Why Johnny can’t preach (Part 2)

If you wanted to find our about the ANZAC’s legendary Gallipoli campaign, how would you go about it? Watch Peter Weir’s classic 1981 Gallipoli (“What are you legs? Steel springs”)? Go to the Australian War Memorial? Borrow a book or two from the local library? Read a Wikipedia article? Go to the new ABC 3D interactive site?

In this second discussion of T David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach (read part 1), I want to reflect on the first reason Gordon gives as to why Johnny can’t preach—that is, Johnny can’t read (texts).

(By the way, you may have realized by now that T David Gordon is a ‘tell-it-how-he-sees-it’ kind of guy. It’s interesting to note that he wrote this book while undergoing treatment for aggressive stage III colorectal cancer, wondering if he would survive. In God’s good graciousness, Gordon is still alive today.)

In chapter 2, Gordon suggests that a massive culture shift has taken place in the last 40 years, driven largely by the emergence of electronic media technology. The shift is from reading texts to reading for information.

Reading for information is content-focussed. It asks the question “What is the main point of this?” The ultimate ‘content read’ is the speed reader, who can ignore content-less (and therefore irrelevant) words like articles, prepositions and adjectives. On the other hand, when we read a text, we are interested not only in content, but form, construction, art, literary style, and so on.

Perhaps the culture difference Gordon sees is something like the difference between two pictures of a house. In the engineering blueprint, we have the ‘information’ about the house, while in the Impressionist painting of the same house, we are drawn to its style, character, angles and shadows. Gordon’s claim is that as a culture, when it comes to reading, we go for the engineering blueprint every time.

Hence the question about Gallipoli. Do we want a quick, give-me-the-facts account (preferably with pictures), or are we prepared to spend the time hearing personal stories and reflections, reading about the political background, and considering the historical significance?

For the preacher, this cultural change is significant because ‘reading for information’ has become the way in which preachers read the Bible. The key question they ask is about content, with subtle matters of construction and form slipping off quickly to the wayside. Gordon suggests that this is the reason why many sermons contain general truths and are thematic in nature, and why the accusation of ‘same-ness’ is a frequent unfortunate reality: it’s because the preacher has just read the information and not considered the text.

Gordon also suggests that a lack of being able to read texts contributes to an inability to reflect and contemplate the significant. Again, he claims the electronic media—particularly the pace of electronic media—contributes heavily to this:

We are swamped by the inconsequential, bombarded by images and sounds that rob us of the opportunity for reflection and contemplation that are necessary to reacquaint ourselves with what is significant. (p. 58)

Now, before you write off Gordon as a cranky old man complaining about young people and their texting, MSN-ing and loud music, consider this statistic. In 1968, the average weekday network news sound bite from a US presidential candidate was 42.3 seconds. In 1988, it was 9.8 seconds (with 1% of bites lasting longer than 40 seconds). In 2000, it was 7.8 seconds.

I don’t think there is any question that we have a become a culture dominated by the instant and the image. Of course, this is a culture in which both preachers and listeners live, so how should preachers address it for themselves, and for their listeners?

That question is answered in detail in a following chapter, but here’s some of Gordon’s teasers to get the discussion going.

• Preaching needs to be focused on the significant and consequential.
• Preaching needs to be concerned more “with the history encompassing events of creation, fall and redemption” and less with current events. (p. 60)
• Preaching needs to be less concerned with ‘how to’ and more concerned with ‘why to’.

However, “any one of these preferred alternatives requires a sensibility for the significant; a capacity to distinguish the weighty from the light, and the consequential from the trivial”.

Stay tuned for part 3.