“The reports of preaching’s death are greatly exaggerated.”

Forgive my misquoting of a quote which has already been misattributed to Mark Twain, but it seemed to fit our current moment regarding the craft of preaching.

This past year, I left social media. One of the great benefits of my social media hiatus has been the blessing of not seeing wild and widely thrown about opinions of people who either know not of which they speak or should know better. And one of the recurring themes of some of my friends, who are religious leaders, is a fetish aimed at criticizing preaching or announcing the “death of preaching.”

While I can’t know the deepest motivations of these women and men, I do know this: Virtually every survey done on the subject of church, formation, and religious life has revealed similar results about the role of preaching in Christian community. When looking for a new spiritual home, a great deal of Americans weigh that decision on the strength of a local church’s preaching. In fact, Gallup puts that number at 76%.

Please don’t hear me saying people choosing churches on the basis of preaching is good, right, or particularly spiritual. Hear me saying, it’s true. It’s real. It’s not likely to change.

If Gallup’s numbers remain true then those who wish me, other teaching and preaching pastors and the ministry of preaching dead either have a lot of work to do to dislodge preaching’s import in the local church, or they are simply barking up the wrong tree and making a boogeyman of what should be a friend.

Here are a few of the more recent arguments about the role of preaching in the local church:

1. Preaching Doesn’t Spiritually Form People.
   I have, and continue to argue that preaching is not supposed to form people—at least not in the way these critics assume. Preaching is different from spiritual practices or small group interaction. Churches exist to spiritually form people, not preaching alone. This reality does not dismiss preaching. Rather, it places preaching alongside several tools in the church's toolkit. I wrote about that more extensively HERE.
2. AI Will Replace Preaching.
   If the preaching at your local church can be replaced by AI, you’re already getting bland, disembodied, and bad preaching. It likely sounds like a book report. In fact, I’ve asked chatGPT to write a sermon. I used part of that sermon in an actual sermon and people, rightly, thought that part was terrible, which was my point. Preaching is animated by the Holy Spirit, not by the sermon text, outline, or content. The Holy Spirit inhabits preaching. The same cannot be said of AI. If you think the Spirit can be replaced by AI, not only preaching, but everything a church does, is endangered.
3. People’s Attention Spans Are Getting Shorter
   This is undoubtedly true. But that reality means that it might change preaching, not end it. This shift means preaching must become more engaging. Saying we should eliminate preaching because people's attention spans are getting shorter is like saying a runner with arthritis shouldn’t exercise at all, rather than simply modifying their regimen.
4. Spiritual Practices and Conversation Should Replace Preaching
   I hear this a lot, and I’m intrigued. Yet when I query the proponents of such as to how they enact this, there is always some reason they can’t answer my question. “Read my book,” they say, or “the results are confidential” or “still being worked out.” There is always a reason their results can’t be reviewed. It could be that the sample size is not yet large enough, or it could be that they have a theory in search of an effect that they’ve yet to see.

My Response

First, preaching has been overemphasized in many denominations and churches. Along with that, the women and men who preach have been given an undo amount of power and influence. In a few public cases, these women and men have done untold damage. They were better preachers and leaders than they were people. Eventually, as is always the case, their sins found them out.

We need to be mindful, however, that most churches in America are fewer than 100 members and there are pastors faithfully serving those communities which we never hear about. Let’s not reduce ministry, the ministry of preaching, and its role to only the names we know.

Second, we do need more community and spiritual practices, but that does not mean we can do with less preaching. Maybe we can. But throwing out modalities as Biblical, time-tested, and dare I say, helpful as preaching seems an unwarranted response to a problem preaching was never designed to fix.

Churches exist as laboratories of spiritual formation, and preaching is only part of that program. Pitting preaching as an antagonist to the other practices in the church community is a kind of zero-sum-gain which smacks more of a concern over power and position rather than growth or ministry.

The shift away from preaching which some advocate is designed to reduce congregational influence from preachers and teachers to spiritual directors and small group scions. The problem here is our association and approach to power, not pastoring. Once we deal with our thirst for power, then we can more honestly negotiate which modalities in the local church actually serve the church and which ones serve the proponents of that particular modality.

All to say, some church leadership influencers want preachers to have less control so that they can have more.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, words are, in the words of Dallas Willard, “how kingdoms are made.” Every kingdom, government, corporation, marriage, and church is the result of words. Words are how we construct what is most moving to us–films, poems, books, vows, songs, promises, everything.

When a governmental leader is elected, they are elected to use words, in the function of legislation. When business leaders guide their organizations, they do so by words. God spoke the world into existence. And the primary mechanism for words throughout church history has been the sermon, the teaching, in the primary form of proclamation.

Each of the sermons in the Book of Acts is not a discussion. They are proclamations. They proclaim that God has acted uniquely in the person and work of Jesus Christ. These proclamations are not conversations, not dialogical. They are the announcement that a new reality is present in the universe, namely that God has been vindicated as the only true God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Kingdom of God is a living reality which people can enter.

That is a reality, not a conversation. Formation flows from engaging that reality, preaching is like a vehicle that transports travelers from one location to another without being the destination itself.

Proclamation does not mean there is no place for chats. We need spaces for engagement, spiritual practices, and discussions and no preacher I know thinks we don’t. That need, however, should not tempt us to stray from the way the world is ordered, how human beings have and do function, and how God, Jesus, the Apostles, and the historical church have served the world through proclamation of the Word through words.

Preaching is alive and well. It is needed. And when you flip through the Gospels, the title Jesus is given the most, is simple. It’s teacher. Keep preaching.

Sean Palmer is the Teaching Pastor at Ecclesia Houston, speaker and speaking coach, and author of several books including--Speaking by the Numbers: Ennegram Wisdom for Teachers, Pastors, and Communicators.