Preach it bro! Or do I mean 'teach it'?

After a decent small bit of reflective practice, Rick Warren wrote: "What I have since discovered is that lecturing a passive audience for 20 to 40 minutes, what Doug Pagitt calls 'speeching,' has been repeatedly proven to result in a very low retention of content. Likewise, adult education experts testify, along with a multitude of unregenerate pew sitters, that passive learning rarely transforms values. Does this mean we should abandon instruction in the church? Of course not. After all, we are commissioned to teach people to obey everything Christ commanded. It simply means traditional preaching is not the best medium for skill training and instruction."
Which is true but I think it's a perspective that tends to be heard but not acted on because either many churches have a superstitious [in effect] reverence for preaching without necessarily noting whether what they are labelling preaching is really teaching, or the effort of doing something about the insight seems to be beyond them or to be a balloon made of lead.
When my wife trained to be a Reader she had to do an assignment on the gospel words that Warren picks up here and we came to the same sort of conclusion:

Preaching to inspire rather than instruct is a differentiation we see in Jesus' own ministry. The Greek word for "preach" (kerusso) means to announce. This is not the same as the word for "teach" (didasko), meaning to instruct

This article is oriented to examining the change that this might make to the ministry of preaching. I have to say that I'm more interested in how to make churches more truly into learning communities. I suspect our liturgies (in the broad sense of the term: what we do together before God) will have to change. I still think that the Mormons actually have something to teach us here, in practical terms. Sunday school for all! I know that there are churches in the USA that do that too, but it's pretty rare this side of the Pond.
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