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Marketplace Preaching:
How To Return the Sermon to Where It Belongs

By Calvin Miller

"To stand and drone out a sermon in a kind of articulate snoring to people who are somewhere between awake and asleep must be wretched work," said Charles Haddon Spurgeon.¹ George Bernanos in The Diary of a Country Priest said, "If only God would open my eyes and unseal my ears so that I might behold the face of my parish."² Solving the problem of wretched sermons may lie in looking and listening to people rather than just talking at them. But what can motivate preachers to enter into the conditions of those who listen to them? The supply of pulpit power must come from our sense of calling and our worldview.

If we contrast the sermons of the Reformation or the Great Awakening with those today, the difference is usually distinct. History's great preachers existed to call the world to Christ. Their sermons were not separate from themselves. Their message existed, as they existed, to call, redeem, and instruct. The sermon was indistinguishable from the bearer.

Tim Timmons says that the narrow-walled focus of the sermon has been made narrow by three handicaps that the preacher must overcome.³ First is the handicap of a world that is listening for quick-fix answers. The sermon must speak the biblical reply clearly and with passion so the sermon presents the answer.

The second and worse handicap is this: The church is talking to itself. The church, in building its own radio, TV, and publishing empires, has become so interiorized that it only "reads its own mail" and only "speaks its own interests to the people of Zion." Marketplace preaching is a call to get outside the walls and find out once again what people's interests and needs really are.

The third handicap is that the sermon and worship are prepared to minister to those who "own" the church. Those who come into such self-absorbed worship are not likely to be drawn back.

As various mainline denominations scramble for miracles to keep them alive, maybe they need to go outside once again. Even if they are not outside physically they need to live outside symbolically. Sermons need to learn again the language of the marketplace. From here on let's refer to the "outside" sermons as those that are market-oriented. Whether or not they are actually preached outside, they exist for "outsiders."

Sermons preached outside have a chance to be heard by those who compose the culture. Their verbiage, reasoning, content, and appeal are not for those who "own" the church, but for all whom Christ calls the church to "own."

The very heart of the marketplace sermon is not talking but listening. The outside sermon listens hard because life is hard. The outside sermon is Scripture saturated, for it knows the Word of God is all that authenticates. Outside sermons teach, but only after they have reasoned and, above all, listened. Outside sermons dialogue; inside sermons tend to pontificate.

"Preach to the suffering and you will never lack a congregation," said Joseph Parker. "There is a broken heart in every pew."⁴ Preach to the nonchurch needs and you will never lack a congregation. Outsiders are interested in learning the power in the name of Jesus. The preacher who meets this kind of outside yearning will likely meet the "yearning Jesus" interests of those inside the church as well.

The church-walled sermon produces a kind of egoism of the redeemed. It blocks the very idea of caring widely. The church-walled sermon often carries no vision, has no job to do, and thus holds little attraction. Nan Kilkeary says that communication only occurs when we break free of all egoism and enter into others' circumstances.⁵ If this is true, only the marketplace sermon is prepared to communicate.

Conversion Information "Most of those who also attend Protestant/evangelical churches are aware that churches exist to tell them how to be saved. Most who come are aware that Jesus called himself Savior. They expect the sermon and the worship service to provide the information they need to come to God...."

THE WITNESS OF PREACHING

Vital preaching has always had as its reason for being the issue of witnessing. But we must ask why we are telling this truth. Is it only to form the identity of the church? No, it tells the truth to create the church. Witnessing is to reach as well as teach. It must have a missionary tone as well as a doctrinal tone.

Many churches have moved away from customary sermon and worship forms. Still, while nontraditional, they appeal primarily to their own kind of people. But there is as little value in having a noncommunicative contemporary sermon as having a noncommunicative liturgical form.

I would like to examine four shifts in the contemporary culture that would accost the old paradigm of preaching.

SHIFT NUMBER ONE: THE NEW CONSUMERISM

Marketplace preaching, in the New Testament and other periods of historic awakening, incited men and women to ask, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" (Acts 16:30, NIV). When the sermon prompts the question, there must be someone there to answer. The marketplace sermon presupposes altar-centered worship. The biblical and post-Reformation models of evangelistic sermons often included altars. There seems to be a linkage between altars and church growth. Altars are meeting places between God and humanity. A sermon that loses its godly summons is at best a current event and at worst a morality monologue.

The business of the sermon and the church has been to call the world to transcendent values. But in the current secularization of the church, altars have been bypassed in favor of what is being called audience anonymity. Without altars, we talk less and less about eternity and more and more about the here and now.

Once heaven and hell are completely deleted from the sermon, the church will have been culturally domesticated. God must at last surrender His sovereignty to human artifice, for then He will not be found either in the sermon or at the altar.⁶ The confused worshiper fails to understand why people get so excited about church while sermons say so little.

SHIFT NUMBER TWO: DENOMINATIONAL DECLINE

The second shift that accompanies the softness in the contemporary sermon is the decline of denominations. In the year 1966, nearly every major American denomination began to decline. Only Missouri Synod Lutherans and Southern Baptists escaped.

What caused this loss of vitality? Simply put: People will not attend churches they do not perceive as vital or important to their life. Long ago, Findley Edge said that people endure nearly anything in religion except a loss of vitality. Marketplace preaching will reestablish such vitality by learning again of the interests, tastes, and desires of those outside the church and by showing how Christ is adequate to fill them.

SHIFT NUMBER THREE: THE WORSHIP-LANGUAGE BARRIER

A third shift that I have long advocated is what I call preaching in the Vulgate. The gospel of Christ was written in friendly street language. When Saint Jerome translated the Vulgate Bible in the 4th century, the Bible became once again a Latin Bible, but it was also written in street, or Vulgate, Latin.

The church once again must learn to preach in the Vulgate. Preachers must appeal to those outside the church with approachable homiletics.

SHIFT NUMBER FOUR: CHRISTIANITY AS SUBCULTURE

The fourth shift has seen the church move from a culture to a subculture. The church is no longer central to culture and has become merely a subculture. There are several touch points that can return the church to her mandate of marketplace preaching.

1. The church must learn to talk to the world in a language it understands.
2. Recent times have witnessed the rise and fall of some Christian television and cable empires. This has precipitated a wide-scale loss of public faith in the church and a loss of respect for our integrity.
3. The marketplace preachers of the third millennium will care more about sociology than did their forebears. The "pro-me" culture of the baby boomers cannot be overlooked. They are the nation's thinkers and leaders. Unless the church can learn how this major segment of culture thinks and responds, it can neither appeal to them nor regain its health.
4. The church is about to turn an important millennial corner. The church must see that people have a high expectation for life in the 21st century. This expectation will come in every area. New areas of social renovation are already in place. Preaching must be compassionate enough to care and virile enough to confront an unredeemed society. We must be determined that we will not make preaching a smiling, vacuous response to human need.
5. Marketplace preaching will also have to find ways of coping with cultural diversity. Widely independent ethnic and socioeconomic subgroups are demanding more individual recognition. The explosive competition between these subcultures is blowing our nation apart.
   Language has become all-important. The pastor now finds a new structure of compassion that demands that we honor everyone's heritage and origin. This goes beyond the mere abandonment of ethnic humor.
6. To preach with fervor, marketplace preaching will have to sense that Christianity is special and not just another facet of culture. Christianity is now rated by most as the same kind and quality of faith as Islam, New Age, etc. Because these voices clamor with equal intensity, the voice of the church must be heard loud and clear. Its mandate to redeem all peoples must be called unique. Our missionary evangelism must speak its Jesus as the only way of salvation theology.
7. Marketplace preaching will speak in new tones of love and compassion. We can no longer fill our preaching with only high doctrine aimed at those who are unchurched.

CONCLUSION

The church itself is always in danger of going out of business if it does not ask the right questions. The question we should be asking is not how to make our worship services better or our sermons more interesting. The church needs to know what the world wants to hear in a sermon, and yet also find a way to give it what it needs to hear in a sermon.

This double understanding will mandate many new forms of worship. Sermons that used to end in invitations may not always be able to do that. Whether or not invitations survive, the sense of the altar must. "Come and declare" will have to find a place in the marketplace sermon, however. "Come and declare" are not just words that evangelicals invented. They are at the heart of Pentecost. When they are barred from the sermon, the sermon will no longer exist. Still the sermonic forms with which we say, "Come and declare," may radically change. Whatever these new forms are, the church has found the best and most acceptable language to express its faith. This new language, which the church calls forth, will be the building blocks of the marketplace sermon.

ENDNOTES

1. Charles Haddon Spurgeon as cited by James D. Berkley in Preaching To Convince (Waco: Word, 1986), 13.
2. George Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (New York: Macmillan Paperbacks, 1937), 30. As cited by James W. Kennedy, Minister's Shoptalk (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 34.
3. Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 43.
4. James D. Berkley, ed., Preach To Convince (Waco: Word, 1986), 41.
5. Nan Kilkeary, The Good Communicator (Evanston: Quikread Press, 1987), 10.
6. A.J. Conyers, The Eclipse of Heaven (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 96.