The Final Exam

This one is a bit of a departure from my usual preaching style. Since my project seeks to engage "the biblically ambivalent, "it made sense to draw on the work of people who have been thinking about this a lot longer than I have. One of those people is Kimon Howland Sargeant, who wrote a fascinating study of so-called "seeker churches". Using his work, I tried to identify the elements of seeker sensitive preaching and then shape a sermon that would incorporate at least some of them.

To me, at least, the result feels like something pretty different, for at least three reasons. First, in terms of structure, it is fairly linear and even employs three numbered points. This is not at all the way they taught me to preach. Second, seeker preaching focuses relentlessly on the felt needs of the individual -in this case, the need for a sense of purpose in life. I was conscious of using the word "you" quite a bit. Third, it was certainly (as a member of my Parish Project Group so delicately put it) "less intellectually stimulating" than my usual sermons. (I think I must have been overcompensating for this with the deluge of footnotes in the manuscript). Overall, it felt like using a different set of muscles -not necessarily a bad thing.

The sermon was preached on January 16, 2011 and based on Isaiah 49:1-7, the Hebrew Scripture reading appointed by the lectionary for that particular weekend. My Reflection Paper can give you a sense of my thinking about the process of preparing, preaching and evaluating this sermon. You can read the manuscript here.