Preaching is a challenging adventure in many different ways. In this thesis I have tried to emphasize the balance between pastoral care and prophetic message in preaching. Is it possible to combine two so seemingly different perspectives? Prophetic preaching has a reputation since the days of John the Baptist, of being harsh and demanding. When the kingdom of God comes everybody needs to repent. Repentance almost becomes the first issue, not the coming of the kingdom. But today we have another more careful approach. We do not wish to harm our congregations. We care for people and we want to share our faith with them, in a loving and caring God. That is a very demanding task in our lives as preachers and pastors. At the same time the pastoral preacher risks missing the point, the cutting edge, of the Scriptures.
In the old Swedish sermon prayer, it was stated that the sermon had a mission to comfort, teach, admonish and wam us. Docent Bo Larsson interpreted these activities as comfort and worry. In my interpretation it was easy first to discover a connection between comfort and pastoral care and then connect worry with the prophetic message. The second connection I made was seeing pastoral care as a part of meeting the individuals in the congregation and the prophetic as a mission for the people of God to be a sign of God’s presence in society. At the same time I realized that the affirmation of a communal mission could contribute to the healing process of pastoral care.
If we emphasize comfort too much we support the victimizing of people which renders them numb and without initiative. Inspired by ideas from several feminist theologians I recognized the temptation to glorify the suffering servant as a role model for the disciples. Now, if we choose to emphasize the part where we are part of God’s ongoing creation and are his collaborators in this serious matter, it will challenge us and give us energy to go from self-pity to self-affirmation. As a feminist theologian, Prof. Barbara Lundblad said: “Touch the places where the wounds are in your own life and in the lives of others.” And she also stated that we should not remain there. We must name the danger to be able to do something about it. Prof. Walter Brueggeman has reached the same conclusion expressed as follows; name the danger, chaos, and show a way of restoring, rebuilding, cosmos. A part of what we have to name and see is our own complicity in the events around us. Being a Lutheran I recognize our talk about sin and confession in the word “complicity”.
That a pastoral approach in the act of preaching is not only an individual approach but also a collective approach was an insight I got from reading G. Lee Ramsey's book Care-full preaching. At the same time as he emphasized the importance of being a caring people, he warned against the risk of becoming too exclusive.
The discussion concerning the context of the project was one of the important results emanating from my D.min thesis. We, the congregation and myself, realized that we had given an image of the context that was not true. It was an idealistic way to look at the congregation and also something that had an aura of the past. These were the good old days. The way we wanted it to be, longed for and dreamed of. This was no longer true since so much had changed since then. This was also something that we needed to name to be able to move on. It was painful but necessary.
The work with the contextual description as well as the work around the sermons in the project became an example of the need for a balance between the pastoral and the prophetical aspects. We wanted the old image to be true but we needed to wake up to move on. The way forward is the way of naming and grieving. The grieving community is a community prepared for new possibilities. The community of denial is not. The new challenge was to restore the congregation to its ministry of being the people of God, a caring people, in this world. One dramatic point in this project was that I noticed that our community experience preached to me, the preacher. It preached about the importance of not thinking pastoral or prophetic aspects but both pastoral and prophetic aspects.
