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PREACHING SKILLSFighting for Your Congregation's Imagination (part 1)Preaching for spiritual formation means casting a vision for a new way of life.Skye Jethani
PreachingToday.com: How did the topic of spiritual formation become important to you?
Skye Jethani: I attended a secular university with a large Christian ministry that was action focused. It was about impact, outreach, and events. As I got into leadership, I had an interesting experience with a guy a couple of years older than me who had been a mentor of mine. I ran into him on campus when I was a junior, and he'd been graduated for a year or two. I had a conversation with him in which he broke down in tears and said his spiritual life had been in absolute ruin since he left college. He said his involvement in our campus group and the events and activities around him were what had buoyed his faith, but the moment he got out of school and didn't have that support structure, he had no deep, internal communion with God or a self-generating faith.
That was a big wake up call for me. I realized I could easily get caught up in believing that all the pizzazz around me constituted my spiritual life, while failing to pay attention to the interior world. That was where the need for spiritual formation first hit me, and that carried on through seminary and into the ministry, where it's so easy to get caught up in all the external elements that they become a substitute for an internal communion with Christ.
Has your preaching changed as you've grown in your understanding of spiritual formation?
My main goal on Sunday morning is no longer that people retain the information I'm presenting—that they would store it away in their brain as a reservoir of facts or truths or principles. My goal is now more toward inspiration. I want to inspire people toward a certain kind of life.
In your understanding of spiritual formation, what inspires people to grow?
Stories are enormously inspiring; and not just biblical stories, but testimonies of people living or dead whose lives have been shaped in a way that reflects the life God is inviting us to. What does not tend to inspire people is giving them lots of concrete to-do's. Often I'll limit application to one thing, and I won't even make it a to-do. I'll just say, "Here's an idea," or "Here's something that occurred to me when God was working on this issue in my life." That approach bothers some people because they've been taught you have to give concrete application so people know what to do. But I'm more concerned with whether they have caught a vision and whether they intend to apply it in their lives.
That's why preaching needs to be integrated with the whole ministry of the church community. If we're speaking about a particular issue over time, presenting a vision for what that looks like in God's kingdom, people have a variety of ways in which they can acknowledge their intention to follow through on the vision. It's not a cookie cutter process.
Is vision, as you're using the word, synonymous with promise—the promises of Scripture—or does it refer to something else?
Vision is imagining your life fully immersed in God's kingdom, or imagining how Jesus would be living your life. For example, we preached a series last January about poverty. We tried to lift up God's character and his compassion for the poor, and consider what our lives would look like if we had God's character regarding the poor.
We all have a vision that's driving us—and often one that has been given to us by the world. When you can identify what that is in your community, it becomes the enemy; it becomes what you are trying to deconstruct in people. Paul would write an epistle knowing what a certain community was up against, and he would present a vision that counteracted it. Most of his epistles are vision at the beginning, and then the latter part of the letter is where he gets to the meat. Children, submit to your parents; wives, husbands, slaves—all those application points come at the end. The vision is at the front.
What has captured people's imaginations in our contemporary setting is the vision of our consumer culture. That's what drives how most people live. So what we need to do is offer an alternative vision for their life, which means deconstructing what people have currently bought into. When it came to the issue of poverty and money, we highlighted the sinister nature of what most of us believe about money and identified where those notions come from in our culture. Then we lifted up the vision of what money looks like in God's kingdom.
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