but what do you mean by ‘following?’

It was an honest and sincere question at the end of a sermon. ‘but what do you mean when you talk about “following Jesus”, I pray, I fast, I spend time with God…do you mean something different?’

On the one hand, the answer was, ‘you are following’, but to be honest I suspected this answer would not satisfy me even if it did her. But if not, what did I mean…?

I thought later, I should have said…’Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind and your neighbour as yourself’. In so far as ‘following’ means following ‘commands’ that would have been a good answer – actually the ‘greatest’ there is.

The more I thought, though, the more I realised that when I talk about following Jesus I have a further thought in my mind. This thought is that to follow Jesus means matching our own experience to the experience of Jesus and the disciples as recounted in the gospels. It is to have our story mapped to their story, our narratives shaped by theirs.

This is a gospel story following rather than only command following. It means working out in our context what the equivalent is to what Jesus and the disciples did in their context.

So for me – being a follower means being willing to keep ‘bad’ company (tax collectors and sinners) because that is part of the gospel narrative story of Jesus and the disciples. The story and the events and not just the teaching matter as expressions of what the gospel looks like in concrete form.

In the passages I had been preaching from Jesus has taken his disciples to the land of the Gerasenes to confront a chaotic wild unclean man from the tombs of death. Thus to follow Jesus means more than that he might get you out of chaos (the preceding ‘with Christ in the vessel you can smile at the storm’ events) but rather following Jesus can actually lead you into situations of chaos for the sake of God’s commission, compassion, and call (bit of traditional alliteration there!).

I am thankful for her question. It helped me understand again how I view the gospel narratives and the ‘way of Jesus’ as well as the ‘teaching of Jesus’ as important for showing what i means to follow.

Why bother with Preaching?

My friend Doug Gay has recently written a book on preaching entitled: ‘God Be In My Mouth: 40 ways to grow as a preacher’ (due to be released I believe in January 2018). I am sure that some, including some of his friends have wondered, if not said, ‘why bother?’. It seems to me that for many preaching is an anachronistic event that is tolerated rather than welcomed in many a service.

On the other hand there are those, often preachers, who in various way and for various reasons defend the practice as relevant, important, if not indeed central to Christian worship. Here I confess my complicity even as I prepare to take up a post as an Associate Professor in Preaching and Worship (John Gladstone Chair Acadia Divinity College).

The above may represent two conversations passing one another by. Indeed this morning I read a blog post that was all about what preachers need to do if they wish to communicate with ‘millennials’ (a strange universalizing of a group for a supposedly contemporary approach!). To me the post read as: ‘if you have got to preach can you at least do this to make it bearable and as quickly as possible’.

‘To Preach or Not to Preach’ is not a new question (see Norrington for whom it was an ‘urgent question’ several years ago) yet there is a resilience (or perhaps a resistance to going away) in the practice.

Despite all the critique – in a remarkable range of ecclesiological formats (institutional, emerging, missional) ‘preaching’ takes place Sunday by Sunday. As such it is a practice of the Church that requires to be explored in the conversation between these two positions above, not separately, so that if and as it continues it becomes a meaningful space for encounter between people and people, ideas and convictions, and indeed God and us.

But as I said, even as I write I betray my complicity in thinking that there is something significant in the human frailty of this event (speaker, voice, listeners, shared time and space etc) that enables an encounter with the divine (Word and Spirit).