnson Lim of Singapore in chapter 6 argues that in spite of all the preaching aids and tools available to us today, preaching still lacks power because the Holy Spirit is MIA—missing in action. Lim argues that preaching that has a lingering effect or that inspires, impacts, and influences the listeners, is pneumatic or Spirit-filled preaching. In our preaching today, with its focus on the preparation of the sermon and its failure to incorporate the work of the Spirit, Lim claims that we are putting the homiletical cart before the homiletical horse. He says there is no unction (pneuma) in the pulpit, there is no action in the pews. His essay offers a corrective balance to this neglect by asking three vital questions: (1) Why is the work of the Holy Spirit important in preaching?; (2) What is unction in preaching?; and (3) How does one obtain unction in preaching? Lim pursues his scholarship on preaching with intellect in one hand and a desire for the anointing of the Holy Spirit in the other. He makes no excuses for his pursuit of the transcendent while at the same time maintaining intellectual rigor in his quest for a deeper knowledge of the work of the Spirit in preaching. He, along with other writers in this volume, is quite conversant with Western scholarship and integrates the thinking of Western homileticians and theologians into his work. More and more North American homileticians, especially those in the mainline tradition, seem reticent to speak of the Holy Spirit in preparation for preaching or to identify and describe its movement in the preaching event. Among any number, it seems to be a tacit assumption that the preacher is relying on some aspect of the Spirit in their preparation and proclamation. Lim brings the Spirit to the forefront and argues for its importance from beginning to end in preaching.

In chapter 7, Sari Saptorini of Indonesia describes the importance of tradition in the preaching of the Javanese people of Indonesia. Indonesia is made up of 17,000 Islands and hundreds of ethnic groups, but the Javanese are the largest group of all with approximately 85 million people. Saptorini argues that anyone who would preach with authority to Javanese Christians must have a firm grasp on the important role that tradition plays in their lives. So embedded is tradition in their culture that she argues that the Christian preacher must be able to convince their audience that the Bible is the ultimate authority in the life of the believers. Consequently, the Scriptures must take a primary place in the preaching of Javanese Christians.

Jerusha Matsen Neal in chapter 8, writing about the experience of the Methodist Church in Fiji, describes the way in which church leaders employed the metaphor of exodus in new ways to affect societal change at a very troubling period in the island’s history. Methodist clergy under the prophetic leadership of Tuikilakila Waqairatu sought to employ this metaphor as a way of steering the church away from its past abuses of power while asserting the importance of the church’s role and voice in an increasingly secular landscape. Through preaching, the clergy sought to frame their new exodus through the imagery of the ocean as opposed to the imagery of the land. The Fijian ministers’ awareness of context and their skill in employing the exodus metaphor in new ways—an ocean homiletic with a fluidity of boundaries—led to new understandings of exodus and hope for the Fijian people. According to Neal, To shift the conversation away from the role of the land in Fijian ecclesiology and toward the role of the ocean is a risky, cruciform decision in this context. It requires the letting go of static certainties and stepping into an unknown future.

In chapter 9, Alfred Stephen centers his homiletic on the sufferings of the poor in India—primarily the Dalit, often termed as the backward castes. Dalits have historically been excluded from the four-fold varna system and were seen as forming a fifth varna. The contextual preaching to which Stephen is calling us is born out of the sufferings of the Dalit people. Long known for their suffering and injustice at the hands of those who consider themselves to be a higher caste, Stephen claims that a hermeneutic that addresses their reality is absolutely essential to preaching from the underside. He proposes that preaching from the underside will have a hermeneutics of resurgence, convergence, and relevance as its foundation, which he believes will allow for the creation of a new community among the Dalits; one in which love, acceptance, and equality will be the norms of life.

Babatunde Adedibu in chapter 10 argues that the redrawing of the political map of World Christianity has led to the emergence of a distinctive indigenous appropriation of the Christian faith across the Global South which is a variation from the Western dominated influences. The obvious implications of this seismic shift in the center of gravity of the Christian faith has led to variegated expressions of the historic faith in terms of liturgy, preaching dynamics, creativity and innovations, ritualization, and religious idiosyncrasies and diversities amongst churches—particularly of the Pentecostal stream. Thus, she argues that the twenty-first century might be labeled the Global South Christian Century due to the radically changing ecclesial landscape within this context. Even though Nigerian Pentecostal churches lean toward the prosperity gospel, Adedibu observes that many provide vital services to a number of dispossessed Nigerians.

A critical aspect of preaching that will most definitely be affected by the shift to the Global South is biblical interpretation. Adedibu highlights Interculturation hermeneutics, as championed by some African scholars. Interculturation hermeneutics takes its cue from life outside the academy. She notes that the general experience of African Christians was that African social and cultural concerns were not reflected in missionary and Western academic forms of biblical interpretation. Inculturation hermeneutics arose as a response, paying attention to the African sociocultural context and the questions that arise from it.

In chapter 11, Deborah Doyinsola Adegbite addresses some of the sociological issues behind popular religion in Nigeria. She focuses primarily on the development of deliverance and prosperity preachers in the Nigerian context. She attempts to explain why ministers who are basically uneducated have such broad appeal among the masses. The influence of the worldwide Pentecostal movement continues to influence Christianity in many parts of Nigeria. While she is critical of deliverance and prosperity preachers in general, she does concede that some of them manage to provide much needed educational, medical, and social services to the people. The preachers, who are largely untrained, reflect the popularity of the various strains of Pentecostalism. Many are pre-critical in their preaching and continue to believe in the longstanding fears of demons and evil spirits active in the lives of the parishioners.

Cleophus J. LaRue and Luiz C. Nascimento

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Voltear la tortilla

Preaching and Theological Method

Eliseo Pérez-Álvarez

The last will be first, and the first will be last.

[Read:] She who laughs last laughs best.

Matthew 16:26

An enticing appetizer at the beginning of a meal along with a palette cleansing, coffee-flavored dessert at the end can be a great help in digesting a not-so-tasty dinner. In like manner, covering up for our less-than-stellar sermons with enticing introductions and sugary endings may well be all we are doing in our present-day preaching.

What you tied in the Eucharistic table, you loosen in the pulpit, is a saying in the Latin America that shows us the sorry state of homiletics in many parts of the world. The jibe is intended to suggest that the clarity of the historic Christian witness, frequently observed by the faithful at the Eucharist, is often muddled by our insincere and superficial preaching. Far too often, our sermons are plagued with bad jokes that fall flat in the pulpit or filled with Greek words and theological jargon unfamiliar to the listening congregation. Still other homilies come off as mere entertainment so weighed down with platitudes and generalizations that they offer less substance than a chat over coffee. Though much of our preaching theory has come from the White Western world, it could well be that an inverted world where the Global South is at the top could have more to teach us than the mere displacement of geography.

Alexandrian Claudius Ptolemy (second century CE) has the credit of drawing the first atlas placing the North-up. In the Middle Ages cartographers oriented maps towards Jerusalem, the city where Jesus was crucified and resurrected. In the tenth century Ibn Hawqal, the Arab cartographer, chose to place the South up. In 1943 Uruguayan Joaquín Torres García painted Inverted America, i.e., the first map with openly political overtones: South America at the top.

This is precisely the meaning of voltear la tortilla, namely, the flipping over of the corn tortilla in order to affirm the cultural and geographical being of Abya Yala—that is, the original name of the Caribbean and the American continent.

Abya Yala means the fertile land or the land full of life, according to the Kuna culture of the formerly Greater Colombia. However, for more than 525 years the North Atlantic empires keep re-baptizing the fertile land as Latin-America, Anglo-America, Ibero-America, Euro-America, and so forth. The hidden agenda is to acculturate us, to impose their hegemonic culture and steal Abya Yala’s logos from our ancient civilizations.

Voltear la tortilla continues to discourage respect for the doctrine of discovery. On the other hand, it continues to encourage placing the South as a co-equal interlocutor within the oikos, or our common planetary home. It seeks to place our Southern experiences as the point of departure—in this case, a liberating homiletic—to provide the last rites to the Southern country folks who still suffer nortemanía¹⁴ (North-mania) or having a crick-in-the-neck always pointing towards the North Atlantic world.

Voltear la tortilla is a permanent reminder of Uruguayan Mario Benedetti’s dictum, The South also exists. In flipping over the tortilla, I will dig into the theological method in my task of stirring the homiletical pot while venturing some answers to a myriad of provocative questions, such as: What are the hidden presuppositions behind each homily? Methodologically speaking, is the being of the non-White people present in our Sunday preaching? Is our exposition of the Bible liberating, or romantic and alienating? Do our sermons probe deeply into the plight of the folks who belong to the oppressed classes?

The theological method or structure has