Just Keep Preaching (Why Community>Content)

Some thoughts on content, community, and preaching in the digital age

If you are one of the new subscribers to this newsletter, I want to say hello, and thank you so much for subscribing! I hope that this space can be a little bit of a community for people to read, write, and think together about where God is leading us as a church in the 21st century, especially those of us in the Wesleyan and Methodist world.

-Cambron

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Should Christian leaders keep making content?

Today I’m thinking about the strangeness of producing content as a Christian leader of a faith community—a pastor, a preacher, a priest, whoever you are. Many of us (myself included) find ourselves doing it in one way or another; but what, exactly, are we doing?

One artist’s attempt to show content overload…

One of the dangers of the online medium is the temptation to produce content for content’s sake; to be one more person contributing to the online noise, one more buzzing bee in the hive. Certainly all writers (and preachers, too) sometimes fear that what they are saying or writing is maybe not all that “engaging,” or “inspiring,” or “dynamic,” or some other word for what we imagine people are looking for.

This anxiety produces existential questions: should we keep writing and teaching and preaching, poking along in this creative, prayerful work? Or should we be replaced by giant screens produced by people smarter and prettier and more gifted than ourselves? Should we just stop all this work and let the AI chatbots and the AI preachers take it from here?

(I’m only half-joking about the AI pastors, you know).

Obviously, I do think we should keep creating.

But it’s just a strange time, culturally, for all creative people—but for preachers especially. Churches have been one of the last spaces to not only expect, but prefer amateur live art forms to recorded, professional content. Most folk art, meaning art produced by common, ordinary people, has almost all died away; dancing, music, storytelling, and theatre, all once were art forms done by the people and for the people. But in modernity we have traded these folk arts for recorded, professional content; instead of listening or playing along with musicians on the porch, we now listen on our phone; instead of going to the local theatre, we watch TV; instead of dancing on Friday nights, we…we watch Dancing with the Stars, I guess.

Church is one of the last spaces where vibrant folk traditions remain, the two most important being congregational singing and live preaching. It is strange to think of these things as producing content, because they are participatory and live; but because of online recordings, it is easier than ever to package and distribute such things into the world as content, available to all and consumable by all. Multi-site churches with one preacher preaching on a screen to multiple places has created a sense that maybe the preaching act is becoming commodified, and maybe the Sunday sermon is replaceable by content from better, more talented teachers.

Our congregations, thanks to Facebook and Youtube and podcasts, have more and better sermons to listen to than in any time in human history. I just preached a sermon series on Proverbs at my church; but the one sermon from Tim Keller on the topic I listened to was better than everything I said put together. I sometimes listen to Bishop Robert Barron’s sermons, the Roman Catholic teacher who leads the Word on Fire ministries. And his 12-minute homilies are usually packed with more insight and power than I can figure out how to get into 25 minutes. I’m always like, c’mon bishop, that’s just not fair!

And so it’s just the case that if you are looking for great content, insightful teaching, powerful preaching, it surely is out there, recorded and packaged for your consumption. And it can be incredibly edifying and uplifting. I love being able to hear preaching from my friends and preachers I look up to. My church has a podcast of sermons for people to listen to, and we see it as just one more way that we might be able to connect with people. So having content out there is not all bad!

But hang with me for a second—isn’t it fascinating that this rise in quality content has also coincided with what Jim Davis and Michael Graham call the Great DeChurching, the greatest decline in religious participation in the (North American) Christian world in recorded history?¹

It’s almost as if the church’s problem is not a lack of good content. It’s almost as if we have been focusing our energies on the wrong problem.

We Don’t Need Better Content. We Need Better Community.

I think what’s been missing, for many Christians in North America (the only context I can really speak to), is not lack of quality content: it’s lack of quality Christian community. And I don’t mean the glib, modern way of talking about community, referring to a group of people that we loosely identify with.

I’m talking about community as the real, flesh-and-blood people that we shake hands with and hug and eat besides and pray with and argue with, the people who will show up for us when our mom dies or when we are in the hospital—the people who know our names and our faces. It’s that kind of Christian community that most followers of Jesus are longing for, and many fail to find. And I wonder, do we preachers realize the role we play, in serving and loving and helping to build up the community that all Christians need?

It seems like this should go without saying, but in communication, especially in the spoken art form we call preaching, it matters tremendously who is speaking as to what we hear.

Preaching in this way is an incarnational act. It’s a holy event when the Word takes on actual flesh, through the flesh and blood of the one preaching. If I hear Billy Graham say something on TV, I am certainly listening. But if my pastor in real life says the same thing, who has shown up for me and will show up for me, then it packs a very different punch (a GUT punch). My pastor maybe doesn’t say it with as much rhetorical flair or ability as Graham, but they know who I am, and they love me, and that matters.

It’s one thing to see someone talking in a TikTok video about what God has done in their life. But it’s another thing to see your friend of many decades, who has gone through tragedy after tragedy, stand up and testify about the goodness of God’s presence by the Holy Spirit in front of the congregation. The former is edifiying; the latter is life-changing. And I know, because that very thing happened in my congregation on Pentecost. If we know somebody, and they know us, we just hear them on a different and much deeper level.

For the preacher this means that people don’t necessarily need the best quality sermon: they need your best quality sermon, because they know you.

Content Should Always Be For The Sake of Community

I believe the next Great Awakening will come through folk traditions, as the Holy Spirit works through live, amateur, creative acts. Live preaching done by live people, open mic testimonies, congregational singing of songs that everyone knows (no screen necessary), laying on of hands in prayer, all with a focus less on professional quality and more on authentic testimony and community. People are tired of sleek, overly-produced Christianity. We want a group of people to sing with, and a preacher to learn with, and a mentor to disciple us and pray with us. The Asbury Outpouring revealed this in the hearts of the young; but it’s a multigenerational longing. Everyone knows that we need something different—it’s jut actually doing it that’s the hard part.

And this in some ways is why I’m so energized about the current moment in American Christianity, which I believe is becoming a Wesleyan moment. John Wesley was not the greatest preacher of all time, or the greatest theologian of all time; but he was, perhaps, the greatest organizer of lay Christian community that the world has ever known. By funneling new and revived Christians into Methodist societies (large, congregational size groups), class meetings (10-12 people meeting weekly), and band meetings (3-4 person accountability groups), Wesley provided a structure for powerful and unprecedented community formation in Christ that swept the entire globe. It seemed that in all of what Wesley wrote and preached, at the heart of it was to spur Christians, in community, to pursue holiness together.

And that kind of creative work, which inspires actual people to come alive in an actual Christian community, is something that cannot be done by a podcast or a video. It requires a person, someone that can know and be known. And it is also work that anyone can do, if they are called by God to do it. I believe this is the work we are called to today: to do all we can, as excellently as we can, to inspire and persuade people to follow Jesus with other people, right where they happen to be.

If you are one of those creative, content-producing Christians today, whether you are a Sunday school teacher trying to help people actually take their faith seriously, a preacher in a rural church with twenty-five people on a good Sunday, a preacher of a large congregation with imposter syndrome, a choir director or worship leader teaching a congregation to really sing out to God, a theologian trying to get a teaching career going, a youth pastor preparing a lesson for a group of unruly middle schoolers, or just someone feeling the call of God on your life, I want to encourage you: the Church actually needs you to step forward and do your creative work, whatever it may be.

What you are doing will likely not make you famous, but it’s also irreplaceable in someone’s life in Christ. Your creative work, the content you create, matters, because you are the only one who knows your people, and no one else can specifically speak to them like you can.

And so brothers and sisters, just keep creating. Keep writing for those who are willing to read, keep preaching to those willing to listen, and keep discipling those willing to show up. God may be forming a community through what you say, and in that community, souls will be saved. So preach on, my friends!

1. From a review of their book by David Watson in Firebrand magazine: The writers set out their thesis with an alarming statement: “About 40 million adults in America today used to go to church but no longer do, which accounts for around 16 percent of our adult population. For the first time in the eight decades that Gallup has tracked American religious membership, more adults in the United States do not attend church than attend church. This is not a gradual shift. It is a jolting one” (3). They continue, “More people have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham crusades combined. Adding to the alarm is the fact that this phenomenon has rapidly increased since the mid-1990s” (5, italics original).