That's Deep
What if knowledge isn't the deepest layer?
First of all…
In case you missed it:
Thanks for being part of this successful fundraiser. You can still help! The Kickstarter is officially over on Monday, but you can make retroactive “late” pledges which I’ll leave open as long as I can or until Follower is published in March—whichever comes first. My hope is that now people will use the Kickstarter as a “pre-order” tool. You can currently order an individual copy this way for yourself (incentive tier: “Just.The.Book.”), or if you think you’d like to discuss this in a group, you can order a batch of ten for the price of nine (incentive tier: “x10”). Of course, you can also back at whatever other tier you want! (Might I recommend the Book Bundle, where you can get all three of my books at once?)
If we manage to raise another $2,000, it’ll give me enough to work with to also fund an audio version of this book. If not, consider that any overage results in an author getting fairly compensated for her work, which isn’t always a foregone conclusion in the industry, so either way, thank you!
On Sunday a childhood friend of mine and her husband attended my church. After the service (during which I had had the entire congregation yell out with Bartimaeus, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”) she said, “I just really love the way you preach.”
“Aw,” I said, never sure exactly what the appropriate filler word is when responding to a compliment, “thank you.”
“I love how it’s so…” she tried to continue, but I interrupted, guessing.
“Interactive?” I guessed.
“Well, I like that, too,” she said. “But I was going to say deep.”
I paused, partly to focus on cutting a slice of green tomato cake with cream cheese frosting which I had brought for fellowship time, and partly because that is just not an adjective I associate with my preaching. It’s not that I phone it in when I’m preparing a sermon. On the contrary; most weeks I start drafting on Tuesday, let the thing percolate until Thursday, let it percolate some more after some more tweaking, and then often retool the whole thing before church on Sunday morning. Usually the passage is “running in the background” of my brain all week like an app I forgot to turn off, and my spiritual antennae keep alert to things the Holy Spirit might have to say about it, directly into my brain, or—more often—via circumstances or conversations that occur while just generally living.
But see, for better or worse, I grew up in (what I am coming to suspect was the least toxic form of) Evangelical Christianity. In that stream, especially back in the day, Scripture knowledge was primary. You memorized it, you studied it on your own, you went to Bible studies, you took classes. Everybody knew that some ways of approaching the Bible were better than others. When it came to Bible study, you wanted inductive.1 When it came to sermons, you wanted expository.2
I still think there is real value in these practices, but there are also real limitations. In my experience, one of the biggest ones is that they are so analytical, you can do them yourself without the Holy Spirit’s being involved at all. Since I no longer see any point to Christianity—or even reading the Bible—without a real interactive, back and forth, developing and growing and shifting relationship with God Godself, taking the Holy Spirit out of the equation of reading Scripture feels like a really big downside. (I would argue—maybe will argue some other time—that it is a really big downside which affects life in the real world quite negatively.)
That’s not consciously why I don’t usually preach expositorily. But it is de facto why. I can’t read the Bible analytically anymore, because when I read it, I’m having a real conversation with God. And just like I probably couldn’t break down a conversation with you into sentence by sentence analysis for the consumption of others, I can’t often do it anymore with the book God inspired to initiate conversation with us, either. Thing is, when people call a sermon “deep,” my brain still assumes that only expository sermons deserve that description. Also, keep in mind that my friend using that word and I grew up attending the same church, and until somewhat recently, she was still going there. Accordingly, I had absolutely no idea what she meant.
“Um…really?” I said.
“Yeah,” she replied, not batting an eye. “You go really deep into the emotions and the psychology.”
And that, I realized, explained a lot. I’m not a psychologist, but as you can tell from the above, I am very relational, and I have been told by multiple sources that I’m good at “seeing” people and reading people. Also at this point Jesus and I usually have a running dialogue going on in the background (along with the sermon Scripture—or maybe that’s part of it), and I think He helps me see what’s going on under the surface, too—of people and of Scripture.
I liked that feedback from my friend. I’ve been trying for a while to figure out what it is about my approach to Scripture that makes it different from a lot of other people’s. I can’t tell you how often someone has said, “I never thought of that before,” when I teach on something. Usually I hadn’t thought of it before, either. But after I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it, and the things I notice are never (except maybe according to that one publishing house) heretical or unorthodox. Just unexpected—and almost always related to some emotional or psychological component that sheds new light on a familiar passage. It occurs to me that expository preaching has depth…but maybe relational preaching (or at least well-informed and lived out relational preaching) can go even deeper.
I think that’s probably what makes Follower different and difficult to categorize, too. An early-reader said it reads like I’m having a conversation with him. Not everybody likes that approach, I suppose, but if you do, I hope you’ll preorder a copy. You can see if you agree.
Thank you.
Inductive Bible study is a multi-step process for studying the Bible, involving noting what the passage says, interpreting it (or, often, having it interpreted for you), and then “applying it to your life.” As I think about it, that is kind of what happens at The Listening Post, but for some reason it feels very different there. I’d have to ponder some more (and maybe ask the participants) to figure out why.
Expository preaching involves picking a passage apart and dealing with it verse by verse.