Preaching in the Small Membership Church

Introduction

Worship is the most important thing small membership churches do. Preaching is the heart of that worship. At the front of the sanctuary is a pulpit, a lectern, or their predecessor, the preaching desk. This is the place where ordained ministers, licensed pastors, or lay speakers employed for a season roll up their sleeves, clean off their glasses, and work up a sweat trying to connect the Word of God and the people of God, often with the audacity of a surgeon trying to connect a severed vein or a lineman repairing a downed power line.

Drama builds into the moment. The congregation finishes its hymn, sits down, and scrunches around for a comfortable position. Bulletins are tucked in hymnals; children are given crayons and paper. The pianist or organist leaves the bench; the drummer silences the percussion. All eyes focus forward to a person who stands to speak. No matter what this person does in the next few minutes to fulfill or belie her or his high calling, most present have a sense that something extraordinary should happen. The person up front is supposed to become a vehicle through which Almighty God breaks into the noise of everyday life and speaks to the disciples of Jesus. The congregation is not assembled to hear that person up front recite a string of trite stories or impress with theological shoptalk, or ramble on about himself or herself. The congregation, as a whole and as individual members, waits for a word from the Lord.

Some today have written off the small membership church so totally that they cannot see the weekly drama of the preaching event that occurs there. A church has only one valid script, they say. It must get bigger. They insist there is only one measure for good preaching. It must lead to more services and bigger sanctuaries. This is an unfair appraisal. We must approach preaching in the small membership church more like anthropologists expecting cultural treasure than as conquistadors disappointed that the natives don’t behave more like us. Week after week in roughly 75 percent of the churches in this country, in churches with fewer than one hundred in worship, a preaching event occurs and some-thing happens. We must name that something and do what we can to move it toward excellence.

This is not to say that preaching in the small membership church does not have its unique challenges. Three in particular stand out. First, there is the preacher’s limited time for sermon preparation. Perhaps the preacher is serving three or more churches at the same time with little or no staff support. Or perhaps the preacher, like Paul the tent maker, is employed full time in work outside the church and steals time to prepare the message early or late in the day.

Second, there are the less-than-studio-like conditions for speaking in many small membership church buildings: poor or no sound systems, bad acoustics, inadequate lighting, no provision for child care, and no capacity to project images that amplify the message. And these conditions prevail at a time when persons sitting straight-backed in uncushioned pews that creak have grown accustomed to viewing the polished productions of television and movies from plush theatre seats and home recliners with cup holders.

Third, there is the suspicion of the preacher as an outsider. Most small membership churches began and grew to adolescence without benefit of a resident clergy. Through the years they were served by short-term pastors, part-time pastors, and student pastors. In my denomination it is not that unusual for a small membership church that is 150 years old to list a heritage of fifty-plus pastors. Self-reliance has been a necessary virtue. Guarding against attachment was and is a tool for emotional survival. The smiling preacher educated in a faraway school may plan to turn us into something we are not, and in any case will not be here long.

But along with those unique challenges, the small membership church offers the preacher unique opportunities. The preacher will know the ongoing stories of most persons in the pews and will know how the message is likely to intersect those stories. What will the parents who lost their five-year-old daughter to cancer hear when you preach about Jesus’ healing of Jairus’s little daughter from Mark 5? What will the couple who just lost the family farm hear when you talk about the rewards of good stewardship? Of course, such persons sit in congregations of all sizes, but their presence is accentuated in a small membership church. This has a way of keeping the sensitive preacher’s language real.

The setting for preaching in a small membership church is charged in another, more subtle way. The question of the small membership church’s place in the contemporary world is never far from the surface. Many congregations feel a collective shame that they have not grown appreciatively through the years. Some of these are waiting for someone from denominational headquarters to swoop down and close them as if they were a branch store that has operated in the red for too many years. Serious questions are worth asking in small membership churches, questions that reach to the nature and purpose of the church. Every sermon, whether pastoral or prophetic, apologetic or evangelical, has the potential to weigh in on the side of the worth of discipleship in a small membership church. The preacher who is savvy about this situation will have a special power in preaching.

Most small membership churches continue to hold the preaching act in high esteem. In many parts of the country, a congregation’s favorite name for one who ministers among them is Preacher. I appreciate rather than try to correct this form of recognition when I hear it and will honor it in this book by viewing all other aspects of the pastoral office through the practice of preaching. As one who has a high view of the ordained office of ministry, I am well aware that you could make a similar case for focusing on the pastor as Pastor, as Liturgist, as Leader, or as some more generic term that holds them all together. But ordination is always also ordination to the Word, and it is pretty clear to me that connecting the people of God with the Word of God has to be at the center of any renewal of ministry in small membership churches today.

For more than five hundred years the churches with roots in the Reformation have insisted that one of the marks of the true church is that the Word is truly preached and heard. This book will explore ways to live out that mark in small membership churches.

We will start with the preacher as a student (chapter 1) sent by the congregation to search the Scriptures while sequestered in a study, using the best tools available, and practicing certain spiritual and intellectual disciplines. The preacher as anthropologist (chapter 2) diligently studies the congregation’s stories, rituals, and artifacts in an effort to discern its corporate identity, its soul. The preacher as writer (chapter 3) combines the study of the Scriptures and the study of the congregation to create a manuscript that can be more or less memorized.

The preacher as speaker (chapter 4) maintains a teachable spirit in the art of connecting with the congregation through body, voice, and face. While immersed in the Bible’s metastories, the preacher as storyteller (chapter 5) helps the congregation remember its story of corporate providence, a critical first step for transformation in many small membership churches today. The preacher as theologian (chapter 6) approaches experience as a reflective practitioner, acts as a guide for the corporate journey of faith, and provides the small membership church with a theological language for talking back to its critics. The preacher as leader (chapter 7) helps the small membership church summon its collective inner resources in order to face rather than deny its most difficult challenges.

The preacher as pastor (chapter 8) equips the congregation for the ministry of all Christians where gifts of healing abound while uniquely providing pastoral care for the body of Christ as a whole. The preacher as prophet (chapter 9) forth-tells and fore-tells in the small membership church where the saints and the sinners, the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the marginal are packed together in incredibly tight quarters. And the preacher as evangelist (chapter 10) exchanges a worn-out model for disciple making for one that makes the most of a healthy small membership church’s fundamental strengths.

My overriding purpose in this book is to name practical concerns and offer specific advice for those who preach in small membership churches. I will engage certain themes of contemporary theology, homiletics, and mission without engaging their respective literatures, but I hope to do this in a way that entices the reader to explore further. A short list of next-step reading suggestions by chapter is at the back of the book.

1

The Preacher as Student of Scripture

Iteach in a summer school for persons who were called into ministry in mid-life or later and do not have the resources, or health, or time to endure the rigors of the ninety-hour Master of Divinity program required for ordination in my denomination. Although there are exceptions (doctors, lawyers, teachers), most of these adult students have only a high school education or the GED equivalent. They answered the call while they were driving a truck, serving as a teacher’s aide, selling insurance, managing a daycare facility, or managing the power tools section of a home improvement store.

They were disciples of Jesus before they answered the call to ministry, and they served as speakers and teachers in their home congregations. They studied the Bible to prepare for their service, but where and how? I love to listen to their stories. They would get up before dawn and study the Bible for an hour or two before they began the day’s work. They would steal away over the lunch hour to work on Sunday’s lesson. They would play CDs of James Earl Jones reading the Gospels while they drove their rig across Interstate 70 from Pennsylvania to Colorado.

And now these servants of God’s Word find themselves in the most exhilarating role reversal imaginable: they are being paid to study the Bible! They are expected to sequester themselves on a regular basis so they might indulge in a search of the Scriptures. The amateur gets to turn pro! And nobody in the small membership church, neither the one who shares the preacher’s blue collar hunger to grow by learning nor the professional who appreciates the privileges accrued by higher education begrudge them this basic act of seclusion behind every sermon.

Of course, some licensed pastors, like some of their ordained counterparts, are not up to the compliment. They will flit from one Urgent Task to another like a hummingbird seeking the next red blossom. They will run on empty, squeezing as many sermons as they can out of the lingering fumes of an earlier period of study. But for