Column entry, “Identifying Your Faith Consciousness as a Faith Communication Identity,” by Robert Reid

Column Title: Communicating Faith in the Cross-Walk of Life

Column Entry: “Identifying Your Faith Consciousness as a Faith Communication Identity”

By Robert Stephen Reid, Professor Emeritus, University of Dubuque

Description: During most of Christendom people lived with some form of a theistic identity. But in our post-Christendom secular society most North American Christians are faced, sometimes explicitly but mostly implicitly, with a daily choice of whether to keep believing in God. Or, believing that, in Christ, God is still seeking to be reconciled with each generation of people in this world. If faith in God is to matter amidst the busy, bustling intersection of cross-purposes and cross-identities of contemporary secular life, my interest is to reflect on the diverse ways people communicate with others about this desire to pursue cross-centered lives of faith.

December 2024 | October 2024 | September 2024 (1) | August 2024 | June-July 2024 | May 2024 |April 2024 | March 2024

Introduction

Authenticity of voice is more likely to be experienced by parishioners if preachers learn to turn an intuitive understanding of voice into an explicitly understood rhetorical resource.

I make that claim during the opening session of every Advanced Preaching course I teach. Since this is usually a once-a-week 2½ hour course, I give an extra 10-15 minutes during the break for students to do an “Identify Your Faith Consciousness” worksheet assignment. It involves reading over a series of standard definitions or understandings of preachings purpose and making a choice. Once back in session I help them discover how the assignment likely reveals their “faith consciousness”—the basic worldview they hold about faith and meaningful ways to share faith with others. I make clear that one faith consciousness is not “more right” than another. They are just different expressions of how people come at and express their faith. I also tell students that the whole purpose of the advanced preaching course will be to turn their preferred way of expressing their “faith consciousness” into that promised rhetorical resource through their practice of preaching in the course. As I teach it the Advanced Preaching course goal is to identify a student’s own faith consciousness. The next step is help them let that be their “Faith Communication Identity” they express in each sermon assignment.

The worksheet assignment I provide has four grouped collections of understandings that homileticians have offered as preaching’s purpose. The full version of it is in Appendix A of my recently published The Four Voices of Preaching: Communicating Faith in a Connected World (Integratio Press, 2024). However, I provide an abbreviated form of this exercise for your consideration below. Your task here is to scan across each understanding collection quickly. Then come back and decide which group is your least preferred understanding of what it means to try to call forth faith as response in your speaking or writing—whether your communicative intention is to make a direct or indirect faith appeal.

The 1^st Set of Understandings of Preaching’s Purpose:

1. “Expository Preaching is the communication of a biblical concept, derived from and transmitted through a historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit first applies to the personality of the preacher, then through the preacher to the hearers.”[1]
2. “Preaching in its essence addresses the perpetual human quest for authority and meaning.” For this reason, “Expository preaching that explains what the Word of God says about the issues of our day, the concerns of our lives, and the destinies of our souls provides an alternative [to the brokenness of the world]. Such preaching offers a voice of authority not of human origin, and promises answers not subject to cultural vagaries.” This is why “Scripture’s portrayal of its own potency challenges us always to remember that the Word preached rather than the preaching of the Word accomplishes heaven’s purposes. Preaching that is true to Scripture converts, convicts, and conforms the spirits of men and women because it presents the instrument of divine compulsion, not because preachers have any transforming power in themselves.”[2]

The 2^nd Set of Understandings of Preaching’s Purpose:

1. “The purpose of preaching is to present the acknowledged word of God, regardless of translation, verbally and nonverbally with such presence, power, passion, and purpose that the listener or observer senses the impulse of change or conversion in his or her own life. Through sacred conversation channeled from God through the preacher with the people, transformation is affected…. The central focus of preaching is to mine the mysteries of God—the who, what, when, where, how, and why of God—in relationship to God’s creation The purpose of preaching is the proposition of the potentiality and actualization of healing the inner hurts and pains, deliverance from trial and tribulations, receipt of joys and blessings, and transformation from negative to positive life choices for the believer, nonbeliever, pretender, churched, unchurched, and de-churched.[3]
2. “In the finest sermons we feel renewed hope, stronger faith, and recommitment to mission. More simply stated, we experience God. For this reason, we claim that preaching is an event in which the congregation meets the living God. When we use the word event in this way, we mean an action, an occurrence, something that happens in a moment of time in the lives of the hearers. When we say this is a divine event, we acknowledge that, through preaching, God chooses to be encountered. Since this encounter affects a new relationship with God of reconciliation and empowerment, we may also acknowledge preaching as a salvation event. Hence, Preaching is an event of encounter with God that leaves the congregation with stronger and deeper faith commitment to doing God’s work.”[4]

A 3^rd Set of Understandings of Preaching’s Purpose:

1. “If preaching is to be vital it must proceed from a center: preaching must be understood as an event…. Dynamic preaching which understands the sermon as a series of forces interacting with one another, would thus take the place of ‘mechanistic’ preaching which views the sermon as a construct of parts. [Which is why] the key to this approach is that its emphasis falls on what the sermon does rather than on what it is…. Preaching is understood not as the packaging of a product but as the evocation of an event”[5] Sermons deal with a concern to be shared rather than with a topic to be explained. They offer confirmation from affirmations rather than evidence from axioms…. Its construction and communication is consistent with the message as originally conveyed.[6]
2. “The sole purpose of [indirect] preaching is to engage hearers in the pursuit of an issue or an idea so that they will think their own thoughts and experience their own feelings in the presence of Christ and in light of the Gospel. An oblique approach . . . is often the powerful vehicle of someone whose primary concern is . . . to communicate with people who after the sermon is over will have to continue thinking their own thoughts, dealing with their own situations and being responsible for their own faith.”[7] “The power of preaching is not in the new but in the familiar. Walter Brueggemann says that the power of the prophet is to bring up what God’s people already know, turn it in their faces, maybe slightly like a prism, and they say, ‘Whew! Have we been saying we believe that?’ But if it’s brand new then they can just reject it. You never have the shock of recognition until first you have the nod of recognition. So, we speak for the church as well as to the church: ‘Preaching not only makes deposits in the bank of the mind and hearts of the people, but it also writes checks on what’s already there.”[8]

A 4^th Set of Understandings of Preaching’s Purpose:

1. Preaching as “part of the church’s ceaseless witness to Jesus Christ must shift its metaphor from event to spiritual formation. Preaching-as-formation is not content with its own eventfulness. It does more than announce a new standing before God or hold up fuzzy correspondences between religion and meaningful experiences. It directs the faithful into the implications of their redemption in Jesus Christ. Instead of demonstrating the likeness of Christian teaching to conventional values, which is the usual method of sermon illustrations, preaching-as-formation explores the differences. In so doing, it becomes the voice of the church as a contrast society.”[9]
2. “Preaching is a mode of witness to the gospel. The distinctive vocation of preaching is to help a congregation name and interpret the divine presence and purpose.”[10] This preaching “is mutual because it presumes that both Christian tradition and contemporaneity can inform and critique one another. It is critical because Christian tradition criticizes the contemporary setting, even while aspects of today’s community criticize the claims, behaviors, and worldview of the tradition. In preaching that is consistent with this theological method, the pastor generates a conversation that helps the congregation affect a mutual, critical correlation between aspects of the tradition and the situation.”[11]

I devote a chapter each in The Four Voices of Preaching to situating the historic and practical dimensions of each of these understandings as a Voice that can “speaks us” whenever we offer an oral or print presentation of our faith talk. Match the group number with the quadrant number in the four-quadrant matrix below. This simplified form of a Matrix of Contemporary Religious Rhetoric helps people of faith identify their “faith consciousness identity” that, with the right practice can become the default “Faith Communication Identity” they express in those oral of print presentations. It clarifies a preferred “Voice” orientation and the person’s aspiration for what will happen as a result of someone hearing or reading what gets communicated.

4. Conversation Orientation that seeks communal engagement and commitment	3. Co-Questing Orientation that seeks personal insight as valuable for the journey
1. Argument Orientation that seeks acknowledged agreement	2. Advocacy Orientation that seeks personal acceptance and transformation

 

So, which is your most preferred Voice? The way that this assignment works is that the person’s likely preferred identity is the non-adjacent quadrant to their least-preferred definitions identity quadrant. In other words, if your least preferred collection of understandings was the 4th “Conversation Orientation” collection—then it is likely that the “Advocacy Orientation” would be your preferred faith communication worldview identity—which is to say, your preferred Voice. But the nature of a matrix is that you always share one the two axes that make a quadrant with the two adjacent quadrants. None of us are just one worldview. One worldview orientation dominates, but we share interests and concerns with the adjacent worldviews. However, we share very little of the worldview of the one non-adjacent quadrant.

The discipline of homiletics has been quite useful in helping faith communicators devise strategic ways to organize talk and text for the direct or indirect appeal aspect of each communicative purpose. Think of them as similar to the way that public speaking teachers help students pick an appropriate strategy for fact speeches that call for agreement, for policy speeches that call for action, or value speeches that call for affirming a societal virtue. By inviting students to practice the quadrant relevant communicative strategies for their dominant “Faith Communication Identity,” they gain the cognitive and muscle memory to let their own faith consciousness and, thereby, become more authentic in what they say and write. Lots more can be said about all this. What I have to add is in The Four Voices of Preaching (Integratio Press, 2024).

NOTES

[1] Haddon Robinson, Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages, 2^nd ed., (1980; Baker Academic, 2001), 21. See Scott Gibson, “Philosophy vs. Method: Big Idea Preaching’s Adaptability,” in The Big Idea of Biblical Preaching: Connecting the Bible to People, Keith Wilhite and Scott M. Gibson, eds., 163-172 (Baker Books, 1998).

[2] Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon (Baker Academic, 1994), 11, 19 & 22.

[3] Theresa L. Fry Brown, “The Action Potential of Preaching,” Purposes of Preaching, Jana Childers, ed. (Chalice Press, 2004), 50.

[4] Paul Scott Wilson, The Practice of Preaching (Abingdon, 1995), 20-21.

[5] David J. Randolph, The Renewal of Preaching (Fortress Press, 1969), 18-19

[6] David J. Randolph, The Renewal of Preaching in the 21^st Century (Cascade Press, 2009), 17.

[7] Fred B. Craddock, As One Without Authority, revised. ed. (Chalice, 2001), 124.

[8] Fred B. Craddock, “Unpublished lecture,” cf. Craddock, Preaching (Abingdon Press, 1985) 45 and 160.

[9] Richard Lischer, “Preaching as the Church’s Language,” in Listening to the Word: Studies in Honor of Fred B. Craddock, Gail R. Oday and Thomas G. Long, eds., 167-188 (Abingdon Press, 1993), 126.

[10] Ronald J. Allen, Introduction to Preaching (Chalice Press, 1999), 10.

[11] Ibid., 74.