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Preaching is one-sided, at least as it has traditionally been practiced. The sermon is a power transaction, where the preacher, privileged by position imposes the sermon with little opportunity for rebuttal or response. Doug Pagitt wants to change all that. Instead of "speaching" Pagitt offers "progressional dialogue" as way to get us talking with each other.
In Pagitt’s view, preaching needs to be more relational, less monological, and more interactive. While a little short on specifics, the book encourages a form of preaching that invests less authority in the preacher him/herself and more authority in the community. In this, he is applying current emergent church thinking to the practice of preaching. The problem, he says, is more of a "low-grade fever than a medical emergency" (76), undercutting any sense of urgency to the argument. Still, Pagitt raises a matter that many have wondered about but few have been courageous enough to challenge.
Our commitment to speaching, Pagitt believes, is a product of our professionalism, our lack of creativity, and our desire to keep control. No doubt, he is correct that the traditional sermon provides the preacher with the ability to control the process, if not the outcome in the listener’s lives. The question for Pagitt, is whether speaching really works and whether it is the most effective way to encourage people toward growth in Jesus Christ.
Whether we want to buy what Pagitt is selling might depend upon how we think about authority in preaching. A biblical view invests authority in the Word itself and not in the preacher. Biblical preachers understand that the power is not in the opinions of the preacher but in the revelation of God’s activity, character and will as it is offered in the Bible. Authority, then, resides neither in the community nor in the speacher. Authority comes from God. Whether the Word of God is best delivered through a monologue or dialogue is probably a different and lower-order question.
Dialogue can be present in the monological sermon, at least to some degree. Good preachers know how to anticipate the listener’s interests, speaking with the listener’s voice and respecting their perspective. Preachers can utilize teams to construct sermons even if they are presented by a single voice. Still, the goal is not to enshrine the opinions of the people (what my father calls "pooled ignorance") but to help the people hear from God.
From a practical point of view, it is difficult to imagine "progressional dialogue" as a dominant form of preaching in most churches of the future. The monologue form is not likely to go away anytime soon, if for no other reason but that it is efficient. Still, anyone who can help us to a greater respect for the listener ought to be heard.
Excerpt (pages 21-24): Unfortunately, these reasons fail to tap into the most significant and perhaps most simple reason why speaching doesn’t work. The problem is that preaching, as we know it, suffers from a relationship problem. The issue isn’t simply how we present the information but whose information it is. The issue isn’t simply how we tell the story but the relationship between the teller and the hearers. The issue isn’t simply the content we present but where we get that content. The crisis isn’t how we preach or what we preach or to whom we preach but the act of preaching itself, which has devolved into speaching.
Speaching is not defined by the style of the presentation but by the relationship of the presenter to both the listeners and the content: the pastor uses a lecture-like format, often standing while the listeners are sitting. The speacher decides the content ahead of time, usually in a removed setting, and then offers it in such a way that the speacher is in control of the content, speed, and conclusion of the presentation…
Speaching stands in contrast to what I call progressional dialogue, where the content of the presentation is established in the context of a healthy relationship between the presenter and the listeners, and substantive changes in the content are then created as a result of this relationship.
It works like this: I say something that causes another person to think something she hadn’t thought before. In response she says something that causes a third person to make a comment he wouldn’t normally have made without the benefit of the second person’s statement. In turn I think something I wouldn’t have thought without hearing the comments made by the other two. So now we’ve all ended up in a place we couldn’t have come to without the input we received from each other. In a real way the conversation has progressed.