So That All Might Know: Preaching That Engages the Whole Congregation - Softcover

Troeger, Thomas H.; Everding, H. Edward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0687652383 ISBN 13: 9780687652389

Verlag: Abingdon Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Become a more effective preacher by understanding the multiple intelligences and learning styles present in your congregation. Most preachers experience the conundrum of reaching some people in the congregation, and not others. Is this problem just a matter of some folks being “tuned in” to the gospel, while others aren’t? Probably not, say Thomas H. Troeger and H. Edward Everding, Jr. Instead, it results from the diverse intelligences and learning styles represented throughout the congregation. A great deal of research in recent years has demonstrated that people receive and process information and communication in wildly different ways. Troeger and Everding use that research to show their readers how to craft the sermon to speak to each of those multiple learning styles each time they step into the pulpit.

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Thomas H. Troeger was Lantz Professor emeritus at Yale Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music. He wrote more than 20 books in the fields of preaching, poetry, hymnody and worship, including A Sermon Workbook: Exercises in the Art and Craft of Preaching, Imagining a Sermon, and Music as Prayer: The Theology and Practice of Church Music. Troeger held ordinations in both the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches. He was also a flutist and a poet whose work appears in the hymnals of most denominations and is frequently set as choral anthems. Professor Troeger was a graduate of Yale University, Colgate Rochester Divinity School and Dickinson College. In 2014 the University of Basel, Switzerland, awarded him an honorary doctorate in theology for his international work in homiletics and his development of "a contemporary religious language which does justice to both aesthetic and theological demands." In 2016 he gave the Beecher Lectures at Yale University. His final book, The End of Preaching, was based on these lectures.

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So That All Might Know

Preaching That Engages the Whole CongregationBy Thomas H. Troeger

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2008 The United Methodist Publishing House
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-687-65238-9

Chapter One

All of Us for All of God

Preaching That Honors Many Ways of Knowing

All of Us

All of us for all of God. It sounds simple enough. But try to preach so that the Spirit working through you opens the whole congregation to the glory and wonder of God. You immediately encounter the complexity of who we human creatures are, who God is, and how we interrelate and communicate with one another. Looking out upon the congregation, you are aware that people perceive, process, and respond to your sermons in strikingly different ways.

Sometimes after preaching a sermon I wonder what "all of them" really heard. Listening to their comments, I think: Is that what I said? Sometimes I respond "Thank you" because it seems that some of them heard more than I said. I stand amazed how the Spirit can work through my limitations. But other times I regret how my limitations may block the Spirit.

Both of us have learned that the Spirit is not ours to command or control: "The wind/spirit blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes" (John 3:8). No homiletical method can guarantee the Spirit will come to the preacher and the congregation. Yet we believe as Augustine does that "in order to know the truth of what is spoken, I must be taught by him who dwells within and gives me counsel about words spoken externally in the ear." Or as the Protestant reformer John Calvin puts the matter: "For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his word, so also the word will not find acceptance in men's hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit." Attending to the Spirit includes relying on the gifts that God gives us, believing that we have received them for a purpose, and trusting that they can strengthen our preaching of the gospel.

The phrase "all of us" points to the multiple ways of knowing that God has bestowed upon us:

Are we possessed with the capacity for deep and passionate feeling? Yes, but we are not limited to feeling.

Do we have the ability to observe, reason, and invent solutions to difficult problems? Yes, but we are not defined by our thought alone.

Are we creatures who can taste the extraordinary variety of the material world? Yes, but our identities are larger than our bodies.

Do our souls flow with visions that keep hope alive and open us to the living God? Yes, but we are not purely spiritual beings.

To engage "all of us for all of God" means, then, to engage the full range of who we are as creatures. Not just our feeling. Not just our thinking. Not just our materiality. Not just our spirituality. But the full, rich treasury of our humanity as created by God, the many varied ways God has given us to perceive, process, and respond to the world. Preachers who engage our multiple capacities for learning and knowing become more effective vessels of the Spirit.

Despite the richness of our resources, most of us have favored ways of learning and knowing, including how we process sermons. Wise pastors know that some of their listeners love stories, while others are listening for what the point is, and still others are waiting to be touched in the depths of their being.

"Draw a picture that will help me see what you are saying."

"Clarify your argument so I can figure out if I agree with you."

"Warm my heart, and I will feel the truth."

The variety of favored ways of knowing suggests that preachers need to draw upon their full humanity in order to communicate effectively with the full humanity of their congregation. By expanding their cognitive repertoire—that is to say, by cultivating the ability to use many ways of learning and knowing in their sermons—preachers can reach a broader range of listeners.

Preacher-Friendly Theories of Learning and Knowing

Many preachers intuitively realize that different people learn differently. But we do not have to depend on intuition alone. We can build into sermon preparation the ways of knowing that are evident in people's responses to our sermons. Cognitive learning theory refines our understanding of the act of communication between preacher and congregation. It clarifies how we perceive, process, and respond to the world through many ways of knowing. It helps explain why different congregation members have varied responses to the same sermon. And it adds motivation to be a preacher who "gets up from his or her desk, leaves behind interpretive reading, and goes in search of real bodies to engage in conversation about the text." Listening to the extraordinary range of responses to a biblical text reveals that there are many ways of knowing, and these different ways will play a decisive role in how a sermon is received.

We learn through feelings awakened by vocal tone and physical gesture as much as by content. A young boy listening to one preacher who speaks in a harsh voice about God's love turns to his father and asks, "Why is that man so angry?" A couple with tears in their eyes thanks another preacher for sharing a story about embracing grief at the loss of a child.

We learn through thinking that sometimes expands the boundaries of conventional thought and sometimes gets interpreted in ways we never intended. One person's comment about our analysis of a difficult biblical text reduces our sermon to a stereotypical idea while another person notes how we challenged her thinking about the passage and opened a new universe of meaning.

We learn through imagining that delights some listeners while it distances others. Talking about "the symbol of the resurrection" upsets one group in the congregation while others are grateful because they had never considered interpreting Easter in such a visionary way.

We learn through doing, although different people have different ideas of what "doing faith" means. One person comes out grateful for the down-to-earth practical ways we named for applying the sermon to real life, while another found our remarks too simplistic and divorced from reality.

• Feeling

• Thinking

• Imagining

• Doing

Any mode of learning will be interpreted in different ways by different people. But by employing all four modes of learning we increase the communicative range of our preaching because we embrace more completely each individual listener's humanity as well as the variety of learning modes that characterize the congregation as a whole.

Utilizing many ways of knowing, our sermons model how the congregation can do the same. Preachers thereby encourage people to employ God-given abilities that they may have neglected. The person whose passion can be enhanced by precise thought and the person whose logic can be empowered by deeper feeling can learn from the preacher how to achieve a more balanced, holistic faith. It is a faith that fulfills the first commandment to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength (Mark 12:30).

Our brief review of four modes of learning—feeling, thinking, imagining, doing—introduces the basic pattern of this book. In each chapter we identify a theory about how people perceive, process, and respond to the world so that preachers can become more skilled...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Abingdon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0687652383
• ISBN 13: 9780687652389
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland