Mosaic Mennonites

Missional - Intercultural - Formational

Growing Leaders

Women’s Preaching: What’s the difference?

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By Gwen Groff, bethanym@vermontel.net
Pastor at Bethany Mennonite Church, VT

I have never liked descriptions of the differences between women and men, mainly because such generalizations tend to alienate people who don’t find themselves fitting the general description of one gender or the other. So when asked to write an article about the differences between male and female preachers I decided to ask several women pastors in Franconia Conference what they believe is different about their preaching from the preaching of their male colleagues and the men they grew up hearing.

Several women grew up listening primarily to their fathers’ preaching. Sandy Drescher-Lehman’s (Souderton congregation) father was her first mentor and she wanted to grow up to be a pastor like him. However, she believed that wasn’t possible because she was a woman. Like Drescher-Lehman, Dawn Ruth Nelson’s (Methacton congregation) first role model was also her father. A difference they have both observed is that men’s preaching is louder. Nelson noted that some male preachers have a “special preaching cadence” that she has never acquired. Lehman is glad the church has developed in the past 20 years to allow “softly spoken women to have a voice in the pulpit and be valid preachers.”

One difference I have noticed in my own preaching is that I use far more stories from personal experience than most male preachers I’ve heard. This carries its own risks. Until I was in a seminary preaching class I did not learn how this vulnerability might shape the content of men’s and women’s sermons differently. One preaching exercise in particular asked us to take an event from the last 24 hours of our lives and use it as an illustration of a given text. The incident that I used was finding a note from an old friend stuck under the wiper blade of my car. Discovering the note from someone who knew me well made me realize I was lonely in this new community in where I was not known. When my sermon was discussed in class our professor highlighted how well my illustration fit the text. However, he also noted that I could never use it in an actual sermon noting that if a female minister ever admits loneliness to her congregation she will have more unwanted attention from parishioners than she can handle.

Despite the risk of vulnerability Dresher-Lehman and Nelson use personal stories in their preaching. “I think there are certainly some men who tell personal stories in their preaching”, notes Drescher-Lehman, “but overall, women have an easier time doing that because we are more vulnerable and open with our girlfriends and thus know the power of our stories for each other’s healing.” She believes women in the congregation “like hearing the Word preached from something closer to how they experience words and stories and life.”

Nelson clearly articulates her reason for often using personal stories: “I have found three interlocking stories to be the stuff of sermons: God’s story (the scripture), our story (the congregation’s), and my story. When the personal story is left out, I wonder where the preacher, himself or herself, ‘is’ in the story and what impact this story has had on him or her.”

One of my own biases is that if we truly believe in the priesthood of all believers, one of the priestly roles that must be shared is preaching. The sermon ought to be more of a cooperative conversation than a monologue. Ambler Mennonite pastor Sharon Wyse Miller said, “I see my sermons as part of a conversation and am delighted if I receive comments or questions. This happens so seldom, however. If we had Sunday School after worship I’d suggest a sermon discussion class.”

Nelson encourages responses during the sermon, “I raise a lot of questions in my preaching, and sometimes I stop and let them give answers. This always is fascinating but it often then makes me wonder why I need to continue the sermon. They have such good thoughts!”

Most of these women find they use scripture differently than the way it was used in the sermons they heard from men. Miller said, “I pray with scriptures, live into the scriptures, and encourage my listeners to do the same.”

Nelson expressed the difference as “reading scripture for formation rather than information.” She has also found that, “Women notice different stories in scripture and interpret them differently. They see the women in scripture more clearly and with more interest. They are less likely to have a woman-as-temptress reading of the Bible.”

One clear difference is the way women embody the pastoral role. One pastor said she longs for the day when people will notice what she says rather than the difference in her voice when they no longer see her more as a woman than as a preacher. Yet there is a positive side to being seen as a woman.

Each of these women pastors said she was aware of mentoring young girls and other women in the congregation simply by being a woman in the pastoral role. Nelson said, “One time a young woman in our congregation went up in the pulpit after our service was over sort of like she was trying it out. I notice that all ages of women are stepping up into more leadership roles since I came. Not just preaching but also leading various other ministries, starting new ministries, and chairing groups.”

“Showing [young women] that they can at least be open to God’s possible calling was one of my main reasons for coming to Souderton, and one of the things that keeps me here,” said DrescherLehman. “There’s no other way to show them that women’s gifts are as important as men’s and can be used as freely. I don’t think they can just be told, expected to believe it, and be free to hear God.”

Gwen Groff is pastor of Bethany Mennonite Church in Bridgewater Corners, Vermont. She and her husband, Robert, are parents of two young children.

Preaching in a changing culture

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Preacher StatueBy Mark Wenger, wengermr@emu.edu
Director of Pastoral Studies and The Preaching Institute for Eastern Mennonite Seminary,Lancaster campus

Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia has an ornate old chapel building used for chapel services and other events. I distinctly remember when I and my fellow students assembled to hear a distinguished speaker in 1993. I was startled by the presence of a large television set placed just to the side of the ornate, old wooden pulpit. I do not remember the video segment, but I do remember the buzz it created and how out of place it seemed in a chapel built in a different time and for a different generation.

I see at least two large shifts in our culture that affect our preaching. Like a slow-motion earthquake, these changes shake apart old patterns and provide new opportunities and tough challenges. I suppose you can say that these tectonic shifts reverberate from the impact that television and electronic technologies are having on how we communicate with each other.

First, as Neil Postman pointed out back in 1985, our culture has made a major shift away from being word-based in its communications to being more image-based. Of course we still use words, but our words are increasingly surrounded by and often trumped by visual images. The average person today, especially the average young person, is far more likely to watch a movie than to read a book. We now often expect meaningful communication for groups of people to include visual imagery, video footage, and pre-recorded or amplified sound. Group communication that lacks these things can seem old fashioned.

This represents a huge change for Jews and for Christians, especially Protestants and Anabaptists, who have been “people of the Book.” “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The scriptures do include a lot of imagery, but it is all expressed in words. As our culture shifts its emphasis to visual communication media, more and more of us have come to accept PowerPoint displays, movie clips, video clips of interviews, and clips from TV broadcasts as part of our worship services and our preaching.

A second change in our culture is the rhetorical movement from argument and proof for persuasion to greater use of experience and testimony. This is clearly visible in the way commercials have changed. They once tended to focus on the benefits and advantages of the products in the belief that people would choose those that perform the best. Today’s commercials tell stories or attempt to create moods and feelings that we will associate with their products in the belief that people will choose the most appealing products.

This change is also evident in the increased emphasis on narrative, metaphor, and imagination in preaching. We used to think of stories as illustrations of the points we were making, but storytellers like Garrison Keillor attract a following without pulling the meaning out of their stories. The story and its imagery are themselves the meaning and point. Some people once frowned on reading novels because they were not telling a true story, but many of us now read them as helpful reflections of common experience.

Many preachers have come to realize that the majority of the Bible is narrative and that it is full of metaphors and verbal images. Jesus told a lot of fictional stories that we call parables. Some of the Bible’s truth is expressed as propositional statements, but a great deal of its truth is discerned from its stories, from the interactions in the dramas, and from the actions of its key figures. Even God’s character is explained many times in terms of the things he has done.

Thomas Troeger has written a very helpful book on this subject called Ten Strategies for Preaching in a Multimedia Culture. He provides a series of suggestions for how to translate the images and content of the scriptures for a culture that expects to receive its communications through visual images, drama, parables, stories, and questions. For example Troeger invites the preacher to “assume there is more to the biblical story.” The preacher can fill out the village scene of the wedding feast at Cana with details and conversations not recorded in Scripture, but quite plausible and congruent with the biblical record. That takes imagination. Another strategy Troeger encourages is for preachers to “create a parable” in the manner that Jesus did, or to develop the sermon as a movie script.

In the end, I believe that preaching that matters must be done with integrity. The sermon needs to come from the preacher’s heart and experience to be authentic, and it needs to be faithful to the scriptures to be God’s word to the people. Changes that serve these ends should be embraced, but we may need to experiment with them before we can discern which ones help us communicate God’s truth more effectively and which ones merely entertain or distract the audience.

Mark Wenger is Director of Pastoral Studies and the Preaching Institute for Eastern Mennonite Seminary at Lancaster, PA. Mark has a Ph.D in practical theology from Union Seminary. He and his wife Kathy were
formerly co-pastors at Springdale Mennonite Church in Waynesboro, VA.

Who Is Listening? Opening new possibilities for the preacher and the listener

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By Nancy R. Heisey
Associate Professor of Bible and Religion at Eastern Mennonite University and president of Mennonite World Conference

The elderly woman whose husband died three years ago sits near the front, always carrying her Bible with her to the service. It is well worn, and the preacher knows she reads it every day.

The youth group members clustered in the back rows have each received a Bible as a gift from the congregation. They remember some of the stories from childhood Sunday school. Occasionally when facing a hard question, they flip through the text looking for something.

The single mother, who discovered this congregation through other young parents who had befriended her, isn’t sure how to look up the biblical references printed in the bulletin. She wonders at times why the preacher tries so hard to connect her remarks to such an ancient book.
The middle-aged high school teacher who has spent his life in the church can’t stop thinking about the recent article he read discussing new archaeological evidence that contradicts the biblical story he learned as a child. Silently, he asks whether the preacher pays any attention to such information.

Such economic, social, and faith-background diversity in many congregations within the Anabaptist tradition in North America is part of the reality many people now call postmodernity. Perhaps the most helpful way to think about what this term means is to note characteristics of an earlier way of thinking that used to be but is no longer widely shared. The modern view was defined by the understanding that human beings were rational and that society was continually making progress. It was also based on the belief that particular causes led to specific effects. Most people in North American congregations have begun to think of reality as more complex and less mechanical. As biblical scholar Edgar McKnight explains, “Machines are relatively simple mechanical instruments, but conscious beings are very complex and unpredictable. The world we see is like the human beings we are.”

Those responsible to proclaim God’s Word in the congregation thus face a daunting task. On one hand, a preacher has the Bible, an ancient library which reveals high moments of God’s encounter with humanity. On the other hand, he is part of a 21st century community whose world is very distant in time and space from that of biblical characters. As part of the Christian community, he turns to this library as an authority for life, and calls it the Word of God. Upon reflection, however, that expression does not directly describe how God speaks through the Bible. Instead, it is a metaphor. As biblical scholar Sandra Schneiders notes, “metaphor is perhaps our most powerful use of language, our most effective access to the meaning of reality at its deepest levels. . . . (But it) is not translatable into literal meaning.”

While today some preachers and congregations still assume there is no difference between the biblical world and the world they live in, most Westerners have long sensed a gap between their world and the world of the Bible. This has led to the image of interpretation as throwing a bridge across that gap. A postmodern perspective offers a more hopeful way to bring the Bible into conversation with the life of the church.

Those who study the practice of interpretation have described this approach as an experience in three worlds.

First, all people begin to listen or read from where they stand, with their daily lives, varied pasts, and different social and economic situations. Coming to the Bible as they are, they can be helped by thinking about ways this identity shapes what they think.

Second, the Bible, like any book, is more than a ream of paper with printing on it. As anyone who has gotten absorbed in a good book knows, reading can lead readers to forget themselves, as characters, word pictures, themes, or plot take on a life of their own. The world of the text is this wealth found in the written material itself. Bible students have always thought this world mattered, but seldom done so while also consciously reflecting on the world before the text.

Third, the settings where the Bible was written and edited, the social and political realities that affected the people of that time, and the author(s) of the texts have an impact on what it means. McKnight suggests that people who study the Bible envision these different worlds as circles which hang together in an interlocking fashion and form a dynamic unity. To imagine moving through these different worlds, made up of intersecting circles, the idea of a dance may be helpful. As the preacher works with the Bible in the preparation of a sermon, she will step back and forth between circles, sometimes dwelling longer in one or the other, but eventually taking all of them into account. There is not just one place to begin, nor one direction to go. But there is pattern, discipline, and rhythm to the process.

Such an approach to bringing the Scriptures, their authors, and today’s people of God into a lively conversation is not only postmodern. Origen, an early Christian biblical scholar from Egypt, described a similar understanding with a different word picture:
“The whole divinely inspired Scripture may be likened . . . to many locked rooms in one house. By each room is placed a key, but not the one that corresponds to it, so that the keys are scattered about beside the rooms, none of them matching the room by which it is placed. It is a difficult task to find the keys and match them to the rooms that they can open.”

This dance also draws today’s preachers into step with our Anabaptist forebears. The biblical interpreters of the Radical Reformation, suggests McKnight, worked from the conviction that they needed to try, or test, the mainstream biblical interpretations of their time. They did so not to destroy meaning, but rather to attain new understandings that would strengthen faithful lives. Likewise, a preacher’s movement through the three worlds may open new windows of understanding and faithfulness for herself and her hearers.

Nancy Heisey is Associate Professor of Bible and Religion at Eastern Mennonite University and current president of Mennonite World Conference. This article is excerpted from her chapter in Anabaptist Preaching: A Conversation Between Pulpit, Pew, and Bible, (Copyright (c) 2003 by Cascadia Publishing House, used by permission), edited by David A. Greiser and Michael A. King, available from Cascadia at www.CascadiaPublishingHouse.com.

Book Review – Graceful Speech: An Invitation to Preaching by Lucy Lind Hogan

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Louisvile, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.
Reviewed by Jessica Walter

Drawing from over 20 years of pastoral and teaching experience, Lucy Lind Hogan invites the readers of Graceful Speech: An Invitation to Preaching to go deep into what it means to be a preacher. She asks that as the “nuts and bolts” of preaching are being gathered, a theology in preaching be developed as well.

Her holistic approach to preaching addresses what it means to be a preacher, all it requires to craft a sermon, and how to deliver the message. She graciously reminds her readers that there are people who are listening. She declares, “We have all been invited to join this great cloud of witnesses cheering on the people of God as they run the race set before them.”

Other highlights of the book include questions at the end of each chapter that prompt critical thinking, important and necessary suggestions for developing character for preaching, and a detailed walk through developing a sermon that offers a variety of resources and practical techniques. Understanding that this can be a lofty topic, Hogan brings readers back down to earth by offering her own experiences in dealing with the reality of juggling multiple life and job requirements and by using cultural references; including examples of themes from children’s stories to the dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

As a seminary student I found this book both encouraging and challenging. Hogan’s personal writing style and deep look at what it takes to develop a sermon and be a virtuous preacher allowed me to truly understand the preacher as a whole person. In this vocation we are asked to be vessels of God’s word and that requires us to take on the somewhat indefinite task of being righteous. Hogan offers wonderfully realistic guidelines on what it means to be an honorable person and a preacher of integrity.

Hogan reminds us that we, as preachers, are one in a host of preachers who have come before us. Therefore studying their sermons is an enriching way to learn from past triumphs and failures. I appreciated her wise look at a preacher’s listeners. She encourages preachers to understand their listeners through several means, including watching the response from the pulpit and taking in how they view you as a preacher. Hogan recommends understanding what is going on in the lives of your congregants on personal, community, national, broader Church, and world levels.

In the capstone to Hogan’s insightful “invitation to preaching” she notes several issues that are “challenging, pressing, and engaging in contemporary preaching.” She asks preachers to not only address the present issues in preaching but also to look ahead to what the future may hold for this calling and vocation.

Jessica Walter is an associate for communication and leadership cultivation at Franconia Mennonite Conference. She attends West Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship and is a member of Slate Hill Mennonite Church in Mechanicsburg, PA. Jessica is a student at Biblical Seminary in Hatfield, PA.

Growth Events

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January 2-19, 2007: Interterm
Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary (www.ambs.edu)

January 15-18, 2007: Practicing Life Abundant in the Congregation and in Daily Life
Eastern Mennonite Seminary School for Leadership Training (www.emu.edu/seminary/slt)

January 22-25, 2007: Pastors Week and Leadership Clinics: Meeting Jesus In Popular Culture
Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary (www.ambs.edu)

March 2-4, 2007: Damascus Road Anti-racism Analysis Training
Eastern University’s Campolo School for Social Change, Philadelphia, PA (SharonW@DesignForMinistry.com)

March 12-16, 2007: Mediation Skills Training Institute
Lombard Mennonite Peace Center, Tulsa, OK (www.LMPeaceCenter.org)

March 20-22, 2007: Here I Stand: Leading Change Through Self-Differentiation
Lombard Mennonite Peace Center, Portland, OR (www.LMPeaceCenter.org)

Toolbox

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BOOKS

Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages
Haddon W. Robinson, Jr.
2001 (2nd ed.), Baker Books

Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon
Bryan Chapell
2005 (2nd ed.), Baker Academic

The Creative Leader: Unleashing the Power of Your Creative Potential
Ed Young
2006, B & H Publishers

Creative Preaching and Oral Writing
Richard Carl Hoefler
1995, CSS Publishing Company

The Four Pages of the Sermon: A Guide to Biblical Preaching
Paul Scott Wilson
1999, Abingdon Press

Fundamentals of Preaching
John Killinger
1996, Augsburg
A good resource in learning the basics of preaching that go across denominations and cultures.

The Homiletical Plot: The Sermon as Narrative Art Form
Eugene Lowry
2000, John Knox Press

Humility, True Greatness
C.J. Mahaney
Helps to shape the heart posture in preaching by teaching that if we want people to listen to our sermons then we should walk in the attitude of humility.

The Practice of Preaching
Paul Scott Wilson
1999, Abingdon Press

The Preaching Life
Barbara Brown Taylor
1993, Cowley Publications

Preparing Sunday Dinner: A Collaborative Approach to Worship and Preaching
June Alliman Yoder et al.
2005, Herald Press

ARTICLES

Comedy Club Pastor: How a Course in Stand-Up Invigorated My Preaching
Dennis Beatty, Leadership Journal
Spring 2001, p. 111-114

The Great Delivery Debate: Three Pastors on What Works Best – Manuscript, Notes or Nothing at all
Jerry Andrews, Paul Atwater, Rich Knight, Leadership Journal, Winter 2000, p. 47-52

Leader magazine by MC USA
Published quarterly, for pastoral leaders

WEBSITES

www.desparatepreacher.com
This site is focused on helping preachers with lectionary preaching.

www.preachingtoday.com

www.sermoncentral.com
A large database of resources for preachers that can be searched through a variety of methods.