Customer Reviews

Preaching Re-Imagined: The Role of the Sermon in Communities of Faith

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is a book that those who currently teach preaching and those who practice the art of preaching would do well not to miss.

Doug Pagitt, aside from being an excellent communicator, is also a top notch, challenging thinker. In Preaching Re-Imagined he lays out the problem (preaching as we know it is broken- the same people hear the same messages year after year and yet continue to struggle with the same problems) and some of the standard reasons why people imagine preaching is ineffective (the problem is the people, the method, the preacher, the content, etc).
Those aren't the problem, Pagitt says. Rather, the issue is "speaching", that is, defining preaching down to simply a monologue. And a steady diet of monologue is detrimental to the soul of the community- when all the communication runs in one direction, there are unintended consequences both to the speaker and the hearers. It may be fine in the short term, but long term this tends to stunt the growth of all involved.

Doug advocates something he calls progressional dialogue- becoming communities who listen to the preachers among us, not only the preacher standing in front of us.

This is a seriously great book that will challenge anyone who fills the role of "preacher" for his or her community to consider the impact their method may have on the hearers, and to consider from the ground-up the "hows", "whys" and "whats" of preaching.

Check this book out- even if you are at a size as a church where dialogue has become impossible on Sundays, there's much here to glean. This book serves as a wake up call for pastors to once again begin involving the people in the work of teaching one another.

A quote:
"As pastor I want to be part of a community where the workings of God are imbedded in all, where the roles of teaching and learning aren't mine alone, but instead are intrinsic to who we are as a people."

Amen.

Pagitt has taken a stand against oratory in general. For a book on preaching, it is guaranteed to be lost in the history of the discipline, buried under better works.

Pagitt's contention is that oratory, to which he gives the inane and grammatically painful term, "speaching," exalts an individual to an undeserved position of authority which doesn't honor the community's role in discerning truth. Instead, he recommends the equally painful "dialogical progression" (as though any dialogues don't have an intended progress), which boils down to nothing more than talking with his audience. What Pagitt lacks, and what I'll go to pains to detail, is 1) any biblical foundation, 2) any accurate understandings of history, and 3) any proof that his own methods are fruitful.

Pagitt makes wild claims about dialoging with the audience to be a biblical norm, even stating that speeches in the Bible are a rarity. This is, in a word, nonsense. In nearly every book of the Bible someone makes a speech, and in every case, the Bible exalts their speaking with authority FOR the community, and not merely with the community. Pagitt offers no proof that his assertions about what the Bible says and does are accurate.

Secondly, Pagitt makes the completely unfounded and uncited claim that "speaching," or oratory in general, are a product of the Enlightenment. Anyone with a college education will find this intellectually insulting. From the ancient greco-roman orators, whose methods influenced the biblical writings, history and timelessly and repeatedly proven the effectiveness of oratory (that is, of a speaker in authority moving an audience to an intended purpose).

Thirdly, Solomon's Porch, his popularized church, has proven to have an actually minimal effect in its immediate community. While their event invitation list claims hundreds, actual attendance is small. His "radical" move to church without microphones doesn't forward the priesthood of all believers, it only forwards the cause of having a minimal number of priests in your church. Pagitt speaches widely at conferences in exactly the form he decries, despite the fact that he has no proven track record of his own effectiveness.

All that to say, this book is a waste of time. It is founded on nonsense and it will be lost in history. Perhaps the most telling indicator is that Pagitt dismisses the expository methods of Martin Lloyd-Jones, and tells readers who like him simply to return Pagitt's book to the store. It kind of gives you a sense of how much Pagitt is really interested in dialogue.

James W. Miller is the author of God Scent: A Devotional.

Doug Pagitt is convinced that preaching would be more faithful to Biblical faith formation and the nurturing of healthy communities if it were more dialogical and less monologue (I agree). Encourage people to respond to statements by the preacher and to each other, and you communicate worth of their insight and enrich the preaching event.

There you go, you don't need to read the book now, everything else is redundancy or gross exaggerations of the downside of not taking his approach. It's as if he's never heard a well crafted sermon from a pastor who knows and loves his/her congregation, and as if preaching is the only event in the life of a congregation. He says at one point "Speaching also strips away any chance for people in the congregation to feel known and understood by their pastor." Oh come on. There is also no acknowledgment of the good purpose of having someone who is trained and dedicated to studying the Word and bringing teaching to the congregation. Not everyone gets a lot out of their own reading of the scripture, not everyone has time to really dig into the history and meaning of the context or the original language. That's something preachers give to their congregations.

The book "Preaching Re-Imagined" re-discovers and re-packages the idea of dialogical preaching. Creative styles of preaching in general, and dialogical styles of preaching in particular, have been discussed and used for a long time. While this book doesn't present anything "new," it does offer a practical guide to understanding one way of preaching in a conversational style. This style is characterized by preparing and facilitating the sermon collaboratively. The most helpful aspect of this book is it's practicality. But other books also describe similar approaches.

John McClure's book "The Round-Table Pulpit" describes "collaborative preaching" where the pastor hosts a "sermon roundtable." Lucy Rose's book "Sharing the Word" suggests "conversational preaching" where "the preacher and the congregation are colleagues, exploring together the mystery of the Word of God for their own lives, as well as the life of the congregation, the larger church, and the world." Mark Elliot's book "Creative Styles of Preaching" describes nine different styles of preaching. All of these books add to the growing cannon of books on creative styles of preaching.

Pagitt asks some tough and good questions about today's preaching style, some which need to be seriously considered and answered by today's preacher.

Criticisms: He builds a straw man which he calls "speeching" and spends a great deal of the book tearing it down. Emphasizes the priesthood of the believer while neglecting the Biblical role of the pastor/preacher. Downplays the authority and sufficiency of Scripture and its role in the believer's life. Assumes that everyone wants to take part in and will grow through progressional dialogue. Some of the Biblical and historical evidence for his proposed model of preaching is simply wrong and ill-informed. I would also entirely disagree with his purpose in preaching.

I'm at least thankful that someone from the emerging church movement has engaged in a serious discussion about emerging church preaching. I thoroughly enjoyed interacting with the book and walked away challenged, but not helped.

To borrow the wording from a couple other reviews on here about this book, Pagitt's book is a bunch of post-modern, rambling fluff that throws the baby out with the bath water. While I can somewhat sympathize with some of his concerns about the nature of preaching, his answers to his concerns are all wrong. I whole-heartedly believe there is and should be a place for group interaction and discussion about the scriptures, but that place is better suited for a small group or sunday school setting, not as a replacement for good sound biblical preaching.

I am a senior at a bible college and once a week we have a freshmen chapel where a freshmen who has had no training in homiletics and very little hermeneutical training gets to preach, and let me tell you, it never comes out good. Allowing just anyone to preach to the church isn't the best idea.

Paggit's book is also very repetitive. He probably could have shortened it from 262 pages to about 150 or less. The whole book is just him rambling. I looked at the works cited page in the back and he has four sources cited throughout the whole book.....FOUR! The whole book is just him talking about the same couple of things over and over again with no support from outside sources.

If you're looking for a good book on preaching, DO NOT read this one. but if you're looking for a pretty awful book about preaching, by all means, pick up "Preaching Re-Imagined"

This is the first book I've read by Pagitt. The title grabbed my attention because it's pretty obvious that a one-man-monologue is not usually the most effective way to teach/learn information. I believe there must be various modes of interaction with the material (question, dialogue, experience, etc.) for it to be learned and lived.

I assumed that Pagitt was advocating a form of preaching that incorporated those elements in the transmission of the message, but instead he insists, "The good news [gospel] is not informational" (p. 103) and "People's lives are not changed by the information they get" (p. 163). I have 3 responses:
1) News is information.
2) Information changes people's lives - for instance, when my wife told me the news that she was pregnant it changed everything.
3) How can an author write a book full of information promoting a change when he doesn't believe that information changes people's lives?

Pagitt says (and I agree), the "whole point of preaching is to help people grow in their understanding of God and how we are to live as God's people and to empower the church to live out God's mission" (p. 162). Describing his own practice of preaching, he says, "I talk for awhile, then I invite others to comment, ask questions, offer clarifications, and so on. If I've done my job, people are thinking and talking about faith issues in a new way, and that thinking will lead them to new considerations" (p. 199). This is similar to the way that every preaching pastor I know would describe his own role, so I fail to see how his ideas can be described as a "re-imagining" of preaching.

His stated goal is "not to convince people that speaching [pre-planned, one-way monologue] is a failure as much as...trying to provide a new way of thinking for those who've already concluded such but don't have the words to go with their intuition" (p. 114). But all he really does is encourage listeners to practice active-listening skills and preachers to be involved in the day-to-day lives of their listeners. This is hardly revolutionary stuff and it certainly doesn't require my imagination to be involved.

Any book that discounts expository preaching and instead relies on delivery above substance is going to fail. This book is all about man's power to create something instead of being true to the biblical text and the power of the Holy Spirit.

I rate it a three not because it wasn't a good book, but because of what I think is an antagonistic attitude. There are many things in the book that I think are worth thinking about, and probably using to help change our current way of doing ministry. I don't like how he seems to put things in the book for the sole purpose of antagonizing people - Doug knows some people will never change, however some people set on the fence, antagonizing them doesn't help, it will make them jump the other way....

A thought provoking, fun read. Pagitt's writing style along with the intentional format of the book lend to an outcome that makes this read a great tool to instigate discussion and creativity. For those brave enough to help investigate and refine the art of preaching, do yourself (and your listeners) a favor and buy this book.