Kenneth A. Briggs on the Vanishing Bible

An article in today's Religion News Service has me wanting to read Kenneth A. Briggs' new book on the diminishing place of the bible in North American Christianity, The Invisible Bestseller: Searching for the Bible in America (Eerdmans). 


In her article for RNS, reporter Emily McFarlane Millar describes what Briggs found as he was writing the book:


Along the way, he met a homiletics professor who encouraged her students to explore the text by exchanging roles with the characters in biblical accounts, and he came across professors at evangelical colleges surprised by how little their incoming students knew about the Bible. He attended a meeting of Bible promoters in Orlando, Fla., worried nobody was reading their tomes; the academic Society of Biblical Literature convention in Chicago; and a traditional Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania. He was deeply moved by his visit to a federal prison in upstate New York, where, he said, the inmates knew the Bible better than he did.


As a preacher in a liberal Protestant denomination, I have found I cannot take for granted that congregations have a working biblical literacy.   Thanks to the three year lectionary, they will probably know the core gospel readings, but most do not seem to know the grand lines of the biblical narrative, what Richard Hooker once called the "main drifts" of scripture.   By "grand lines" I mean covenant theology (old and new), the adoption of the gentiles into the chosen people, the relationship of Jesus to the prophets, or how Revelation concludes God's plan of redemption (as opposed to it being a book of predictions and prophecy).   It's difficult in a fifteen minute sermon to develop any of these ideas, especially if, as I am, one is an occasional preacher.


Bear in mind that I am speaking now of a dwindling group of churchgoing Anglicans who have been doing this, most of them, for a long time.   I am interested in knowing what the bigger picture is, according to Briggs, but I am sure it is not a pretty one.


I am not clever enough to point to all the reasons why the bible is fading from our consciousness.    I can guess at a few of them.  Within the church, I suspect it may be an erosion of belief in preaching among clergy, or a sense that it is not foremost among their priorities.   Most parishioners, I find, have low expectations of the sermon.  My late father once said that the sermon was a time when he could lightly close his eyes.


Among the culture as a whole, I suspect there is a widespread distrust in the bible as an archaic book of bronze age make believe.  Watch any half hour of the political comic Bill Maher on HBO and you will get this loud ad clear.  There is also a skein of post-modernity which distrusts narratives of authority, and easily deconstructs the bible as an arbitrarily compiled compendium of texts by the men who ran the church.  There is also a widespread and (I think, often justified) suspicion of Christian fundamentalists who use the bible in a highly selective way.   Fans of The West Wing will remember President Bartlett taking apart a fundamentalist evangelist by using the contradictions in her proof texts against her.


If you have read my sermons here on this blog, you will, I hope, agree with my assertion that I am a thoughtful preacher who approaches scripture carefully.   I try to be mindful of the strangeness of the bible, of its foreign and difficult nature, and I am often leery of it.  But, I am also enough of a follower of Karl Barth to agree that without this scripture, we only have our own ideas and constructs of God (which Barth dismissively referred to as religion) to fall back on.   Simply put, I can't know God except through the bible.  I would have nothing to say as a preacher without it.  I believe that the bible helps us to be human, and so I conclude these thoughts with some of Briggs' words in the RNS interview.


One thing we miss in this is the potential to enlarge our minds and hearts and spirits. I think the Bible is the springboard to opening all kinds of ideas, thoughts, beliefs about what our life is about. And I think without it, it narrows our perspective and gives us a much more truncated view of what the possibilities are. I don’t think we’re getting as much of the larger picture by avoiding the source that has been that pathway to all kinds of discovery. (It’s been the pathway to) entertaining most profound thoughts about what possibly we might belong to beyond ourselves or our immediate communities.

The Restful Homily?

Thanks to Mad Padre's Man In Dublin for putting me on to this graphic from the Catholic Memes site.

My father, who was what in the old Anglican world was a "churchman", once told his seminarian son that, in his experience, the sermon or homily was a ten to fifteen minute chance to rest with one's eyelids lightly closed. My father spent much of his churchgoing life in the pews of small parishes where the homiletical bar was sometimes set low, but knew that the small church offered other compensations. My dad never lived to see the age of internet memes, and if he had he would have been scornful of me for trying to explain them to him, but I think he would have liked this one.

When I was a young and self-absorbed university lecturer, I would be driven to distraction by the sight of inattentive or sleeping faces in front of me. Twenty years later, as an older and, hopefully, wiser preacher, I don't take it so personally. I realize that there are those who struggle to church despite a busy morning of childcare, or shift work, or who wrestle, as my dad did, with the deafness, fatigue, and the other gifts of old age. They still come, and their worship is pleasing to God. However, I also realize that their faithfulness, combined with the urgent demands of proclamation of the good news of Christ's gospel, demands that the preacher gives of his or her best. I think of an Anglican colleague of mine who confided rather blithely that she composed her homily during the gradual hymn, and I wouldn't blame her parishioners for falling asleep during the sermon. I probably would too.

For preachers out there who haven't yet seen it, this video from the Working Preacher website from last week is worth four minutes of your time. Matt Skinner teaches New Testament at Luther Seminary and is one of the regulars on the Sermon Brainwave podcast. Skinner doesn't say anything here that you probably didn't (or should have) heard in your homiletics course, but it has some good advice for keeping your parishioners awake.

Doing Church in Hipster Brooklyn

Sometimes I'm tempted to think that churches are no longer countries for young people, and then a story like this one give me hope. Perhaps the "Skinny Jeans" angle explains why it was carried in the NYT's style section, but no matter. MP+




November 2, 2011
A Congregation in Skinny Jeans
By MARISA MELTZER

ONE recent Sunday night on the south side of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a crowd of more than 100 men and women in their 20s and early 30s gathered.

True to the unspoken dress code of the neighborhood, they were wearing high-waisted skinny jeans, vintage T-shirts and deliberately homely sweaters. One woman in a floral romper, her platinum-blond hair cut in a shag, carried a Bob Seger vinyl record under her arm. After a gospel band played, the group listened as a man with a tattoo and a shaved head, Thomas Vito Aiuto, gave a talk that referred in turn to Woody Allen, jogging and London cabdrivers.

They were at church.

Resurrection Presbyterian Church and Mr. Aiuto (known as Vito), its pastor, have developed a reputation for attracting the artistic young denizens of the neighborhood to services that combine readings of Psalm 85 with sermons that have a somewhat secular inflection.

Mr. Aiuto, 39, bristles when his church is singled out as particularly cool. “I don’t want this church to be special,” he said over chicken mole at a Williamsburg taqueria. “I don’t want us to be a church for artists. I want it to be a garden-variety church. What we have to offer people is God.” He paused for a moment. “And I think our music is really good.”

While only one-quarter of the so-called millennial generation, those born after 1980, attend weekly religious services (according to a study by the Pew Research Center), young pastors like Mr. Aiuto and Jay Bakker, the son of the televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye, as well as groups like the Buddhist-inspired Dharma Punx, are tailoring their messages to young worshipers.

In Mr. Aiuto’s case, this can involve a certain irreverence (he made a rude gesture while illustrating a point about the parable of the prodigal son during a theological question-and-answer session after one recent service) and a dash of self-deprecation.

“I’m shocked I’m a preacher,” he said. “There’s a part of me that did and in some ways still feels that I have no place standing up and telling other people what to do or to believe.”

Read the whole piece here.

"If People Are the Focus Then There's No Hope". Paul Wilson on Preaching

Paul Scott Wilson, from Emmanuel College, Toronto School of Theology, on what he calls "one of the biggest issues that there is in preaching", the need for the preacher to focus the sermon on God.

Notable Quotable: Barry Ward on Why Funeral Planning Matters

"A Christian funeral service focuses attention on what God has done for us in Christ." So says Rev. Barry Ward, pastor of Saving Grace Lutheran Church in Saskatchewan, in a great little article in The Canadian Lutheran. Worth reading by all pastors who are caught in the awkward space between what families want for a celebration of life and what the church's funeral liturgy can offer. It's an awkward space to be in, but Ward reminds us why that conversation is worth having. MP+

Tom Long on Narrative vs Episodic Preaching

I have a lot of time for Tom Long as a guide to the art of preaching. I heard him at a clergy day some years back and his wisdom really impressed me.

In this clip from Working Preacher, he talks about the dangers of assuming that an ADHD culture can still understand narrative preaching, and offers some advice accordingly.