In Brueggemann’s words, we preach to “fund imagination.” Through proclaiming the Word, the Spirit reorganizes perception, experience, and even faith to enable hearers to live in the reality of Christ’s work, respond to Christ, and obey. This kind of preaching subverts the dominant habits of thinking and the ways our imaginations have been taught to see the world. Instead of dissecting the text, making it portable, and distributing it to people for their own personal use, the preacher re-narrates the world as it is under the Lordship of Christ and then invites people into it.I can't help feeling that this is a bit like a protestant equivalent of the Catholic recognition that consecration in the Eucharist is to be attributed to the whole prayer, if not the whole service, rather than just a small set of words.
Any how, it is clear to me that worship as a whole should do this. To be sure, if there is preaching it should play its part, but at the end of the day, surely, if an act of worship is about re-calling us to Christ in company of one another, it best serves that by playing a part in topping up the imaginitive fund. I also can't help wondering whether the focus on the icon of preaching has served to obscure the real failure of liturgy [understood more broadly than just words set to be read together, but as the ordering of corporate worship] in the West to either fund imagination or promote significant engagement with the missio Dei in our own times. I've been working in odd moments on the idea of a culture jamming liturgy which is precisely about this.
Leadership Blog: Out of Ur: The Myth of Expository Preaching (part 2): proclamation that inspires the imagination:
Filed in: preaching, Christian, imagination, Brueggemann
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