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In "The Wounded Healer," Henri Nouwen says that the role of the pastor/preacher/priest (which we all are, of course) is to interpret the common experiences of the community. He must be able to accurately articulate what people are experiencing; then he must be able to interpret the experience in a way that gives people insight into their experience.
I was mulling this in my head, and was (as I often do) sort of preaching through the subject silently. As I did so, I came to the realization that, if the preacher cannot accurately articulate the experience of the listener, or, worse yet, if he does not have any common experiences with him, then (short of miraculous work of the Holy Spirit) he is going to be woefully ineffective in his preaching. He will be interpreting experiences which the listener does not understand; thus, his preaching, no matter how insightful and relevant to his own experience, will be meaningless to the listener.
Therefore, if a church becomes self-referential - that is, if it primarily discusses experiences that are common within the church but rare outside of it - then it will not communicate with those outside the group. Again, we are back to "it's not about you." Any time that we expect to be reaching out to others, we must be talking about experiences that they can relate to and interpreting them. Perhaps not exclusively those experiences - it's probably good to lead people towards and expectation of something different - but the heart of the message needs to be an interpretation of something that others will understand.
We have a great risk, I think, of falling into this trap at The Village. Certainly every church has the risk of falling into "churchiness," where the church becomes unintelligible to the disconnected and searching people of the world. But we also run the risk of becoming disconnected from our fellow Christians who have different backgrounds. If they have not felt disconnected and lost even while attending a church, if they have not felt the fundamental brokeness of our old familiar ways of doing things, if they have not had our common experiences, then they may not understand our interpretations of them. |
