Stop Trying to Evangelise and Just Preach Good News

What I’ve Learned About Preaching to a Secular Crowd

I’ve been in Anglican school chaplaincy for 12 years now. From time to time, you receive something very special. A mother of a Year 12 student handwrote me a thank you letter for the ministry I have had at Christ Church during the time her sons were here, even though I’d never personally met her. While it wasn’t a short letter, I think the section that made me smile the most was this:

“We are not a religious family – I say that because it makes me all the more grateful. Your words about kindness, courage and how to live well spoke to us just as they would to anyone of faith.”

Anglican school chaplaincy in Australia is a strange beast. As a priest I have a calling to connect people to God, and our schools are unashamedly church schools, and yet my ‘flock’, the school community, is overwhelmingly secular; especially where my school operates, in the western suburbs of Perth. My theological training mostly rotated around growing my understanding of the Bible, the Christian theological tradition and a few ministry subjects thrown in, that almost always focused on parish life. I was well-equipped to preach at a local Anglican parish, but I quickly realised that school chaplaincy is an entirely different environment.

What follows are some reflections on what I’ve learned about preaching to a mostly secular congregation. I in no way pretend to be an expert here or even that I often feel like I ‘know what I’m doing’, I’m simply wanting to share things I’ve tried that I know really didn’t work and things I have tried that I feel have got closer to what I think may be a good approach.

Know the People

In chaplains’ get-togethers, I sometimes hear chaplains complaining about having too much of a teaching load, and how they’d rather focus on pastoral and liturgical ministry. I completely understand that, like many teachers, a lot of us are overloaded with responsibilities. Many of us have had good training in how to expound a passage of scripture in order to preach it, but what I discovered early on in chaplaincy was that most of my brain-time in writing a sermon, homily or talk was spent in trying to expound the people I was speaking to, not the scripture. I felt like at times I was speaking an entirely different language to that spoken by the crowd in front of me. My classes enable me not only to teach the students but to learn from them.

Our Questions are not Their Questions

Some of the best exercises we have done in class are when students have written down their vision of a good life, or what they hope their lives might look like in 10, 20, 30 years. In Year 10, I begin the course by asking them to list five questions they regularly find themselves asking themselves. What is as clear as day is that these questions, and answers, are far removed from those elevated as important in our Christian communities. They are simply not interested in questions of how they can be forgiven by God. Even the word ‘God’ introduces a kind of grammar that makes little sense to their way of seeing the world – they inevitably envision an old, bearded man in the clouds when you do this. Similarly, and perhaps shockingly to many of us, they just aren’t particularly interested in what happens to you when you die, or if there’s an afterlife. Sadly, even moral concerns such as ‘how can I have more self-control in my life’ are well down the bottom of their lists.

They are interested in how they can save enough money to buy a boat. Or how they can secure good enough marks to open up their career choices. Many are plagued by questions about making the right choices for their future. They know that quality relationships with others really matter in life and want this for themselves. Many of them, particularly as they go through the upper years of high school, want to know that what they do carries meaning.

Our Questions are Their Questions

I’m aware that this title contradicts the previous one, but the point I’m making here is that when you dig deeper, we start to see that there is less distance between the concerns and questions of the Church and those of the secular world than we might initially think. I think of this:

“One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” (Mark 12:28)

None of my students are asking which are the greatest commandments in the Bible. But when you think about it deeper, what this scribe is really asking is which ways of living and behaving are to be privileged above all others? Which interpret the rest? If we had to truly translate this into the closest question for our age, it would look something that overlaps with: ‘What is the good life and how do I get it?’ And that translates the question into something our communities are indeed asking.

I think this may be true of so many things we hold dear as Christians; when you dig deeper, you see that even questions as specific as ‘How can I be forgiven by God?’ or ‘How can I get better at praying?’ are in secular language asking something very close to ‘Where can I find purpose and meaning in my life? How do I live in harmony with the world around me?’

I’m not suggesting here that we delete God from the equation, and I have never done that, but I am suggesting that our framing of problems, and grammar of issues need to be constructed in language that our congregations already speak.

Stop Trying to Evangelise and Just Preach the Good News

My title of this article was deliberately contradictory, not only to function as clickbait. ‘Evangelism’ simply means preaching the good news, so how can I urge you to stop doing it and in the same sentence tell you to do it? Some might ask, how can I even suggest we stop evangelising, when Jesus has commanded us to do so, citing the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20)?

I’m worried about some ‘evangelistic’ approaches to ministry that sees evangelism as something close to ‘winning the debate’. It’s an intellectual tussle to prove the truth of Christian faith over and against secular worldviews. The responsibility on the preacher is to persuade, to change the mind of the congregation so that they come to agree with you, and therefore put their faith in Christ. There are a couple of problems with this approach (likely more than just a couple). The first is that you can smell it from a mile off. Generally speaking, people don’t particularly enjoy having intellectual arguments with other people, and they certainly don’t enjoy being proved wrong. When a sermon that sets out to convince the congregation that their worldview is wrong and the preacher’s is right, the most common effect is to make the congregation hostile to the preacher… and even worse, to their message. Secondly, I don’t believe it is really what ‘evangelism’ means. The word itself comes from ‘good news’. When this kind of argumentative approach occurs in preaching, what is heard is not good news at all. At best, it’s bad news with a caveat, and by the time you get to the caveat, most of the congregation has tuned out anyway, so all they’re left with is the bad news part.

Instead, I wonder if we should leave the conversion part to God, and just do the preaching of good news part. Identify the issues that plague them, identify their worries, their fears, their hopes, the gaps in their life and tell of how the love of God brings hope to all of them; how God’s light shines in the darkness. When a new global conflict erupts, can we speak good news into that? Can we speak of a future without war or violence, and a community God is mobilising that makes peacemaking the heart of its mission? When students and families gather for their final Year 12 chapel service, can we address the fear of change they are all feeling? Can we speak to time rushing by before our eyes, as little kids who once built bases out of lego are now reversing the family car out of the driveway – can we tell them of the timelessness of God’s love, or of the violence of change brought to the disciples on Good Friday, only to be brought into the beautiful future of God’s resurrection promise? Surely, this is a much truer and more relevant proclamation of good news, than an attack on their worldview?

Remember How Wide the Gospel Is

Through these reflections I had to learn early on that the good news of Jesus is far bigger and wider than I ever thought. And I use ‘wider’ here deliberately. The story of Jesus is not confined to one way of looking at it. Too often, in our Anglican traditions (or factions), we find our angle and stick to it. This might be substitutionary atonement, God’s call to social justice, moral transformation, and many more. But as we encounter the questions, hopes and issues of our people, we might spend some time thinking about how Jesus brings good news in wider ways than we might have realised.

As an example, I think of Jane Kenyon’s stunning poem ‘Chrysanthemums’ where she recounts her husband’s journey through diagnosis of cancer to treatment in hospital. After getting close to death the poem ends with:

              Once the staples were out,

              and we had the discharge papers

              in hand, I brought him home, numbed up

              for the trip. He dozed in the car,

              woke, and looked with astonishment

              at the hills, gold and quince

              under October sun, a sight so

              overwhelming that we began to cry,

              he first, and then I.

It’s rather typical of Kenyon’s insight that the richness of life is found in attention to the beauty of the world. Most of our school congregation feel this beauty of the world, and desperately want it to be meaningful. Jesus’ incarnation, death and resurrection takes the very created order up into the life of God. He affirms its goodness by saving us, not outside of, but within creation itself. Creation, through the body of Christ, is given eternal meaning. And this is profoundly good news for us, but an angle we might not be used to considering.

Can we speak good news into financial fears? Disappointments? Relational breakdowns? Boredom? I don’t think I’ve yet encountered a question or concern for which our story does not have good news in some way. We just may need to be more thoughtful about how we find it.

Divorce the engineer and embrace the artist

Too many of the sermons I hear (and have preached myself) treat preaching as something closer to engineering than art. We want to explain the scripture, structure it into three or four points, answer the questions, and above all make it clear. But why? This kind of approach makes sense if we are dealing with something concrete and material, but our sermons are almost never truly about those things – we are speaking of the life of God, how can you reduce that to clarity? Good art is truly art because it can carry meanings that cannot be fully communicated or explained. And when art does that extremely well, we are sometimes even willing to call it a masterpiece. Art is also willing to engage the affections in ways that a prosaic exposition simply doesn’t. We tend to experience feelings of the beautiful or the sublime when we encounter excellent literature, poetry, music or visual art, and we often can’t put our finger on why it does this for us. There is something represented and communicated that lies underneath and beyond what can be put into explanation.

Are we willing to aim for this in our preaching? To allow ambiguity to achieve the beautiful? Are we willing, rather than being concerned with the logical structure of our address, to write as if we were painting, and carry the listener into a new world or story? Modern poetry has had a deep commitment to the power of the image (and Kenyon’s above poem is an excellent example of this). Do we think about developing images in the mind of our hearers, images that, rather than remove them from the physical world they inhabit, instead infuse that world with spiritual meaning?

I know this might sound a little vague, but my point is that I think our primary motivation when writing a sermon or homily should not necessarily be ‘clarity’ but ‘art’. When we do that, we strive toward creating something beautiful in the ears of the hearers, even if they cannot put their finger on why it is so. But they will leave with a memory that immediately connects Christian ministry with the beautiful and the sublime and the profoundly meaningful – and this is far truer to our calling and to the truth of God than the alternate approach that can risk leaving people with a memory that connects the Church to a feeling of profound blandness.

Looking Forward

I think back to that mother’s letter and while it was of course nice to be flattered, what moved me most was what it revealed: here was someone who did not share my faith, who had an entirely different worldview from mine, who may never walk through the doors of an Anglican parish, yet she recognised something beautiful and life-giving in the Christian story. Maybe that is one of our callings as school chaplains.

This is not an attempt to water down our message. Instead, it is an attempt at a faithful translation of what we know to be truly good, to those asking questions in a different language. Not in order to win arguments. Rather, it is to be students ourselves – listening students of our communities, to learn the language they speak, the fears they carry, and the hopes they hold. Then, having listened well, we speak into that world with the wide, wide love of Jesus Christ.