Disappearing Cats 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

No, “anachronistic” is not the correct word. Pulpitted preaching is an institutional form of communication deeply embedded in the Church’s patriarchal and hierarchical cultural history. Church members like to keep you up in the pulpit (the higher the better) because it is less threatening to them if you are kept at that safe, formal distance. They will always say they put you up there because being there gives proper respect for the authority of Scripture, but what they really want is the absence of interaction or any form of engagement that they fear may call them into question. The institution likes to play this little authority game. As a church member once told me, it was my job to tell them what to do, and it was their job to tell me they weren’t going to do it.

Marshall McLuhan used to say that the medium is the message. The sterile, one-sided, preacher-focused worship involving at best only the merely intellectual participation of a congregation is the spiritual form of community that constitutes the real message of such gatherings, no matter what the preacher preaches. It is hard, virtually impossible, to get around this.

The alternative to such a dysfunctional form of communication is dialectical, or interactive discourse. Stanley Fish describes dialectical discourse as a process of engaging the auditor (or the reader) to respond and thus contribute to the pursuit of truth through a process of discovery that is often a process of self-discovery, or transformation, because the truth discovered is the truth about one's own self , not just some common knowledge that can be looked up in a reference book, external to who one is.

Robert Burton's assertion in The Anatomy of Melancholy that "Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse" is true for all sermons as well, or ought to be. Fish reminds us that such dialectical discourse will be "disturbing, for it requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by. [The discovery of truth] is often made at the expense not only of a reader's opinions and values, but of his self-esteem." The reader or auditor does not simply move from a flat, literal, factual world to an understanding that is broader and more nuanced, that is. The reader's own self-understanding is consumed and abandoned in a process of transformation toward a larger and more authentic understanding of the self as a child of God. This is scary stuff. No wonder they put you up there in a pulpit. They ought to have seat belts installed in the pews as well.