Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation [Paperback]

John W. Wright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 16, 2007

Here is Biblical narrative preaching that transforms. John W. Wright presents a new model of preaching that aims to connect the biblical text with a congregation so that they are formed into a true Christian community. Such formation calls for interpretative engagement with both the biblical narrative and the cultural narrative that shapes our society. Wright critically surveys current theories of preaching and the variety of hermeneutical practices, providing clear guidance and practical direction for faithful preaching.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is an important and timely book. John Wright has presented us with an excellent volume on narrative preaching. As you would expect of a good text on preaching, it is very helpful with regard to the mechanics of narrative preaching. But Dr. Wright offers us much more, especially as he embeds narrative preaching in a thoughtful and reflective ecclesiology. The book is written in such a way that the reader experiences what the book describes, as Dr. Wright leads us through discussions of preaching as comedy and tragedy and ultimately through narrative preaching as a means of inviting listeners to participate in the redemptive story of God. This volume will be an invaluable resource both to preachers and students of preaching." (Ron Benefiel, president, Nazarene Theological Seminary )

"The church should be worried about this book. It comes as an invitation to rethink the task of preaching, but three pages into it you'll realize that Wright is not giving us another 'how-to' book for adding to the plethora of 'messages' delivered every Sunday. No, this little book is packed with minor-prophet-like punch, arguing that preaching is the practice by which the North American church has fallen, but also gives us a glimpse of how preaching could help it stand. Providing a brilliant historical and theological diagnosis of the problem with so-called biblically based, need-centered preaching (whether liberal or conservative), Telling God's Story winsomely sketches what authentic 'biblical' preaching looks like: not conscripting the Bible to legitimate the cultural narratives of consumerist individualism or triumphant nationalism, but rather finding ourselves in the biblical story as an alternative to both. If the church is properly said to be a polis, then this book unpacks the 'politics' of homiletics. It should be required reading in seminaries across North America. And we could hope that pastors already immersed in ministry would be willing to risk reading this book. But be forewarned: it will radically change your understanding of your charge to 'preach the gospel.'" (James K. A. Smith, associate professor of philosophy, Calvin College )

"If you think preaching should focus on getting individuals to heaven and guiding America (back) to greatness, then do not read this book. If you think that Christians make the church and that its purpose is to help them, then run away from this book. For here John Wright proclaims the biblical gospel that God intends the church 'as the visible body of Christ in the world.' Setting the biblical story over against cultural stories that have falsified the gospel and emaciated preaching, Wright calls for a homiletic reformation that preaches the congregation into the biblical story. Wright is right about what is wrong with our preaching and our churches, and his corrective guidance in this book is the cure we need. Attentive to rhetoric, filled with pastoral insight and sermonic exemplifications, this book is essential assistance in becoming 'the rhetorical embodiment of the biblical story'--that is, the church." (Brent Laytham, associate professor of theology and ethics, North Park Theological Seminary )

"John Wright very clearly exposes both the prevalence and dangers of the split between 'personal salvation' and 'mission of the nation-state' preaching in North American culture and calls us instead to the kind of preaching that will immerse our listeners in God's larger story. His many helpful insights into such topics as a 'homiletic of turning,' comedic versus tragic moves, therapeutic and managerial functions, and elements of congregational contexts will positively affect your preaching and pastoral care. This is a significantly constructive book!" (Dr. Marva J. Dawn, theologian, author, educator with Christians Equipped for Ministry, and Teaching Fellow in Spiritual Theology at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia )

"Challenging some of the most determinative conceits represented by contemporary American homiletical practices, Wright provides an alternative account of preaching by helping us reclaim a tragic dimension internal to our lives as Christians. Deeply erudite, Wright draws on the work of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck to develop an account of preaching in which the church becomes the subject as well as the agent through which Christians learn again to have their lives narrated by the gospel.

One of the most surprising aspects of this extraordinary book is its ability to help us recognize that current forms of sermon practices can be traced to the Puritan attempt to move the individual from sin to salvation in such a way that it provided reassurance of what it meant to live in God's elect nation. As a result, Wright traces the current accommodated character of American preaching to what people oftentimes associate with a conservative religious movement. This analysis alone makes this an important book, but even more significant Wright provides a constructive alternative to such accommodated forms of preaching by providing us with examples that can shape an alternative imagination." (Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School )

"Out of his own rich experience as a scholar and preacher, John Wright summons us to 'reinvent' preaching through a rhetoric that draws us out of the comfort zone of a cultural narrative where the biblical text dissolves into a happy ending and, instead, places us into the biblical narrative where we are taken up and transformed by God's story. In clear and compelling language that often rises to eloquence, this book exposes the subtle but almost sinister shift in North American Christianity by which the horizon of contemporary world culture has displaced and replaced the biblical horizon of God's narrative of creation and redemption by a fusion of individual piety and national religion. Authentic preaching then seeks to renarrate a world that makes truth relevant to its own existence by forming a Christian community--the church--that finds its life within God's narrative. Such preaching draws the church out of the world in order to place it back within the world to live out God's narrative of salvation, justice and hope. I wish that I had read this book forty years ago when I began my own preaching ministry!" (Ray S. Anderson, Senior Professor of Theology and Ministry, Fuller Theological Seminary )

Product Details

• Paperback: 166 pages
• Publisher: IVP Academic (April 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0830827404
• ISBN-13: 978-0830827404
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #182,809 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Takes Aim at Contemporary Preaching & Offers an Alternative Approach, September 17, 2008

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C. Stephans - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation (Paperback)

Professor John Wright's book takes aim at Christian preaching in America. He diagnoses today's preaching as placating to the culture and as merely contributing toward a "value-added" culture rather than building the kingdom of God.

Wright states the problem with contemporary preaching: "Preaching has largely ceased to incorporate individuals into the concerns created by the Christian Scriptures. Instead, preaching has become the application of an individualistic, therapeutic biblical language to contemporary concerns or disembodied calls to social justice." (19)

He elaborates on the problem that he sees catering to a consumer-driven need for a therapeutic climate in church and the desire for preaching that affirms the individualistic self-actualization that our culture cherishes and pursues. He indicts pastors who weave the Biblical narrative into this false gospel of American culture. He writes about what he sees as a divorce between theology and preaching fueled by a mindset that diminishes the power of the gospel and seeks the approval of congregations more than the approval of God. Wright is no fan of American pastors, contemporary or past.

He calls contemporary preaching "comedic" in that it seeks to fuse the horizon of the biblical text into the preexisting horizon of the congregation. He contrasts this with what he prescribes and calls "tragic" preaching that demolishes the preexisting worldview of the congregation and its culturally-inspired spirituality and replaces it with a countercultural, truly Christian narrative that inspires repentance and conversion and leads to the development of a "peculiar people."

His book's goal is to help preachers learn how to develop a "tragic" homiletic that leads congregations into the Biblical narrative rather than affirming the cultural norms.

The two stories that have characterized American preaching since the founding of the country, according to Wright, have been an individualistic narrative and a narrative that exalts the nation as its object. Wright picks out a few preachers in American history to accuse of either emphasizing the individual at the expense of God's whole people or he accuses them of preaching a gospel that promotes the nation of America as the biblical "city on a hill" at the expense of God's kingdom. Both of these I think are over-generalized stereotypes that focus on an issue while dismissing the work of the Holy Spirit in these ministries. One person so labeled as what one would infer as a heretic is George Whitfield. He is accused by Wright of shifting the whole location of salvation "from God's action in Christ to the personal experience of the individual." (59) Wright disregards any fruit that Whitfield's ministry produce and does not consider that the Spirit may have been at work in his ministry that others have lauded over the ages. It also seems that Wright is ignoring the context in which Whitfield preached--mainly to those who were unchurched and unwelcome in existing churches. I wonder if Wright's indictment of Whitfield also carries over to Wesley--guilt by association. The treatment of Whitfield is indicative of a tone in this book that chastises all who have come before and all who have not adopted Wrights manner of preaching.

Similarly, Wright strongly opposes all notions that God might have inspired and honored the early Americans who longed and strived for America to be a place of God's Spirit and church. Sure they may have esteemed the new land too highly and become too nationalistic, but one cannot deny that God has used their efforts and prayers to advance the gospel both in and through America. Again Wright seems to imply that the Spirit has been absent from the continent and has finally come to him with this new revelation for how to preach.

This may sound harsh, so let me state that the positive writing of this book outweighs the negative. I think Wright is correct in his criticism of some preaching in America. Undoubtedly, the errors in preaching he cites are temptations for all pastors who become influenced by the culture and allow it to direct Biblical interpretation and hermeneutics. His exhortations are well suited for any who preach in America.

He provides several examples of sermons to illustrate the style and content of preaching he espouses in the book. These serve their purpose; however, they did not strike me as being in such contrast to much of the preaching I hear in the churches I attend; although, that is subjective on my part.

He promotes three congregational practices to support the biblical narrative and worldview. These are the Lord's Supper, forgiveness and reconciliation and caring for the needs of saints and hospitality offered to strangers. These he writes are appropriate and necessary for the church to become the people God desires. These unarguably are essential elements in any church and provide a larger context for the "tragic" preaching he suggests.

I think Wright makes some profound and striking points about preaching today. He leads readers back to an emphasis on leading people not necessarily to comfort and affirmation but to repentance and conversion for the purpose of growing up into Christ as a community of saints. I think he undermines his focus by taking historical jabs at preachers in the past who I think have done lasting service to the Body of Christ. His generalizations and stereotypes are also unhelpful and discount the work of God's Spirit in the church today. The good points make this book worth reading for preachers.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Effective Communication Skills Inclosed, March 1, 2010

By 

A. Clarke "Adam B.R. Clarke" (Toronto, ON) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation (Paperback)

A crushing blow to individualism.

The church should move from being a therapy session for individuals and become a peculiar people within society... A "people-group" that does not exist outside of culture, but witness to the grander story of God.

The question of the book becomes: How do you move as a church from being therapy to individuals, but translate people's lives into the biblical narrative to portray and live apart of the body of Christ? This book becomes more than a how-to of preaching, it becomes a life-changing calling for preachers to move their congregations into partakers of the biblical narrative.

The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, a movement looking at the role of narrative, is re-told by Wright to show how North American churches ended up preaching the individualism of Scripture. The church became a place for individuals to get away from the busyness of their week, the stress of the office - basically, the church became a therapeutic centre of individual needs. It was not a community, but a...

Help me overcome, help me move past... Help ME.

The body of Christ was now individual body parts all moving to their own individual needs. The solution became a new message to the people, a movement of sorts that takes away this individual mentality and moves towards community. After all, in community can we only help each other.

The movement starts by moving towards a tragedy, the tragedy of the cross. Tragedy brings enlightenment, understanding, a new narrative. Is that not what the cross accomplished? A brighter hope, a new horizon, and a new narrative to the lives of those partaking in it?

In the individual context of Scripture, the narrative becomes skewed.

The individual turns to scriptures for assurance that he or she really is living within this spiritual path that leads to individual eternal bliss in heaven.
- Wright on Frei

If that is what we are turning from, then what are we being turned to? Well, first we must realize that we are apart of an ongoing story - that starts with creation and will end with God's reign - but we are not there yet. Wright provides three turning points that we need to acknowledge in order to join the story:' [1] Acknowledge the contemporary horizon (worldview) of a congregation as they have been formed by the culture around them
[2] An anchor to move horizontally around the contemporary horizon
[3] Head in a new direction

These three steps allow for a turn towards the wonderful good news of living amid God's story. I truly appreciate the fact that the author does go beyond providing the typical three-step solution, as he gives a whole chapter's worth of hands-on teaching examples of how to turn your congregation toward a worldview that does not separate them from culture, but allows them to be visible witnesses through their newfound ability to have a worldview that is considered peculiar. In a strange way, this moves the congregation into the status-quo, allowing for their narrative to lie outside the lies they are fed everyday.

As I finished the book, I began to see the point. The biblical narrative is not a how-to negotiate the so-called secular divide of personal life, or even how to live a cushy life. The biblical narrative is an awakening to become one of God's elect, to witness his love, as a partaker of God's creation and as a witness that may require an element of suffering. For me, this quote sums up the key focus of Wright's book:

The church does not exist so that individuals might seek intimacy with others, themselves of God. The church exists as a people, a distinct people, whose witness can bring opposition from the world through the fact of its nonconformity, but whose communal life provides concrete, embodied resources for support amid the resultant suffering.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone that does any form of teaching within the church. It gives a great formative history of the decline of teaching within the church, but it also provides examples that can help turn a congregation into strong witnesses of Christ's work. It may be heavy, but the rewards and resulting call to God's story are well worth it.

4.0 out of 5 stars Just waiting for volume two, July 23, 2011

By 

Nathan P. Gilmour "hardlythelastword" (Statham, GA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation (Paperback)

I should note that, although I preached probably a dozen sermons a year when I was in seminary, I preach only four or five a year now. In other words, preaching is not my primary public discourse by any means. (For the sake of comparison, I teach college classes five days a week and lead faculty training sessions eight times a school year in my current professional capacity.) That said, I'm always interested in preaching better next time than I did last, and I agree with Hauerwas and with Wright that preaching, because of its particular situation in the life of the Church, the sermon is a moment and constitutes a practice that can shape the Christian imagination even as some in futurist circles decry the genre as obsolete. Wright in fact names the sermon as the primary site of interpretation (31), taking a stand against theological education that regards academic biblical studies, with its monographs and articles, as the proper place for interpreting text and the sermon as a time merely for "packaging" the work that the academic commentator does. By taking this stand, Wright articulates a particular theology of the Scriptures, holding that there is certainly a place for books about the gospel of John but that they're always helpers to the congregation and the preacher rather than standing on their own as logically prior practices.

Much of Wright's book is dedicated to a theology of the congregation, and his formulae stand in contrast to what he calls the North American narrative, a way of life characterized by individualism, consumerism, and a duality of mind that divides the world between the managerial/objective/scientific and the therapeutic/subjective/spiritual. Drawing from the hermeneutical work of Gadamer, Wright lays out two visions for the homily, what he calls the comedic and the tragic. These are not exact analogues of the dramatic genres but instead point to two relationships between sermon and the North American narrative. The comedic sermon sets forth ways to adjust to the North American Narrative, leaving the basic structures of modern life to stand as given. There may or may not be jokes, but what a comedic sermon never does is point to the world and say, "Sin." Instead, the comedy-sermon suggests small ways that one can relieve the pressure of the objective/material world by means of a temporary retreat into the subjective/spiritual. Wright holds that the comedic sermon has become the norm because of several reasons, among them the removal of preaching from the eucharistic context and its placement in revival and street-preaching scenarios; the personalization (in Wright's terms, the diminution of the gospel from a cosmic drama) of the Christian message in the course of North American history; and pressures on preachers in a free-market context to please religious "consumers."

By contrast, the tragic sermon disrupts the order of things by naming the soul-killing nature of the system, letting the people know that the "gods" of the marketplace are only interested in human sacrifice. The tragic sermon thus sets up a moment for repentance rather than for adjustment-therapy and for affirming one's place in the system-the idea is to imagine the preacher himself and the folks gathered for worship that they are in fact pilgrims and aliens, that the way the North American Narrative teaches us to imagine the "self" and the self's "needs" are not philosophically prior to the sinfulness that pervades all historical moments and the vices that give North American life in the twenty-first century its particular flavor. Because the congregation, as the saved people of God, is already situated within the Biblical narrative when they gather (83), the homily's role is to remind the congregation that their minds should be renewed in accordance to the forgiveness into which God's grace has brought them. The "how-to" section of Wright's book lays out a rhetoric of the homily based on David Buttrick's concept of "moves" within the sermon but steers clear of Buttrick's theological liberalism, which Wright holds as incapable of anything but a comedic sermon and certainly incapable of forming the people called the Church into anything but nice citizens of the liberal state. This rhetoric of turning, as Wright calls it, starts out describing truthfully (and therefore with some appeal, but not so much that the turn becomes a sucker punch (95)) the vision of human good that governs "normal" life in North America, then moving by means of a transition paragraph into a section that sets forth Biblical alternatives to those visions. In other words, the tragic sermon becomes a microcosm of the conversion narrative, hence the book's subtitle.

The last third of the book consists of a discussion of pastoral and congregational practices that go along with the rhetoric of turning, everything from hospitality to Biblical-narrative counseling to congregational Christian education. Along with the book's conclusion, which is an extended commentary on Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana (the great preacher's manual of the early Church), this finishing section gives a strong sense of the practices that make something like a sermon of turning intelligible, and together they give a strong sense, once again, of how congregational life and the shape of the sermon inform one another. Wright warns that too many turning-sermons will wear a congregation out and that the turning-sermon should not be every Sunday's fare (103), but he never does lay out what the other Sundays' sermons might sound like. Perhaps he's setting up demand for a sequel in that omission, but it does make for a less than satisfying experience when, two-thirds of the way through the book, one realizes that one has been reading about "special occasion" sermons without any sense of how "ordinary sermons" might contrast with them.

Wright's book therefore is not a comprehensive guide to sermon-writing so much as a theoretical exploration, but that's precisely the sort of thing that helps many of us, myself included, to think about what the practice of preaching means. Wright's greatest contribution, then, is to remind the reader that there can be no truthful "how-to" without a prior ethics of the congregation and that the pastor or the priest or the elders or whoever shapes the imagination of the congregation are doing so at all moments, whether in consistent or in hypocritical ways. Thus repentance is always a practice, the sermon is one component of that practice, and all such components must always fall under the scrutiny of the theologians (whether pastors or priests or elders) whom the congregation calls "preacher" or "teacher."