The focus of my preaching project and this resulting paper is, in many ways, part of an on-going conversation I have been having with my congregation, with colleagues and with myself about current trends and concerns within the church, and how the act of preaching within the congregation can address those trends and concerns. One noticeable trend is the influence that our current individualistic, post-modem, 'nomadic' culture is having not only on how the church functions, but on how the church sees itself. From the earliest histories found in both the Old and New Testament, a central understanding of the church has been of being a place of community. A community formed not by
human doing, but formed in response to being created "in God's image and likeness..." But something has changed, and continues to change within the life of the congregation. More and more it seems that people are coming to church not so much to affirm their connection to a community formed by God, but rather to affirm their individualistic ideals and ideologies, and to seek out a personal, even private, understanding of salvation. More and more people are coming to church with little or no understanding of what it means to belong to a church. Because of the transitional nature of current society, more and more people are coming to church with little or no understanding of what it means to be part of a community.
It is from this reality that I have taken on this project of struggling with and examining the possible ways in which the act of preaching might foster within the life of the church an understanding of what it means to be a place of Christian community. The result of the preaching project is a proposal for a new methodology of preaching. This new methodology enables the preacher and the listener to form connections with each other and with the God who calls and creates them to be 'a people,' a community. It allows both the preacher and the listener to connect with the Biblical story and to claim one's presence within that story.
