Assignment #1 Personal theological statement and community reflection

I have been in ministry for over 13 years since graduating from seminary in 1994. This course helped me understand the rise of the emerging church and has given me new ideas and strategies for using the Bible in the postmodern culture. Some of the course readings also caused me to reexamine the way I interpret Scripture. My faith tradition and theological training encouraged me to see the greatest and most important work of a good pastor as preaching and teaching the Word of God, “devote yourselves to the public reading of the Scripture, to preaching and to teaching” (I Timothy 4:13). I’ve understood my primary responsibility as a pastor in both my former civilian church and in my military congregations is to faithfully preach the Word of God. However, before I could communicate the Word of God I first had to understand the historical meaning of the text. It is also important for me investigate the history and culture of the time of the writing to help me understand the meaning of the text. The grammatical-historical method of interpreting Scripture required that I first comprehend what the author intended his original readers to understand. The goal of my preaching is to apply the text to the contemporary church and world but only after I understood the author’s intention of his text. I was troubled in our fifth lecture to read the definition of deconstruction “every text, by its very nature of being a text, provokes multiple possibilities of meaning.” William Johnson insists that postmodern interpreters search for multiple meanings of texts because, “the meaning of texts is not tied to the original intention of the author, for such a thing is no longer available to us. Once in written form, texts take on a life of their own.” I am troubled by deconstructionsim because it robs the Scripture of any authority and places me and my experience above the text rather than under it. If there are multiple meanings of the text then I place my meaning over the author’s meaning. Deconstructionsim allows me to refashion the text in my own preferences and strips the text of any authorial intent. After I read the definition of deconstructionsim I searched for one of my texts from my seminary hermeneutics class, Validity in Interpretation by E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch is a professor of English at the University of Virginia and while he is not a theologian his book champions the authorial intent and determinate meaning of a literary text. I found Hirsch helpful in my exegesis of Scripture because he maintained that “when the author is banished from the interpretive process, subjectivity and relativism become prevalent and no adequate principle [exists] for judging the validity of an interpretation.” I am simply not ready to give my experience the authority of Scripture. I often do use my personal experiences and stories in sermons but they are illustrations to help explain and apply the Scripture. The reading by Lucy Atkinson Rose was equally troubling in that she stated “that no ‘truth’ is objective, absolute.” She also maintains that “the source of authority is embodied in one’s life”. In the community of God I’ve endeavored to anchor my fellowship and ministry on the Word of God. When I was assigned to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in D.C. I provided ministry as an Army hospital chaplain to wounded Soldiers who had been injured in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. In some of the most challenging ministry that I’ve ever been in, I walked with Soldiers through their “valley of the shadow of death” as they recovered from combat wounds and injuries. Their toughest questions had no easy answer to why they had lost a limb from an IED or why their buddies had died in Bagdad. Time and time again I went to the Bible with these Soldiers seeking to find a message of hope or encouragement. Often times we searched the Bible looking at the experiences of the people of God in the Scripture and finding encouragement from those saints who had lived through incredible trials, testings and hardships and who shared a common experience. A Soldier who had survived an IED attack in Iraq told me that though he had run away from God, God had never forgotten about him even when his Humvee was destroyed by a roadside bomb. We thanked God that he had retuned back to the U.S. alive and most importantly we thanked God that he had returned home to his heavenly Father like the prodigal son. He said “God used a bomb to get my attention.” The Lord had used the horrible experience of war to bring a lost sheep back home. I’ve seen God work through experience but my experience should never become the source of my authority. My experience can change from day to day but God’s Word never changes.
With over a decade of ministry to Soldiers in their late teens and twenties I understand the mindset of GenXers questioning authority but I certainly don’t see deconstructionsim as the answer. I’ve learned to listen to the questions of Soldiers raised in a culture of modernity and baptized in the horrible experiences of war who are desperately seeking answers and truth. Deconstructionsim has proved to be empty but the brutally honest experiences of God’ people sustained through their trials by God’s faithfulness have proven trustworthy and reliable.
I found one of the most helpful lectures in the course was on the place of storytelling in contemporary preaching. Steve Taylor correctly reminded us that “the Christian faith is the stories of God in human lives.” Jesus was a master storyteller and he was such a powerful communicator of God’s Word because his parables often focused on stories from everyday life that his hearers could relate to. If I want to be a better preacher and communicator of God’s Word then I will need to learn to be a better storyteller. I also appreciated the insight from the course notes that “storytelling offers relationship and builds community.” Numerous Soldiers have shared with me how they received “Dear John letters” when they were in Iraq from their wives or girlfriends saying that their marriages or relationships were over. Sometimes I have shared my story of when my ex-wife left me and our three children during my first active duty assignment. My story of how God brought me through the darkest and loneliest period of my life has “offered relationship and built community.” Johnny Baker accurately points out, “People love good stories. Weave them into your sermons or make the whole sermon a story or a series of interwoven stories.” I’ve been challenged in this course to understand that stories connect; build relationship and minister hope in the community of God. I especially found the strategy “Creating a Parable” insightful from Ten Strategies for Preaching in a Multi Media Culture by Thomas H. Troeger. Troeger maintains that a direct argument seldom works in preaching because it is intrusive and people resent it and resist it. However, “a story that engages our imagination in order to awaken the deep resonances of our lives are less immediately threatening.” Although I was trained in New Testament Greek exegesis I find myself bringing in more and more stories into my preaching. Stories do not replace exegesis but they connect in a way that the community of God can relate to and apply to their lives.
I was also extremely challenged to undergo a paradigm shift on preaching by Doug Pagitt in Preaching Re-Imagined. I’ve been guilty of the one way communication of speech making that Pagitt calls “speaching.” Paget makes a very strong argument that speaching is an ineffective means of communicating the gospel and building the community of God. His unique and controversial approaches to building spiritual growth in the community of God have really caused me to question how effective is my preaching and how can I stop my preaching from being a one way form of communicating. Biblical preaching will always have its place because “God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe” (I Corinthians 1:21). However, Pagitt asked me to take a look at the effectiveness of much of today’s preaching (and my own preaching) and see how it can be re-imagined into a means of participation rather than a religious speech.