DOUG PAGITT is pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis, a leader in the Emergent Movement and the author of Preaching Re-Imagined (Zondervan). Michael Duduit, the editor of our sister magazine Preaching, interviewed Doug about how leaders and teachers can have greater impact in the lives of the people they speak to week after week. ]
Preaching: Tell me about your background. What tradition did you come out of?
Pagitt: I didn’t grow up going to church at all–church was not a part of our family at all—so my personal family history of church wasn’t anything. But when I got into Christianity I was discipled by evangelical parachurch groups, so they loved me and cared for me early on. I went to Bethel College in St. Paul and Bethel Seminary, so I did my training there. And I was a part of a megachurch in the southwest suburbs of Minneapolis for 10 years before working for Leadership Network and then starting Solomon’s Porch.
Preaching: How do you see preaching and teaching changing as we try to reach younger, postmodern audiences?
Pagitt: I tried to argue in the Preaching Re-Imagined book that preaching is really something more than this speech-making act that we’ve all become accustomed to. Preaching is the delivering of the good news into a certain context where it’s taken and understood and functions as good news. So it’s the proclamation of good news inside of a certain context. And that’s rarely done, rarely accomplished, through a speech-making act where this speech is developed in isolation from the hearers. ‘
If you look at New Testament/Old Testament preaching, it’s very contextual. It’s contextual to the experience, it’s contextual to the hearers, it’s contextual to the happenings, it’s contextual to the Old Testament. Even the prophetic preaching is, “Israel, this is where you are right now, this is who you are, this is what’s happening, this is God’s word unto you in this situation.” So I think this notion that what we do is preach the text is a really faulty notion from my vantage point. What preaching ought to be is preaching the good news, the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God alive in the world, the activity of God in people’s lives.
What we ought to be doing is preaching to people in situations, sort of like that little adage that teachers will say when someone asks the teacher, “What do you teach?” And they say, “Oh, I teach students.” You know, the answer isn’t, “I teach math.” And that shows a difference in our focus. Are you more worried about the subject matter or are you worried about teaching people? Good teachers always remember, “I teach people,” not “I teach a subject.”
Preaching: In Preaching Re-Imagined, you talk a lot about developing community. Do you see a difference between preaching to the lives of those individuals versus preaching to the community?
Pagitt: We have a much more difficult time seeing our churches as communities of people. What we have more is this collective of individuals having a common experience, or something like that. And so if we don’t have a sense of community identity, communal identity, then we are really stuck with sort of saying, “I just have to talk to each individual person’s life.”
I know one of the things we work hard on is a sense of us understanding where we are as a people and what situation and circumstance we find ourselves in and the degree to which postmodern people can find solidarity with others around the same particular issue. That is a place of real connections. This is why someone can go to a U2 concert and feel this connection and feel like we are a part of the same thing and really feel like the call to the One Campaign to stop worldwide poverty is something that rings true to them even though there are hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands who are hearing the same message, because they feel like we are a part of this together. So we seek)the formation of communities that we preach in and preach from, because communities preaching within themselves and preaching to one other is an essential part, I think, of an on-going life that would involve preaching with postmodern people.
Preaching: In your book, you talk about a concept you call “progressional implicatory preaching.” Explain what that is and why it’s important.
Pagitt: What I was getting at was our preaching ought to change depending on who’s there. When this really dawned on me as a recipient was when we were attending a church for a few years; I was-n’t working in church ministry at the time. We went to church and I really adored the pastor; he’s a great guy—a friend of mine still to this day—but on Sundays it would feel as if I was struck by a drive-by sermon. It didn’t matter if I was there or who else was there, this was the sermon—it was delivered at four different services, two different times of the day, morning and evening, and you know, it’s the way it is. You showed up, you got what was delivered, and that’s that. It really wasn’t changed or affected by the particular people who were there.
So I try to suggest that on-going preaching, on-going use of proclamation of the good news, really ought to be more out of a dialogical pattern than out of a public speaking and mass communication pattern. And then a progressional dialogue means that the content of what’s being preached is actually formed and shaped in relationship to the people who are there, so that it moves somewhere. So not only is it thoughtful of the people who are there, but the preaching changes in light of the contribution of the people who are a part of it.
You’re trying to find a sustainable, long-term way of doing preaching for people. You know an awful lot of folks are really, highly committed to going to church. But many people are just hearing the same material over and over. So, the idea of it being progressional is that people’s lives change and circumstances change, and when they’ve changed then they actually have something to contribute to the preaching act. Then we’re implicated by the story, rather than asking the questions about how does this apply to us.
So I don’t think what we say to people is, “Hey, let me figure out a way to tell you how your having cancer applies to your life.” No, when you’ve found someone who has cancer, he or she already knows that this changes his or her whole life. Some things change; I am a part of this story. I don’t have to ask: what does it have to do with me? It just fundamentally has to do with you in the very fact that it is what it is. And I think that good preaching, and preaching that’s done properly, really does implicate us and say to us, “Well, what do we do now?”
Preaching: One thing I sense in the Emerging Church conversation is a great deal of interest in spirituality and spiritual formation. Does preaching play a role in that for you?
Pagitt: I do think we need to consider the role of preaching in comparison to the other approaches to spiritual formation. I think preaching is one of the really good forms of spiritual formation, but it is not the primary one, and it’s not necessarily the most comprehensive. It’s just a particular kind of one of the particular practices we use to spiritually form us, but it’s not the exclusive one or the primary one. I think hospitality and service, that kind of thing, are all a part of it.
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Michael Duduit is Editor-in-Chief of Preaching magazine. You can visit his Web site at www.michaelduduit.com
