Dear Church,
It really is good to be back in Pennsylvania. While the time in Southern California was great with grandsons, busy with doctors and dentists, and getting some repair work scheduled on our home, each day away was a reminder for me that there is still more joy-filled work to be done in my role as interim pastor with you. In the next six months there is still much to accomplish by way of structuring how we as a congregation engage in cooperative mission, how we become more intentional in adult formation, and how we become more multi-voiced in the preaching ministry of our congregation.
A primary focus for me over the next six months will be a concerted effort in preparing and implementing a sustaining and sustainable preaching team. While in an interim role, offering a more monologue diet of preaching was important for reinforcing and clarifying the restructuring and realigning process, the time has now come for beginning to implement a more multi-voiced approach to preaching. According to Stuart Murray Williams, multi-voiced preaching is consistent with the witness of scripture, practiced in our historic Anabaptist-Mennonite traditions, honoring of the importance of the preaching ministry (if preaching is central to the life of the church, then more than one person ought to do it), it trusts the work of the Holy Spirit in Christian community, and it fosters discipleship rather than dependency.
What must be avoided in moving from monologue models of preaching to multi-voiced approaches is the tendency of creating preaching beauty pageants as described in 1 Corinthians 1.10-17 (“I follow Paul … I follow Peter … I follow Apollos …”). The purpose of preaching is two-fold: It is foundational – to build the life and witness of the church on the loving truth of Jesus the crucified Lord. And it is aspirational – to lift up Christ the resurrected Savior, who is the counter-cultural power of God and wisdom of God.
To begin this multi-voiced preaching ministry, Josh Meyer has been invited into a seven-month experiment. Josh is not on our church staff, he is simply joining us one Sunday per month, to preach and then graciously stick around and offer an opportunity for discussion. Nevertheless, this experiment will hopefully begin to take us down a new road – not of preaching as an individual act of monologue – but on the pathway to a persistent and resilient discipleship as we collaborate in the Word each Sunday morning we meet.
There will be all sorts of obstacles to Blooming Glen becoming a multi-voiced community of gospel proclamation. Inertia with the present way will be a problem, so will the challenge of relearning both listening skills and teaching skills. Creating an ecology of collaboration among the developing preaching “bench” will challenge old assumptions about church once jettisoned and challenge us all to think in fresh ways about how to publicly declare the gospel of Jesus for the purposes of resilient discipleship and the ministry of God’s people. In the miasma of post-Christendom, chronic COVID, and the separation of knowledge and wisdom, becoming a multi-voiced church is a risky and messy journey on which we are about to embark.
But I think we are able. More importantly, most importantly, I believe God is able.
Pastor Jeff
jeff@bgmc.net
PS – With Debbie and I back in Pennsylvania, I want to resume inviting you into times of listening. I’ll be at the Broad Street Grind on Friday afternoon, February 2 (3:3m-4:45 pm). I’ll be at the A&N Diner on Monday morning, February 5 (7:30-8:45 am). And I’ll be back at the Broad Street Grind on Friday afternoon, February 9 (3:30-4:45 pm). These are opportunities for you to ask questions, dialogue with me, and/or one another, and practice the discipleship art of radical candor: to express abiding care for one another and, at the same time, to challenge one another directly. Hope to see you there!