I have a whole library of sermons downloaded onto the podcast app on my smart phone. My sermon library features preachers from around the globe—New York, New South Wales, Nottingham, Seattle, Sydney, and Singapore. So now, no matter where I am; I can listen to some of the world's well known and effective preachers. I have never set foot in some of the cities or churches where these preachers live and minister. I know nothing about their context or congregations. As I zip around the UK on trains, planes, and automobiles, in one sense this rootless, context-less sermon appreciation doesn't matter. Podcasted sermons are good news for me as I get to listen to some great Bible preaching.

But at the same time I also wonder if this is bad news for preaching. At times I feel like I'm listening to only half a telephone conversation. Listening to these globally podcasted sermons makes me ask some hard questions about the nature of preaching—and the nature of my own preaching ministry: Does it matter to whom we preach? Are we just preaching into unnamed cyberspace, at an anonymous crowd or to our own congregations? Does it matter who our individual listeners are, or whether we have any relationship with or pastoral responsibility for the people with whom we dare to speak?

It could be argued that the recordings I listen to through my headphones are missing a crucial ingredient of authentic preaching. Specifically, they make little if any reference or impact to my church community and our cultural context. If so many of our preaching heroes speak to general audiences it's perhaps, no wonder, then, that many of us find it normal to preach to the generic individual "out there" rather than to the real people right in front of us. But, just like a tailor-made suit is going to fit so much better than an off-the-shelf suit, so preaching contextualized to the life situation of the congregation in front of us should be better able to equip listeners to face the challenges and opportunities in their daily lives. It would be like an Albanian driving instructor who knows nothing of your local traffic laws teaching you generic driving skills. They are useful to a certain point but could no way replace the know-how of a local instructor.

How can we learn how to preach into the specific needs of our church community? Notice, I said church not just local individual Christians. We need to learn again how to preach not just to local people but to our local churches. How can we preach not just to individuals but to the corporate body of Christ that God has placed in our care? And what can we do to get back to a more biblical approach to what I would call "church-based preaching"?

The solitary individual model

My collection of podcast sermons from around the globe often reflect one approach to preaching. Let's call it "the solitary individual" model. In this approach, the basic unit for the sermon is a solitary person rather than the church as a community. The exegesis could be brilliant—but the sermon isn't tied to a specific community of people who live in a specific cultural context.

In some ways, this approach has become the default mode of much of the exceptional preaching that exists today. Why? How did we develop this solitary individual approach to preaching? Let me suggest three ways that we find it easy to view this as the normal or even the only approach to our preaching.

1. We live and preach in an individualistic society.
First of all we must recognize that we live in an increasingly individualistic culture. Zygmunt Bauman, the eminent sociologist, describes individualized culture in the book Liquid Times as "the fading of human bonds and the wilting of solidarity." It is therefore not surprising that our churches are affected by individualism. Sunday services are often seen by parishioners as the once-a-week dose of personal encouragement and inspiration that will help them face the week ahead. Congregants often evaluate our church gatherings on the basis of what they personally got out of them, whether they learnt anything from the sermon or we moved by the praise and worship time. With these kinds of expectations from our congregants its little wonder we end up giving people what they want. There is a cyclical process going on—our culture is becoming more individualistic, so people come to our services with more individualistic expectations, and so we deliver more individualistic sermons which encourage people to think more individualistically, and so this feedback loop cycles on, ad infinitum.

2. Our preaching heroes preach like this.
One of my favorite preachers is Tim Keller, senior pastor from Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. He has a myriad of incredible preaching gifts: he is a clear exegete of Scripture, he has fantastic pastoral sensitivity, and he has the evangelistic passion and the clear thinking of an apologist. No wonder I have listened to hundreds of hours of his preaching and he has had a huge impact on my own preaching. I am an egalitarian Baptist but I love being challenged and encouraged by my complementarian Presbyterian brother.

But unlike Keller's church, my local congregation is not a downtown megachurch of thousands in affluent Manhattan. My home church is a community of just a hundred people who come from a wide variety of social backgrounds. It's a church where professors, professionals, and former prostitutes share communion together. I live in a small market town which has 10,000 inhabitants, and our church family is made up of a vast range of educational abilities and a variety of cultures and classes intermingle.

Keller, like many mega-church pastors, recognizes that his church community is quite a transient group with people moving in and out of the city all the time not to mention the steady stream of visitors and tourists and virtual onlookers like me. They pitch their sermons in such a way as to engage with the individuals who may be part of the crowd, connecting the gospel generically to the felt spiritual and emotional needs facing individuals that might be listening. This is completely understandable in their context, but when their contagious individualized preaching model permeates down and sets a standard or a benchmark for preaching everywhere, it is easy to forget that for most of us our churches have a consistent community that witness into a specific context and our preaching should sound very different. Listening to Keller's preaching it seems that his assumed listener is an individual who has no particular tie to his church or to the city. In his defense, of all the megachurch pastors that I have heard preach in their home churches, Keller takes the most time to apply his teaching to New York life—but still his dominant style is to preach to individual listeners rather than address a church community.

3. Evangelistic preaching has set the tone for all of our preaching.
A third reason that preaching tends to be individualized is because of the global influence of evangelists and apologists like Billy Graham, Luis Palau, Josh McDowell, and Ann Graham Lotz. Because of their great oratory prowess and evangelistic gifts, they fill stadiums and their preaching has been live-streamed and distributed widely. Again these high profile preaching events are aimed at a transient unconnected audience. Those listening are coming to a one off event and; apart from the friend that invited them to the event, the people listening generally have no relationship or connection with one another. So the preachers rightly focus on the individual and their need to make a response to the evidence for belief in God or to respond to the claims of Christ and become a Christian.

Our congregational preaching is of course also a fantastic evangelistic opportunity. On any given Sunday there are always going to be people in our church services who need to hear the gospel and it seems obvious therefore to emulate the style of the evangelists mentioned above and fulfill our calling to reach the lost. However, and I hesitate to say this as an evangelist myself, an overly evangelistic focus may mean that our preaching is more likely to miss out on those important congregational and contextual aspects in our desire to encourage individuals to make that personal decision to come to faith.

The specific community model

We need to recover the art of preaching to a contextualized community, working out how our preaching can reshape our church family's common life together. We need to remember we care for the flock not just individual sheep. We need to help our congregations navigate how to face up to the local challenges and make the most of the neighborhood opportunities of the shared space in which we dwell. In an individualized culture where more and more people live in single person households we need to demonstrate the hospitality of the family of God more than ever and allow our churches to be counter-culturally communal.

1. Preach to the people in front of you.
Veteran preacher Stewart Briscoe often used to advocate preparing sermons imagining a round table at which were sat different representative members of the congregation—and older member, a young parent, a single person, a business professional, or a student. This helped him to prepare in such a way that the sermon connected with this diverse group. This is a fantastic idea and has really helped my preaching. I would suggest rather that than keeping this as an imaginary table, you occasionally try it out and ahead of your Sunday sermon invite people to join you for coffee and give them a preview of your sermon and ask for their feedback. This will help you to develop the habit of preaching to the people actually in front of you.

For example, I was preaching recently on James 1:27: "True religion that God our father accepts as pure and blameless is to care for widows and orphans in their distress." When I prepared the sermon I pictured some Christian parents, I pictured a single woman who had to relinquish her children to the care system, I pictured a someone who had walked away from Christianity because of the hypocrisy of Christians. I made sure the sermon challenged parents to consider becoming foster parents to the children in the local community who needed parents in their lives. I encouraged new Christians who had had to relinquish children because of substance addiction, neglect, or abuse that God cared about them and the children they had to give up. I apologized to those who had been given a false picture of the kind of religion that God is after by hypocritical Christians and explained that not everyone who calls themselves a Christian accurately reflects the true religion that God seeks. I then called the whole congregation to ask ourselves as a church how we will make sure that we are standing alongside those that will care for vulnerable children in the surrounding community through foster care or by being an adoptive parent. I stressed that this needs to be more than an extra flower on Mother's Day and needs to include practical ongoing support as we are one family together in Christ.

2. Call your whole community to action.
As you seek to apply God's word to your congregation make sure there is a specific corporate call to action. Ask of your sermon "How should our shared life as a church be different in light of this passage of Scripture"? In some traditions it is common practice to address the congregation as "church" or even name your congregation: "What I believe God is saying to us as Cornerstone through his Word today is …" You might want to try and include this into your preaching over a month or so. It might feel strange for a while but it is a great way to change a habit.

Here's one way I have tried to put this point into action. We usually have our church business meetings straight after our Sunday services. Sadly, these meetings often bring the worst out in people. It just so happened that we were doing a series in Galatians and the service before a big church meeting we were expounding the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:13ff. At the end of my sermon I closed with an interactive time where I asked in what way the fruit of the Spirit should influence the way we conduct our business together as a church family. We corporately came up with some values that would mark our behavior. Our church business meetings have seen a significantly improved tone as a result.

3. Get published locally.
Local newspapers; if your area still has one, have been under a lot of pressure recently often having to cut staff and increase the amount of advertising. Why not take the opportunity to submit a shortened version of your sermon for publication in the newspaper? You are far more likely to get published if your sermon connects with the local realities of life in your town or city. This will help you write your sermons with your local context in mind.

4. Preach the personal greetings.
The Epistles are in effect written sermons aimed to be read out to a gathered congregation. When we preach them sadly we often skip over the personal greetings and localized details. Notice, for example, how in Philippians Paul goes out of his way to commend Timothy's service and to make sure the Philippians know how helpful Ephaphroditus had been to him. Preachers will often give examples of people who had served well in the past—famous missionaries, leaders in the reformation, etc. But why not use living examples from within the congregation. Living role models can be so much more helpful in setting a new normal for congregational life. Evangelicals probably preach more on the Epistles than any other part of the Bible, but sadly we often skip the parts that will help us to follow the New Testament norm of both contextualized and community-focused preaching.

Dr. Krish Kandiah is a social entrepreneur who advises the UK government on child welfare reform and refugee resettlement. He is in demand as a speaker, writer, and theologian.