Preaching to a Postmodern World: A Guide to Reaching Twenty-first Century Listeners

Graham Johnston’s book considers a very important theme— briskly written, amply illustrated, and quite revealing. I have been preaching for over twenty-five years and benefited enormously from reading the book.

J. John, speaker and writer

Preaching to a Postmodern World provides a clear and helpful approach to communicating Christian truth in our postmodern context.

Susan Perlman, associate executive director, Jews for Jesus

"Graham Johnston has written a very helpful and practical book that both understands the shift in outlook and offers ways to connect to postmodern people.

Rev. Peter Corney, executive director, Arrow Leadership Australia Ltd.

Preaching to a

Postmodern World

A Guide to Reaching

Twenty-first-Century Listeners

Graham Johnston

To Dad

Thanks for showing me the way

© 2001 by Graham MacPherson Johnston

Published by Baker Books

a division of Baker Book House Company

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnston, Graham MacPherson, 1960–

        Preaching to a postmodern world : a guide to reaching twenty-first-century listeners / by Graham MacPherson Johnston.

        p. cm.

        Includes bibliographical references.

        ISBN 0-8010-6367-1 (pbk.)

        1. Preaching. 2. Postmodernism—Religious aspects—Christianity. I Title.

        BV4211.2 .J58 2001

        251—dc21                                       2001025687

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permsision of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Scripture identified as NASB is taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®. Copyright © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

For current information about all releases from Baker Book House, visit our web site:

http://www.bakerbooks.com

Contents

Foreword by Haddon Robinson

Introduction

• Risk Your Life

• Think like a Missionary

• Weigh Style, Skill, and Spirit

1. Toto, We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

• Expect Differing Worldviews from the Pew

• See the Opportunities and the Unprecedented

• What Worked Then May Not Now

• Practicing the Principles: Two Burdens

2. Postmodernity: Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?

• What’s Modern versus Postmodern?

• Reacting to Modernity

• Rejecting Objective Truth

• Skeptics Suspecting Authority

• Living in the Missing Persons Era

• Managing the Blur of Morality

• Postmodernity and the Search for the Transcendent

• It’s a Media-Mad World

• Facing the Knowing Smirk

• Questing for Community

• Living in the Material World

3. Rules for Engagement

• Don’t Engage at the Expense of the Message

• Communication Takes Two—and Time

• Risk Involvement

• Address Where You Live

4. Challenging Listeners

• Become More Relational

• Tune in to the Secular

• Be More Apologetic

• Encourage Accountability

5. Obstacles

• Preaching to the Biblically Clueless

• Deal with the Exclusive Uniqueness of Christ

• The Whatever Age

• Handling Resistance to the Master Plan

• The Ultimate Hot Potato

6. Inroads

• Spirituality Is Hot, Religion Is Not

• You Want to Go Where Everybody Knows Your Name

• Creation and Connectedness to the World

• Sense over Sensibility

7. Practices for Engagement

• Take a Dialogical Approach

• Use Inductive Preaching

• Use Storytelling

• Use Audiovisuals, Drama, and Art

• Use Humor

• Become a Good Listener

• Make Your Delivery Crisp and Clear

Conclusion: No Other Place I’d Rather Be

Notes

Bibliography

Foreword

When you invite an amateur to speak, his first question is usually What will I talk about? If you ask a professional to speak, her question is Who is my audience? The most important single factor in whether or not you are an effective communicator lies in whether or not you doggedly pursue a third question: Who are my listeners?

For some reason, though, those of us called to teach and preach often fail to raise this important part of the equation. Too often our big question is What’s my content?

Let’s face it. We don’t teach the Bible. We teach people the Bible. As vital as it is to know content, it’s not enough. We must know our audiences.

Perhaps we feel we know our listeners. Pastors have a distinct advantage over other communicators. As ministers move among their people, they get to know them. Or they should. They know their names, how many children they have, what they do to earn a living. They know couples who exist in wretched marriages, and parents whose kids have taken off for the far country to lease a condo there.

But hearers are more than their vital statistics. They are denizens of a culture they hardly understand, and in fact may not even realize is there. (After all, if you asked a fish to tell you about its existence, it might not even mention the water.) Yet Christian communicators who want to know their audience must be aware of the culture that shapes them, motivates them, and often lures them away from God.

Graham Johnston describes the water in which we exist. He describes in detail the culture. He points out what it does to us. Better still, he provides some workable leads on how to communicate the life-giving Word to men and women swimming in the currents of the twenty-first century.

If you really want to know the answer to Who is my audience? this book will tell you. Investing a few hours reading it can help you communicate more effectively. Your hearers will be glad you read it. So will you.

Haddon Robinson

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

South Hamilton, Massachusetts

June 2001

Introduction

How is biblical preaching changing now that a recent Barna Report survey shows us two-thirds of Americans no longer believe in objective truth? What will powerful preaching sound like as this twenty-first century continues to unfold?

To get an idea, look at the movie Contact and its central question: Could there be life somewhere else in our universe?1

Jodie Foster, who plays the film’s heroine, is a research scientist optimistic of life in the universe, but openly skeptical to life in the form of a personal God. She represents the classic modernist, relying on science as the arbiter of what’s true. Then in a reversal of fortune, she travels through time and space to encounter intelligent beings from another galaxy, only to find herself awkwardly having to defend her personal encounter in ways that defy the common boundaries of scientific explanation.

Before a congressional hearing, she offers this defense: I had an experience . . . I can’t prove it. I can’t explain it, but everything I know as a living being and everything I am tells me it’s real. I was given something wonderful . . . something that changed me forever. A vision of the universe that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves. That we are not . . . none of us is alone. I wish I could share that . . . I wish that everyone if only for one moment could feel that awe, that humility, that hope.

The message brims with optimism: We are not alone in the universe, and our lives possess meaning.

It’s a message the postmodern culture gets. In the same way that Foster’s character made the shift from a scientific rationalism to an experiential and intuitive base of understanding, our culture has shifted from once clinging to certainty, to now valuing relativistic thinking and a lack of absolute truth. Welcome postmodernity, theologian Diogenes Allen observes. [O]ur intellectual culture is at a major turning point, he says. A massive intellectual revolution is taking place that is perhaps as great as that which marked off the modern world from the Middle Ages. The foundations of the modern world are collapsing, and we are entering a post-modern world.2

Today postmodernity says: All you can believe is what’s in your own heart, count on intuition and faith, give up on the idea of truth, have an experience instead.

This shift in Western thinking is like the air that we breathe, agrees William Willimon: It affects the way we perceive the world, think of ourselves, and how we understand reality or what is. Just because this revolution didn’t begin with some battle cry does not make it any less dramatic. He adds: Sometime between 1960 and 1980, an old, inadequately conceived world ended, and a fresh, new world began. That, they say, calls for a renewed sense of what it means to be Christian, and more precisely, of what it means to be pastors who care for Christians in a distinctly changed world.3

For the biblical expositor as well as the home Bible study leader, this raises unique problems in how to communicate God’s message. After all, to many pastors’ chagrin, the postmodern mindset is not exclusive to the unchurched. It’s shared by those folks who fill church sanctuaries each Sunday. This cultural gap must be bridged, within the church and outside it, so that the Christian worldview engages the listener’s worldview in a life-altering divine encounter.

To start, know that the Christian outlook is neither wholly modern nor postmodern. So Christianity has not changed—just the issues and questions faced by the people in the pews today. As Helmut Thielicke puts it, The Gospel must be constantly forwarded to a new address because the recipient is repeatedly changing place of residence.4

Today, then, preachers must think not only on the message but also on the nature of the hearers. Our times beg the question, Is the message of Christ being heard, not just preached?

If biblical communicators fail to perceive the significant ideological shifts affecting humanity, the church may wake up to discover that preachers are merely talking to themselves about matters only the deeply committed comprehend.

Insight into the postmodern worldview, however, will better equip you to address today’s listener with clarity and relevance in two ways. First, understanding the assumptions, beliefs, and values of your listeners will enable communicators to connect in areas of common ground and shared interest. Second, since preaching carries a prophetic voice that cries out when things run contrary to Christ and His Word, it allows you to challenge.

But how do you connect, and how do you best challenge the postmodern listener?

Risk Your Life

Gaining a knowledge of postmodernity doesn’t mean you must compromise the message to suit the hearer, risk being corrupted, or lose your moorings in Christ. But who hasn’t feared the often-quoted trap Dean Inge describes: He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widow?5

This is perhaps the greatest tension the contemporary church wrestles with—how to reach the present age without selling out to it.

[The Christian message] can fail, acknowledges theologian Lesslie Newbigin, by failing to understand and take seriously the world in which it is set, so that the gospel is not heard but remains incomprehensible because the Church has sought security in its own past instead of risking its life in a deep involvement with the world. It can fail, on the other hand, by allowing the world to dictate the issues and the terms of the meeting. The result then is that the world is not challenged at its depth but rather absorbs and domesticates the gospel and uses it to sacralize its own purposes.6

After all, God’s truth transcends culture; for God’s truth to penetrate today’s culture we have only to find ways to bridge the biblical and the postmodern worlds—to speak meaningfully to people where they are.

Think like a Missionary

My appeal is that biblical communication to a postmodern culture should be approached in the same way that a missionary goes into a foreign culture. No missionary worth his or her salt would enter a field without first doing an exhaustive study of the culture he or she seeks to reach. The time has come for today’s preachers to don the missionary garb.

The better seminaries have long included courses in the missions curriculum to help prospective missionaries ‘read’ the culture they are about to enter, observes Don Carson. But such courses are rarely required of students in the pastoral track. The assumption is that these students are returning to their own culture, so they do not need such assistance. But the rising empirical pluralism and the pressures from globalization ensure that the assumption is usually misplaced. Apart from isolated pockets, Western culture is changing so quickly that the church now struggles to understand what is going on. Indeed, it is less and less easy to speak of ‘Western culture’ in such a monolithic fashion: there is a plethora of competing cultures in most Western nations, and many pastors will minister to several of them during their ministry. Indeed, in many metropolitan areas, pastors may find themselves ministering to several of them at once.7

For many, any change is hard. All innovation is open to question and different assessments, says author and theologian Os Guinness. The darker side of this innovative genius is the church’s proneness to compromise with the spirit of its age. But from the adaptations of the early church—for example, Augustine’s translations of the language and ideas of Platonism, down to the innovations of eighteenth-century Methodism and nineteenth-century revivalism—Christians have been tirelessly determined to innovate and adapt for the sake of the Gospel. . . . In sum, innovation is not a problem.8

So resistance has its reason, Guinness concludes, because there can be danger when the focus on methodology comes at the expense of sound theology. His bottom line, Critical discernment is essential.9

Weigh Style, Skill, and Spirit

There are those who might suggest this is an either-or situation, that we must be divided by the tension between a reliance upon Scripture or upon communication skills.

The folks who believe preaching draws its power exclusively from the mystical outworking of God’s Word see any focus on communication skills as only detracting from the divine empowerment in the Bible. Just preach the Word, and that’s all you need, they say. Or, We don’t need any more books telling us how to preach. Just proclaim the simple gospel.

Yet what many effective preachers fail to recognize is that their own communication skills come sharply honed. Their preaching carries with it more than mere faithfulness to the text, even though they are unaware of their presentation skill. This is why some outstanding preachers do not teach others to preach well. The elements that make their preaching soar work on an unconscious level. In business circles, these types of people are called unconscious competents.

What’s deemed as a lack of the gift of teaching in some other fellow, may, indeed, be nothing more than inadequate training in communication. In fact that’s what propelled noted speaker and pastor Steve Brown to pen his own work on preaching, where he states openly that he wanted to discuss good communication because he’s heard so much poor communication in church pulpits.10

However, divine empowering and good communication are not mutually exclusive. The resolution between communication skills and the empowering work of the Spirit is not found in an overdependence upon better techniques, nor an overreliance upon God’s Word not to return void. It’s best found in developing a discerning balance.

One of my favorite illustrations of this is straight from the everyday life of theologian Bruce Waltke who used to act out the story of David and Goliath with his primary age children. Waltke, of course, played Goliath, while his little boy and girl formed a collective David. The son was enamoured with David’s sling, crudely fashioned from a belt and a Ping Pong ball. The boy would rush ahead of his sister, slinging the Ping Pong ball at Dad. Waltke’s daughter, meanwhile, relished everyone’s full attention as she shouted at the top of her lungs, I come against you in the name of the Lord.

But Goliath could not be vanquished by a stone alone, nor by only shouts against him.

Waltke insisted that both responses take place—the slinging of the stone and the cry of God’s empowerment—to defeat the foe. One without the other, he told his children, was inadequate.

So it is in teaching. The balance of good communication needs the presence of God’s Spirit to achieve God’s purposes. Good communication need not be seen as adversarial to the work of the Holy Spirit. To the contrary, communication skills complement the preaching of God’s truth, not undermine it.

My purpose is to examine both sermon development and delivery in light of our postmodern generation. Mine is not a theological treatise on postmodernity, nor an attempt to address exegetical procedures of sermon preparation. My working assumption is that biblical teaching would demonstrate a proper exegesis while maintaining attention to the changing culture. I hope to surface issues on the effects of postmodernity upon biblical preaching, with the understanding that this subject is far wider and more complex than can be addressed in one writing.

We must start somewhere, though. As theologian Lesslie Newbigin affirms, I am trying to talk about the Gospel—good news about something which happened and which, in that sense, does not change. The way of telling it, of understanding it, however, does change.11

Here is to maintaining the biblical message while investigating fresh means of how to communicate God’s message.

1 "Toto, We’re Not in

Kansas Anymore"

For many in ministry the reaction to the postmodern shift can be either a shrug as if to suggest who cares? or a nervous twitch that reveals this whole thing is beyond me. Post-modernity, after all, is one of those topics that’s bandied about, yet can seem grasped only by intellectuals trying to define how the concept shapes our society or affects our twenty-first-century mindset.

Yet as rock icon Bob Dylan sang, The times they are achangin’. Indeed, postmodern times are here, and it doesn’t look like they’re going away.

Theologian Diogenes Allen affirms this: The principles forged during the Enlightenment (1600–1780), which formed the foundations of the modern mentality, are crumbling.1

How did we get here? Twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein captured the age’s conclusion when he wrote, We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.2

The rock group Supertramp framed this Enlightenment dilemma in its 1979 hit The Logical Song:

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,

a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.

And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily,

oh joyfully, oh playfully, watching me.

But then they sent me away to teach me how to be

sensible, logical, oh reasonable, practical.

And then they showed me a world where I could be so

dependable, oh clinical, oh intellectual, cynical. . . .

At night, when all the world’s asleep

the questions run too deep

for such a simple man.

Won’t you please, please tell what we’ve learned?

I know it sounds absurd,

please tell me who I am. . . .

The crisis of modernity, you see, was a failure of the head to address the questions of the heart. Modernity could not adequately deal with one basic question: Tell me who I am?

So postmodern people have began approaching belief in God, truth, and the Bible differently. But has the church reciprocated in its approach?

No, Martin Robinson observes. Many preachers have not been trained nor educated in communicating to postmodern listeners. We find a church in a desperately difficult situation, Robinson says. It has not been able to adapt. . . . Things thought unquestionable in the 1950s and ’60s are now completely unsustainable.3

The church can choose to bury its head in the sand or, equally disastrous, attempt to turn back the clock to the good old days. Neither option works. The former is unadvisable, and the latter impossible.

The way forward for the Christian faith will be for evangelical Christians to stop shrugging or twitching at the mention of postmodernism, and get on with engaging the culture with God’s timeless message in a critical and thoughtful manner. A good starting place is to understand three overarching implications for biblical preaching to twenty-first-century listeners.

Expect Differing Worldviews from the Pew

The first implication is that there’s variety in the perspectives of your listeners. In fact, preaching aims for a target and if you didn’t realize it ours happens to be moving. You can no longer assume, for example, that your regular church listeners subscribe to a Christian worldview. Look at the changes this past century in evangelistic preaching. The rage in the late seventies through the eighties was a confrontational apologetic that played up the rationale and intellectual integrity of the gospel. The approach was effective, particularly on university campuses where the rhetoric of scientific rationalism thrived.

In the nineties, however, scientific rationalism began losing its grip. People started tuning out, and ministries sought to reinvent their approach from a less analytical or confrontational manner to a more relational one.

For modern pulpits, faith often became unwittingly a synonym for rationalism, explains homiletician Craig Loscalzo. We thought we were the children of Abraham, but discovered we were merely the children of Descartes.4

One of the clear and present dangers for Christian belief is being wed to the Enlightenment and encased in an approach to ministry that allows Christianity to be viewed as a thing of the past.

"The transition from the modern era to a postmodern era poses a grave challenge to the church in its mission to