On preaching
The Guardian (online) is running a series on preaching , trying to measure the health of the medium, and debating whether it has a future. Simon Jenkins of the Ship of Fools comments on the lease of life that sermons have received from digital media , not least from YouTube. But what's also interesting is his passing comment that "preaching remains a significant event in churches", in other words, not just online but in the hard reality of church-bound worship. This rather belies the assertion in the opener from the Guardian, that "the one form of preaching that seems to have died in the West is the traditional delivery from a pulpit". I think this captures one of the strange things about modern church culture. There is a received wisdom that says that preaching is dead and belongs to the past, yet Sunday by Sunday thousands of sermons are preached without excessive objection from the listeners (we'll come back to that later). This is a...