RITUAL REVIVAL FOR PLAYFUL PROTESTANT PREACHING

As a Christian participating in a diverse culture, I also recognize secular calls for revival. William McLoughlin captures the need for revival well: "Awakenings begin in periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our structures, and the authority of our leaders in church and state."59 American culture needs the kind of catharsis that a revival period provides. In fact, McLoughlin writes that periods of revival "are not only fruitful but necessary if a culture is to survive the traumas of social change."60 The time has come for churches to stop abiding this trauma and begin speaking and acting the disruptive Good News to a world in peril.

As mainline Protestants learn to negotiate life in this world with its many moral and theological languages, we will find a renewed ability to reclaim our relevance and authority. Through conversations with other Christians during revivals and the renewal of preaching as language play, mainline Protestants can learn how to understand the faith positions of others and better express our own. As Protestants model and practice the graceful play of language in worship, we may begin carrying this practice into our daily lives. Churches can gradually cease to be homogeneous communities and become more vibrant, pluralistic ones. This transformation need not necessarily be a peaceful, orderly process. No "great awakening" ever is. At the very least, the time is ripe for mainline Protestants to embrace the socially disruptive nature of the gospel by playfully preaching the Word of God in its plurality of languages.

1 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1937), 193.

2 This paper concerns moderate to liberal mainline denominations, which include fellowships such as the United Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans (ELCA), United Church of Christ, American Baptists, and the Disciples of Christ, of which I am a member. While there is increasing racial and ethnic diversity among these denominations, this paper focuses on the situation in predominantly white churches. In fact, many observations about the situation in white mainline churches contradict the kind of growth experienced in numerous nonwhite mainline churches. Though not a focus of this essay, the growth of many black churches may hold great lessons for white congregations-one of these lessons may turn out to be the continuing importance of the revival tradition in the black church. My aim here is not to engage in a comparative study of revival across traditions but simply to pay attention to the history of revival within some white mainline Protestant traditions.

3 Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at the Church in the New Age (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), 39.