Beware Tuneless Preaching...Continued from page 6
Michael J. Quicke
8. It is rattled by “worship wars.” Tuneless preaching allows consumerist, market driven forces to dominate its vision for the church. Preoccupied with bottom-line success – numbers and money – its driving passion is “to give the people what they want.” Locked into one-service scale of worship, tuneless preachers are desperate for people to attend (and give) in services that “work” for them.
9. It rarely preaches on worship itself. Because tuneless preaching shrivels worship down to music preliminaries, it rarely thrills to the pulse of praising God’s glory or rests in awe before his holiness. “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10) is read but never obeyed. Tuneless preaching avoids Scripture’s great worship passages, largely omits the psalms, especially psalms of lament, and finds Hebrews tedious.
10. It misses Scripture’s narrative. Tuneless preaching breaks up God’s narrative in Scripture into fragments called sermons, and therefore atomizes God’s big story into disconnected bits and pieces. Instead of enabling people to live within God’s great narrative of salvation in Scripture as “the story of stories” from creation to salvation, each sermon focuses on “doing” something rather than on “being” a new people. Of course, we need to be an active mission people, but first we need to be God’s people.
These ten characteristics are likely overstated. Hopefully, very few preachers are characterized by all ten failings! But, graphically, they spell out some great dangers facing the contemporary church. Preaching separated from worship profoundly disconnects what God wants to belong together. I believe that we are called to tuneful preaching, confronting the challenge each characteristic presents. Successive articles will identify certain key characteristics, beginning with the most urgent of all – recovering a more adequate theology of preaching as worship.
Let’s beware tuneless preaching and commit to harmonious integration of preaching and worship that will presage renewal in the church. This is a work in progress and I look forward to receiving feedback from both preachers and worship leaders about how both might serve within God’s harmony, with preachers gloriously tuneful in praise to the glory of God in three persons.
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Michael Quicke is Charles Koller Professor of Preaching and Communication at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard, Illinois.
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Notes
1. Russell Mitman, Worship in the Shape of Scripture, Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2001, 20.
2. Ibid., 28.
3. Kevin Navarro, The Complete Worship Service-Creating a Taste of Heaven on Earth (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005, 37.
4. Thomas Troeger, Preaching and Worship, (St Louis: Chalice, 2003).
5. J. Kent Edwards, Effective First-Person Biblical Preaching (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 18-19.
6. Sally Morgenthaler, Worship Evangelism, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995),51.
7. Mitman, Worship in the Shape of Scripture.
8. Michael Pasquarello III, Christian Preaching, A Trinitarian Theology of Proclamation, Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 39.
9. See, for example, Nicholas Lash, Beginning and End of Religion, Richard Lischer, The End of Words. Stanley Hauerwas, Sanctify Them in the Truth.
10. Pasquarello, 42.
11. James Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace, (Downers Grove: IVP, 1996), 20.
12. Navarro, 2005, 144.
13. Marva J. Dawn, A Royal “Waste” of Time, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
14. Michael J Quicke, 360degree leadership (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 52.
15. Timothy L. Carson, Transforming Worship (St Louis: Chalice, 2003).