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Preaching is more than just the presentation of truth. It is an event that is “performed” in God’s presence. That is to say that an actual human witness engages a group of real people in the presence of the Holy Spirit to communicate the Word of God in real time. This is not performance in the sense of an actor on the stage, although preachers could learn much from the skill of an actor. This is performance in the sense of the activating of truth among people in the world.
Jana Childers and Clayton Schmit have edited a helpful book called Performance in Preaching: Bringing the Sermon to Life. The book was published in honor of the life and work of Charles Bartow whose earlier, God’s Human Speech introduced many of us to these themes. The book also features a DVD which models much of the what the book is talking about.
Personally, I preferred the theological aspects of the book to its technical advice. Paul Scott Wilson’s piece on the nature of the “now” in preaching was particularly fruitful. Drawing on Nicholas Lash, he writes, “Every time a biblical text is properly interpreted, it is performed … every time a biblical text is lived as it is intended to be lived, it is performed (40).”
Alyce McKenzie adds, “Preaching is not merely an act of public self-expression. It is a performative act as contrasted with a spontaneous act. Preaching has intentionality about it, both in its preparation and in it’s delivery (57).”
We have heard much about lectio divina in recent years. For these writers, preaching is an expression of actio divina. It is an event of God’s self-disclosure in the world. How a human preacher performs this disclosure of the divine activity deserves our careful thought. This book will help us to that end.