Beware Tuneless Preaching...Continued from page 1

Behavior sometimes reinforces this division. I visited a well-staffed church where the Senior Pastor, (“100% dedicated to preaching,” he said,) had a television monitor in his office that allowed him to relax in an armchair in his comfortable office. There he stayed, viewing the service until moments before he had to preach the sermon, when he emerged dramatically at the front of the church. However, in another church I found the music leader publicly absented himself when it came to the sermon. Having completed his tasks of leading choir and orchestra for the first part of the service, he disappeared, perhaps to enjoy a cup of coffee!

I have heard complaints from pastors that music is too important in their church and from worship leaders who have resented the lack of interest in their work from preachers. One worship leader criticized the preacher because -- in spite of repeated promises -- he never passed on Scripture and sermon details until too late in the week. Another worship leader, with a significant choral ministry, said, “When I take a choir on a mission, singing in different parts of the world, I always feel that the senior minister thinks it’s a waste of time. I don’t think he believes we have a valid ministry.” And several times I have heard a worship leader say: “Let’s worship a little more before we hear the sermon” as though to widen the division between worship and preaching.

Unhappily, much worship literature perpetuates this divide between worship and preaching by making minimal reference to preaching as worship. For example, Gregory Dix’s classic The Shape of the Liturgy gives two out of 764 pages to the role of the sermon.² Even when preaching is identified as a key component by worship leaders, it often receives minimal attention. In The Complete Worship Service – Creating a Taste of Heaven on Earth, Kevin Navarro extols the importance of preaching. “The more I think of my preaching as an act of worship and not merely as an act of exhortation, the more gospel I will have in my message.”³ Yet, though he claims that preaching is like the main course in a well-prepared meal, it receives only limited attention in his penultimate chapter.

From the other side, few recent homileticians seem to write about preaching’s role in worship. Thomas Troeger’s Preaching and Worship ⁴ concerns the interrelationship of culture, preaching and worship. Deploying a cultural analysis of the five senses he raises important questions for understanding both preaching and worship, but does not deal with the important relationship between preaching and worship.

So preachers seem to be divided from worship leaders, both seemingly leading different sorts of activities marching to a different beat (or, more likely, only the worship leaders have a beat!) Tragically, this professional divide goes deeply into the way that many churches understand and practice worship.