Preaching Matters. But . . .

I have always thought of myself—certainly with more than a little presumption—as a better than average preacher. Perhaps every preacher thinks so. 

But I’ve also studied preaching. I did it from a non-religious point of view, focussing on how preaching persuades, for my Ph.D. work. I’ve taught homiletics to aspiring preachers. And I’ve studied—again, mostly in non-religious settings—how contemporary media has changed both people’s ability to listen and read. 

         Along the way, as a minister, I’ve wondered long and hard about what attracts people to one church rather than another. Sometimes the reasons have little to do with “how good” a church is—however you define “good.” Lots of churches, for example, are tribal. People belong to them because “their people” belong. This is often true of immigrant churches and of ethnic churches in particular, though it may have to do with social standing and belonging to the right club. Sometimes—more often than you would think—people go to church out of long habit, and it is enough that there is one very close to them. That decides it. In my years as a minister, I’ve met people who go to one church or another because of architecture, because of a friend, because of the music, or because it has a great Sunday School for their children.

A few people choose their church for theological reasons. They want (for example) a really liberal church. Or a fire-breathing Primitive Baptist church that does revivals. Not many, but a few!

Put aside all these reasons for choosing a church, there are still two matters that count more than almost any other. First, people will make a judgement, upon visiting, about whether or not there is a community in that church that will fit them. A few weeks ago, for example, after attending my congregation a few times, a youngish millennial couple asked me how many other couples their age attended regularly. I gave an honest answer and have not seen them since. And, of course, people looking for community will stay if the community they find truly embraces them. 

Second, getting back to preaching, I realize more and more that over time people will make a judgement about where to go to church based on the preaching. If a church wants to maintain its size or grow it will need a preacher who connects on a very regular basis. The room for so-so preaching has shrunk, a lot. People want a preacher who will have them holding their breath to see how “it” turns out. Someone who can make them laugh at themselves. Someone who has something to say that is rooted in the heart of the gospel but that resonates with lived experience. Something more than self-help. Someone who is compelling but doesn’t nag. Someone who says the mystery in a way they feel it. Someone who connects with their fear and hopes.

So, though I like to think of myself as that preacher, as I enter my final season as a preacher, I have begun, in spite of what I’ve said so far, to question how much of a difference I can make as a preacher.

Let me explain the reasons why. Although they are informed by my studies, what I’m sharing now is my gut feeling about these things. I’m interested in what others may think.

First, it is harder to make an impression as a preacher because audiences don’t listen anymore with the same skill and attention that they used to. Once upon a time preachers created sermons in the image of the essay or book. This worked, because people tended to read a lot. They were deft at figuring out linear, rational, ordered arguments. 

But these sort of sermons work with a smaller and smaller demographic. Partly this is because attention spans are way shorter than they used to be. If you are not sure this is the case, check out the literature. It takes a lot more skill to gain the attention or your audience, keep it, and engage it than it used to.

Second, people also have a harder time attending to sermons because the most common model for sermons a generation ago was the book, but it isn’t anymore. Books—and good essays—are linear. They build their case cumulatively and rationally. They use reason and narrative. And when people used to listen to sermons, they listened with the ears of readers.

But people do not read as much as they used to. They find it difficult to attend to sustained narrative. The books they do read—just check out how many there are in any bookstore—are often self-help books that are long lists of “to do’s.” Books are far more fractured and less narratively sensible than they used to be. If narrative preaching is a partial answer to this reality, it has to be the sort of narrative that non-readers used to be able to listen to—legends, sagas, parables and so on. Walter Ong’s description of the psychodynamics of orality helps me here, but challenges me too. It’s hard.

Third, I’ve also become less sure of myself as a preacher because I’ve become acutely aware of my own uncertainties and waffling. I live with ambiguity when it comes to what and how to preach. I used to be able to count on people being interested in the truth of dogmas, for example, and spent time trying to get those dogmas across. But I’m done with dogma myself, so it doesn’t make for great preaching fodder anymore.

Fourth, I’ve become less sure of myself as a preacher because I know that my status—perhaps role is a better word—as preacher has changed over the years. I cannot rely, any longer, on being listened to because, well, I’m a preacher and I know. People don’t sit down convinced that they need to listen; they sit down to decide whether or not they will listen. People don't come to church believing that they are empty vessels that just need to be filled.

What to do about this? Well, I take longer to write than I used to. I pay more attention to how sagas and legends were told in an era before people read. I count on my current audience’s high level of literate education than I used to, so I can be forgiven a bit more. I try new things: preaching secular texts and songs, using drama, interactive exercises. But I’m an amateur at much of this, unsure of how to embrace it and make it work.

The bottom line? Preaching is harder than ever. There is no excuse for business as usual. We have to take risks. We have to speak to what people are really wondering about. And we have to keep on trying.

The Best of What I Read in 2016

            I keep lists: of ancestors, of sermons I’ve preached, of places I’ve been to, and of books I’ve read. I am not sure why lists appeal to me, but when the time comes to reminisce they are handy for jogging my memory. I track my books on Goodreads.com. And so, without further ado, here are the books I read in 2016 that I don’t want to forget.

            Where We Came From: My ongoing fascination with human evolution was enriched by Svante Pääbo’s Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. Pääbo’s book is a memoir about how he fell in love with genomics, and how his team eventually became the first to sequence the Neanderthal and Denosivan genomes. While the book does get a bit technical from time to time, Pääbo is able, for the most part, to describe the science in terms understandable to lay people.
The inside look at the politics of science is a reminder that Washington and Ottawa are not the only places to find politics. The book feels, in some ways, like a road trip where you know the destination and can’t wait to get there. Hands down, the best science book I’ve read in years—and I’ve read quite a few.

            Science Fiction! Several of my favorite books were science fiction. Two African American women writers were my hands down favorites. The first was N. K. Jemisin, who wrote, The Fifth Season trilogy. The first book in the trilogy is The Broken Earth. Her books encouraged me, as a reader, to reconsider systemic racism and personal prejudice by making the point of contention not skin color, but unique but not widely-shared human gifts and skills. The turns of plot are both surprising and believable, the Earth Jemisin creates is detailed and exotic, and the key characters are well-developed.

            The other author—perhaps the best I read all year—was Nnedi Okorafor. Her novella Binti reminded me, a bit, of Margaret Atwood at her best as a stylist—as when Atwood’s poetic chops spill over into her prose. Okorafor’s writing is also near-poetic and subtly engages all of the reader’s senses with compelling descriptions of characters, their looks, their smells, and their families. I’m looking forward to reading the Novella’s full-length follow up, which was published in late January, 2017.

            Modern Media Tech and Its Casualties. My PHD was in Speech Communication, and during those studies I became fascinated with how different speech, reading and writing arts and technologies demand different kinds of intellectual equipment. People in oral societies with low literacy develop fascinating ways of communicating via spoken word and other media that are quite different from societies where books are front and centre. High literate societies, on the other hand, are very different than those where screens predominate. I explore this in my own book, Not Sure.        

            Adam Gazzaley’s The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World is pure gold for parents, teachers, preachers, and university students who want to understand what is going on in their brains, and the brains of their wired audiences. I found the book’s structure—one half given over to neuroscience, and the other half to explaining its consequences—a bit off-putting. And the book is dense. But the effort it took to read was richly rewarded with deepened understanding of a technological change that is still sweeping over us. A good companion to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and a look under the brain’s hood for those who want to understand why it is that we entertain ourselves to death.

            Behind the Trump Phenomenon: Two books that provided very helpful background for understanding Trump’s victory and white Evangelical Christian support for him were Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America and Robert Jones' The End of White Christian America. Isenberg focusses on how America was built on the backs of poor immigrants such as indentured servants, jail parolees, as well as slaves. She traces out the generational poverty of this sort of deep-family-history, and it isn’t pretty. Jones shows how the structures of Christian religion, both mainline and conservative, have often worked against racial justice, inclusiveness, and an honest appraisal of why things are the way they are.

            Memoirs: When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir of the author’s long illness with cancer, up to just before his death. Paul Kalanithi is a neurosurgeon struggling to finish his residency and keep his marriage afloat. He’s a good man and his story, as sad as it ends, is also inspiring. I was fascinated by the role religion played in his life, even though he doesn’t dwell on it. With several doctors in my own extended family, the description of the grind Paul had to go through as a resident was sobering and sad. But I came to love this man, even if only from a great distance.

            Stefan Hertmans wrote an inventive memoir about his grandfather titled War and Turpentine. I was impressed and often moved by the way Hertman’s described the social and familial traps his grandfather had to navigate. The grandfather’s diary of his time as a soldier in Flanders Fields serves as the non-fiction basis for this book. But Hertman then adds his own fictional gloss to the story in order to make a truer portrait rise and shine. The aching pains from long ago that marked his grandfather’s life is given great prominence here, and encourages all readers to be sensitive to the hurts they or others struggle with too. The book includes some very compelling descriptions of First World War battles, as well.

            Written in English: As an old English major, I’ve always been fascinated by the history of English—and by extension, the evolution of language. John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English focusses on the impact of Celtic and Norse grammars on English grammar, and the reasons why this sort of influence is often missed in “history of languages.” I know. It is hard to imagine that this might be scintillating. But it is! Language is a window on so much more. His takedown of the Sapir Whorff hypothesis is marvelous. His speculation that Phoenician traders may be the source of up to a third of proto Germanic words that are not Indo-European is really fascinating.

            Fiction: I read many novels that were not sci-fi, but my favorite was Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. This slim work is part mystery, part gripping yarn, and part parable. The protagonist, Tony, reflects on what he has made of his rather empty life. I resonated with his doubts and disappointments. The ending, though, is a big surprise, one that Barnes has carefully laid the groundwork for so that it is also totally believable.

            Theology: As a minister and theologian, I’ve read (a nearly) countless number of books about the meaning of life and basic theological questions like, “Is there a god?” and “if so (or not) so what?” The best of a dozen I read this past year—if not in style, then in terms of offering a helpful overview of more liberal perspectives—was David Ray Griffen’s God Exists but Gawd Does Not.
             This is a book about Process Theology, deeply rooted in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Griffen describes the “Gawd,” of classical theism, as one who sits on a throne and interferes in the world on behalf of some but not others. He contrasts this concept of Gawd to Process Theology’s God. He nailed much of what eventually made me uncomfortable with the sort of God that I was raised with. His explanation of the Process alternative, however, was less compelling.

            New Amsterdam Dutch: I couldn’t put Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Centre of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America down. A great deal of American political and social culture is partly rooted in how the Dutch set the table at Manhattan. From the Declaration of Independence, to the Bill of Rights; from pluralism to religious freedom, the Dutch experiment in New York informed the nascent American psyche, and sometimes for the better. I read Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton a few months later, and I couldn’t help but note how often Shorto’s book shed light on Chernow’s.

Not Nearly One Hundred Best Books Read in 2015

         The New York Times and The Globe and Mail and many other press outlets use panels of judges help assemble their 100 “best of the year,” book lists. The lists are comprised only of books that were published this past year. They are designed to have something for everyone in them. They tend to highbrow, reflecting the literate interests of a highly educated minority of people.

         My list, on the other hand, is very personal, reflecting my interests alone. Far from being a hundred-book list, mine must be much shorter, since I only managed to read forty books this year. My list spans books written over the past two-centuries too, mostly because I’ll often read everything I can find in subject areas that interest me. This year that was the Boer War, in preparation for doing research on a distant relative—Pieter Schuil—who died in that conflict. I also read many books that touched on the meaning of life because I am thinking of writing a book in that vein myself.

         And of course, I read a lot of science fiction, mostly because this has been my genre of choice for escape since I was a tween. And this is my nod in the direction of “definitely not highbrow,” although the two sci-fi books I chose for this list are not the typical “read and toss” books I usually end up with from this genre. They were very good.

         So, without further ado, here is my list of “Best Books I Read in 2015: Mildly Annotated.”

Best Science Fiction

         Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. This book fits into the very hot post-apocalyptic meme, though not very predictably. It is less about the end of the world as it is a book about the importance of art and beauty, and the hope that drives us to survive. Unlike much sci-fi, this one is beautifully written, too. It is the perfect antidote to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, by the way. 

         My runner up in the scif-fi category would be David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. Also well written. Strange. Had to work hard on the willing suspension of disbelief at a certain point. But engrossing, imaginative, layered, and in the end fun.

Best Books on the Meaning of Life

         I read a dozen or more books on this broad theme. They ranged from popular self-help books like The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt to philosophical primers like The Meaning of Life: A Reader, by E. D. Klemke. Only one of these books blew me away: I and Thou by Martin Buber. I was assigned this book for a college philosophy course forty years ago, and I merely skimmed through it then, to get by. Too bad—I really missed something. I loved everything about this book, from its obscurantist argumentation (like that of my hero, Kenneth Burke) to its overwhelming humaneness and insight. The introduction by Walter Kaufmann was worth the price of the book all by itself. Just wonderful.

         The worst book? The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind by Simone Weil, closely followed by her Waiting for God. The former was written for the Free French, during WWII, to help guide reconstruction. Just weird. And while Waiting for God had some fine moments, they were all spoiled by Weil’s directionless meandering punctuated by her senseless starving of herself to death. Reading these two books made me very suspicious of literary elite that wants to suggest she is some sort of literary saint. No.

Best Theology

         Well, in truth, this might be philosophy pretending to be theology, or philosophical theology, but the best—and most challenging—book I read this year was John Caputo’s The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps.

          Love the way it got under my skin. He argues that we should pay attention more to how God insists (perhaps) than we do to God’s existence. Having said so, there is no way that I can sum up the many layers of this work without writing a Master’s thesis, at a minimum. It is rich. It is surprisingly poetic and humorous. It also made me wish that I had a better understanding of Hegel and Kant than my secondary-literature-only background. I also read Caputo’s What Would Jesus Deconstruct: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church. It is more accessible, written for the Evangelicals who he wants to haunt (his term) with his ideas. Caputo, incidentally, is a major inspiration for Emergent/Post-evangelical/Post-Church Christian Peter Rollins. Rollins books are more accessible but less interesting than Caputo’s. I’d suggest starting with his Insurrection: To Believe Is Human, To Doubt, Divine.

Best Non-fiction

         One of my hobbies is paleoanthropology. I’ve read most of the popular literature from the past twenty years or so, and some more professional books too. The highlight of my summer was a visit to the Cradle of Humanity, the Sterkfontein caves in South Africa—as well as the museum there. This is also the location of the Rising Star cave site where Homo Naledi was recently found—the most exciting thing going right now in paleoanthropology. The most dynamic work being done in this field involves unraveling the human genome, often from ancient bones. The best book I read about this topic, this past year, is Christine Kenneally’s, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures. Besides serving as a great introduction to genetic science, it also discusses cultural and familial transmission of values.

         The reason I was in South Africa this year was to research the life of a distant relative who was executed by an English firing squad during the Boer War—the Pieter Schuil I mentioned above, a first cousin three generations removed. I have Pieter’s diary and a letter that an English chaplain wrote to his parents after the war, describing his last night alive. I’ve written about this story here: Pieter Schuil and Pieter Schuil Two. While doing my research I came across Ingvar Schoder-Nielson’s, Among the Boers in Peace and War. I sought the book out because I knew that one chapter contained an account of Pieter’s arrest and execution. I was blown away to find another chapter about a meandering late-Boer War intelligence-gathering trip that Pieter took with the author. It felt like an unexpected “second visit,” with Pieter. On the whole, the book is a very interesting glimpse at an experience that few of us could imagine—living on the South African veld, fighting the English, losing, and (in Ingvar’s case, at least) surviving.

Best Novel

         I rarely read novels that don’t come highly recommended, so few of them are bad. (One favorite site for recommendations is Joanne’s Reading Blog). This year, however, decided to walk into the best bookstore in Toronto, Ben McNally Books, when I had a few hours to kill, and pick out the thinnest novel I could find. I bought Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider. This is a dark allegory written from within the European Evangelical tradition of another time. It was first published in 1842. But what a lovely romp. Half horror, half Jeremiad, and half morality tale. Beautifully written, translated, and fun all the way through. Get it!

         Just before going to press, I thought my runner up would be J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. A book about “modern” South Africa that is deeply disturbing and impossible to put down.

         But last night I finished what might have been the best reading experience I had all year, a book by Lawrence Hill, The Illegal. Coming after the incredible success of his Book of Negroes, I was prepared for a let down. Not at all. I loved the main character, a marathoner. His struggles were believable, and I admired Hill’s social commentary throughout. This book is an absolutely necessary antidote to all the race-baiting, anti-immigrant talk in the USA right now, but also a reminder that we in Canada have only made a beginning at being the welcoming, multiethnic country we’d really like to be. And what a great, compelling, well-written story! A page-turner from beginning to end.

The Idiot Box

My wife and I do not own a television. We never had. Judging by the reviews of this year’s TV season, so far, we’re not missing much.

However, our refusal not to purchase a television isn’t really related to our dislike for what’s on television. My pet reason for not having a television is that many scholars suspect that watching even a small amount of television detracts from the ability to read well. Repeated exposure to TV develops the synapses and neural pathways in the brain that decode television; but this brain development seems strongly correlated to lack of development in the reading center of the brain. For Christians, who are people of the Word—undermining the ability to read well and deeply is a spiritual issue.

Even Camille Paglia, a famous culture critic best known for celebrating television’s role in the “repaganization of Western Culture,” understands how television is dangerous in this respect. She writes that in the second command God forbade the use of all images in heaven above and earth below because God understood that such images create a powerful, spiritual urge to ignore words. So Paglia calls for “the enlightened repression of our children,” by which she means rigorous word-centered education to the exclusion of TV, if we want our kids to become all they can be. Commenting on this insight, Neil Postman said, “With the Second Commandment, Moses was the first person who ever said, more or less, “Don’t watch TV; go do your homework.”

So what about your TV watching habits? I have a few suggestions. First, inform yourself about the State of the discussion when it comes to the benefits and risks of TV viewing, especially for children. I’d recommend Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, and Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. In my book, Not Sure, you can find a long bibliography on the relation of television to reading on page 42.

Second. Make reading together a family-time priority until well after the kids are reading on their own, a lot, with pleasure. As an added benefit, you’ll double and triple your cuddle time. My wife and I took turns reading to our children for an hour a day until the oldest was well into high school. That daily hour is easily one of our kids’ best memories of growing up.

Third. Don’t ever allow the television to play when a parent isn’t watching along. Children of all ages need instruction and wisdom about what they see on television because television mostly portrays a fanciful world without God where greed, envy, and several more of the deadly sins carry the day. That’s a very jaundiced view of how things really are; kids need another perspective to interpret TV for them.

Finally, if you don’t have time or energy for the above—and I take it that includes a lot of this blog's  readers—I have one final suggestion. It cuts through all the difficulties that go with having a television. Get rid of it.

Our family fell into life without a television when I was in seminary and couldn’t afford cable, much less the television itself. Somehow that circumstance has become a blessing that continues to give and give. Over the years we’ve avoided countless hours of uncommunicative stupefaction and had discussions, reading, and lots of other fun activities instead.

The bottom line here is that all the time and energy it takes to watch television responsibly may simply be out of reach for most of us. On the other hand, all those extra hours without a television could provide a rich, rich resource for raising kids in the way they should go. All for the price of a trip to the trash can.

End of Summer Booklist

Labor Day is just around the corner, and so perhaps you are looking for that one, last great book of the summer. I've read a few, and maybe one of them will appeal to you.

My wife, Irene Oudyk-Suk, is a couples and sex therapist (couplesinstep.ca). One book she asks many of her clients to read (or watch on video) is Canadian therapist Sue Johnson’s “Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love.” The book is a popular and practical exposition of the new neuroscience of love. Her approach to therapy is based on John Bowlby's attachment theory, and is usually called Emotionally Focussed Therapy. Don't let the ten-dollar terms scare you, though. This is a very practical and readable book about committed relationships. If you want to figure out how love actually works, pick it up.

One book that has been making waves in Christian circles this summer is Rob Bell’s Love Wins. In this book Bell tries to explain why the heart of Christianity has to be the story of God’s grace, and how the heart of Christianity has nothing to do with eerie tales of hell and punishment. A noted Evangelical leader, his book has upset the status-quo apple cart. You’ll need to read it to make up your own mind, but I thought it was a great read.

My PHD is in Communication Theory. One question receiving a lot of attention in those circles is, “does use of electronic media effect how we think?” Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle argues that we have traded the world of ideas for one of “comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans and a celebration of violence.” Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading and the Brain, looks at the issue from the perspective of neuroscience. Amazon just delivered Shane Hipps’ Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith. I haven't read it yet, but he asks what this all means for Christians who are, after all, supposed to be “people of the word.”

No summer reading list is complete without fiction to fall asleep by--or not! I’m a fantasy and science fiction buff, and really enjoyed reading bestselling George Martin’s A Game of Thrones. This summer I also found Robert Sawyer’s Hominids, which combines my interest in human evolution and sci-fi. Sawyer is easily Canada’s best known science fiction writer. With the upcoming provincial election in the air, I’ve also purchased Terry Fallis’ Best Laid Plans. This book, about the inner machinations of Canadian politics, was CBC Radio’s 2011 Canada Reads contest winner. I'll read it over Labor Day weekend in preparation for Ontario's upcoming provincial election.

Finally, a bit of a dream. I'm trying to talk Irene into retiring to a sailboat--at least for a few years. I'm not sure when we'd do that (I'm thinking soon, Irene wants to wait fifteen years!). But in the meantime, we should probably learn to sail! So I bought, and devoured The Sailing Bible: The Complete Guide for all Sailors. Living on a boat sounds like it could be a blast. Not much in there about being becalmed and swarmed by flies, which I hear is one of the occupational hazards of being out on the great lakes, at least. We'll have to see--maybe Irene and I will try sailing for a week next summer?

What late-summer good-reads would you add?