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RITUAL REVIVAL FOR PLAYFUL PROTESTANT PREACHING
Encounter, Summer 2006 by Blosser, Joseph
A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.1
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More than sixty years ago, H. Richard Niebuhr wrote these words mocking the naïve liberalism of American Christianity. While American religious life since Niebuhr has undergone numerous divisions and theological currents, his statement still captures the malaise of the ever-diminishing white mainline Protestant church in America.2 Front and center, or rather front and left or front and right, of this malaise stands the Protestant pulpit. Following Fred Craddock's groundbreaking shift in homiletics more than thirty-five years ago, scholars and pastors have written a library of texts to reclaim, reenvision, rejuvenate, and redeem the sermon from this situation. Mainline churches, however, continue to dwindle, the political voice of progressive Christians has grown hoarse, and the pulpit remains unmoved. It is not that preaching texts are misguided or fallacious; rather, their scope is typically too narrow. To put it differently, the problem with preaching is not just a problem of homiletical technique but also a problem of the context of preaching-a problem of language, ritual, and community. While attending to the problems of preaching in this broader sense may not single-handedly reverse the decline in mainline churches, it can serve as a focal point from which other transformations can gain energy and direction.
In many Protestant churches, the sermon has become singularly responsible for creating powerful worship services and transforming congregations. Even in denominations that celebrate the Lord's Supper regularly, the sermon often remains the central focus of worship and the most commented upon element. Numerous studies suggest that the number one characteristic most parishioners seek in a pastor is not ritual creativity, organization, or even counseling skills, but preaching ability. Since many Protestant congregations have a voice in who will serve as their pastor, how and what a minister preaches can weigh heavily on a congregation's decision to retain or to release her or him. Desiring to be accepted into a congregation and shaped by a strong secular society, "the bulk of the clergy," according to Pierre Berton, "tend to go along with the majority feeling in the United States at any given time."3 It is no wonder, therefore, that many Protestant churches have lost their public gospel voice. These churches have invested their faith in a single aspect of the Christian tradition, the preached word, and yet when clergy separate the sermon from the disruptive diversity and creativity of the gospel in order to appease popular opinion, the sermon loses its ability to instruct, inspire, and develop faith.
This paper's monitory tone arises from a flawed answer to the problems of preaching. Insisting that better preaching can be cultivated through textbooks neglects the wider context of the sermon. Effective preaching needs a strong worship environment-a preacher can bring enormous energy to the pulpit after a moving hymn or an appropriate liturgy. But scholars and preachers often neglect the importance of ritual life and shift their focus wholly to the sermon.4 The resulting loss of ritual life with its creative, disruptive power causes the Word spoken in worship to stagnate and lose its points of connectivity with the congregation and with the divine. This paper argues for a revitalized conception of the Word as a process emerging from the dialogical interplay of diverse faith languages as they are cultivated and expressed through the practices of rituals, sacraments, and preaching.5 If the revitalization of ritual in Protestant congregations is critical for infusing the Spirit into preaching and worship, there are innumerable creative, disruptive rituals that different denominations and congregations can develop. For members of "frontier" denominations such as the United Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Disciples of Christ, I suggest a retrieval of a vital component of our collective history, namely, the revival. The word "revival" among contemporary mainline Christians may connote politically charged evangelistic events with which we would prefer not associate. While many contemporary revivals do limit themselves to passionate appeals for conversation and recommitment, and while this is part of revival, I want to challenge mainline Christians with a more historically rigorous conception that sees revival not as an evangelistic tool alone but as a sacrament of Christian life.
Taken sacramentally, revivals can offer great possibilities for the disruption of the monotony of Protestant preaching and worship. Like other rituals, sacraments engage communities in practices that pull them together and help establish identity. Unlike other kinds of ritual, however, sacraments are specific to faith communities. As they strengthen a community through a common practice, this practice becomes a symbol that points beyond itself to the divine. When individuals in the community participate in this sacred symbol, it opens them to the radical, even infinite, diversity of the symbolized. These liminal encounters often demand new modes of expressionnew languages of faith-as they connect people's lived experiences of the divine with the languages that form their identities. Even as only an annual sacrament of Word and communion, revivals can still offer mainline Protestant preachers a powerful forum to begin playing with the plurality of moral and theological languages present in their congregations and communities. By playing amidst the horizons of these diverse languages, preachers can forge new vocabularies of faith that connect the gospel with life in transforming ways.
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