A Shared Pulpit: Creating a Hospitable Homiletic Culture for Congregational Formation in a Metamodern Age

Abstract

Preaching has always been a means of congregational formation, and it is most effective in this endeavor when the homiletic matches the expectations of the audience. Modernism’s solo, authoritative clergy voice and postmodernism’s inductive New Homiletic responded to the needs of listeners in their respective eras. This paper proposes a homiletical paradigm that responds to metamodernism—a movement emerging in the U.S. over the past 10 years—and imagines this paradigm’s contribution to Christo-formation in the faith community. After the introduction, this paper traces how modernism and postmodernism affected America’s homiletic and subsequent congregational formation. This is followed by a description of metamodernism, its place within postmodernity, and its effect on church members’ expectations. Next, I present a shared pulpit culture, where the congregation hears a myriad of preaching voices, as a formative response to metamodern demands for more complex truths to be discerned within trusting communities. The paper ends with experiences from a faith community that practices a shared pulpit to show how the practice forms the vocational preacher, the members who preach, and the church at large.

1. Introduction

The intended effect of the sermonic event varies by context and preacher. Charles Campbell (2002) claims that the purpose of preaching is to “build up a community of resistance” when preachers speak “a word that sets the church free from the captivity of the powers” (p. 90). This purpose is well received among the oppressed, and it thrived in postmodernism. In a more traditional effort, common in the modern era, Paul Scott Wilson says that the purpose of preaching is simply “to communicate faith” (Childers 2004, p. 144). While not denying the transforming potential of preaching, he emphasizes “preaching as theological exercise” to equip the generations with the core tenets of the faith for an ethical life (p. 144). Lucy Rose (1997) says the purpose of preaching is a wager, open to counter-wagers, so that assumptions can be disrupted as “new power arrangements emerge” around the table with Christ (p. 97). Her kenotic relationship with homiletical authority would not have met the expectations of most churchgoers in 1950s North America, though Marvin McMickle’s (2006) is more timeless. He casts the African American sermonic event as the catalyst to motivate the church to praise, and then service (pp. 78–98). Cantalamessa (2010) interprets Jesus’s purpose of preaching as sacramental—one that inevitably sanctifies the hearers—because the sermon announces Christ through the Spirit: “In the beginning and once and for all the Holy Spirit has inspired Scripture, and now every time we open it, Scripture breathes the Holy Spirit!” (p. 81).

These purposes and corresponding modalities of preaching have a rightful place in their contexts. Revival preaching at Cane Ridge (1801) and frontier crowds around Wesleyan circuit riders (1790–1820s) brought people to faith, even if those sermons would largely fall on deaf ears today due to their emphasis on a universally understood measure of holiness. Though the “something” may vary by era, Jana Childers (2004) was correct when she concluded in her anthology about the purposes of preaching: “Preaching is meant to do something” (p. 47). It is acceptable for an academic lecture about the Bible to result in mere intellectual knowledge, but it is the premise of this paper that the overarching purpose of preaching is to transform the church into the image of Christ for the sake of the world, whether that is through initial justification or ongoing sanctification.

America is in a metamodern age in which modernism’s metanarrative has been found unreasonable; yet, postmodernism’s plurality of truth has left chaos in its wake. Metamodernism emerges in part as a juxtaposition and in part as a rejection of both ages. Vermeulen and van den Akker’s “Notes on Metamodernism” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010a)—considered the defining work on metamodernism—explains: “metamodernism should be situated epistemologically with (post) modernism, ontologically between (post) modernism, and historically beyond (post) modernism” (p. 2). The features of metamodernism will be explored further in the paper, but it is an era that is characterized by paradox and oscillation, one that embraces complexity, hope, and doubt in equal measure, as well as an openness to a grand narrative (aggressively rejected in postmodernism). The grand narrative it seeks, however, demands far more nuance than the one offered in the modern era.

This paper calls for a hospitable homiletic culture. The characteristics of biblical hospitality complement a metamodern age that expects openness and multifaceted perspectives. Christine Pohl, renowned for her work on biblical hospitality, defines hospitality “to welcome people into a place they wouldn’t necessarily feel free to enter without some kind of invitation” (Pohl 2020). People transform from guests to hosts in hospitable places, and blessings flow reciprocally. This guest–host dynamic is most notable in the Christian story in Christ, who welcomes people into his body while simultaneously abiding within them at their invitation. Jesus models this type of hospitality in the Upper Room Discourse with the disciples before his arrest (John 13–17). In sum, he says, “Abide in me, and I in you” (15:4), and this conversation unfolds around a table where the host, Jesus, washes the feet of the guests, and the guests are asked to do the same (13:14).

Church members are typically barred from preaching in the pulpit space without an invitation from the pastor, and this paper does not suggest foregoing care about who preaches the word of God to the people of God from the pulpit. Yet, it does suggest a cultural shift from a spirit of exception or allowance to one where members’ voices in the pulpit are the rule and are expected. The congregation comes to see the pulpit as their space more than the vocational preacher’s in a hospitable homiletic culture. Pohl (2020) contends that hospitality “has multiple dimensions, like physical dimensions in terms of feeding people or providing space for them, but it also has social ones in terms of providing recognition and conversation and valuing the other person. And then it has lots of spiritual dimensions because we worship a God who’s welcomed us”. A hospitable homiletic culture extends God’s hospitality for the Christian to the physical location of the pulpit, notably situated near the communion table, where lines between guest and host are blurred and mutual blessings emerge. This paper will explain that biblical hospitality, embodied in Christ and modeled throughout the canon—from the angelic strangers who visit Abraham to Lydia, who hosts missionaries in her home to learn from them—is a type of hospitality that metamodern people desire.

Just as the country’s social philosophy informed preaching in the past, so should it today. If transformation into the image of Christ for the sake of the world is a sermonic goal, what is a homiletic for a metamodern world? This paper proposes that a hospitable pulpit culture is an effective response to the cultural shift into metamodernism for the purpose of congregational transformation.

2. American Cultural Philosophies of the Past and Homiletics

North America’s guiding philosophies, like modernism and postmodernism, emerge from the arts, academy, and culture of the age. One social philosophy does not replace the previous so much as the philosophies coexist at the same time. A person sitting in a restaurant today might overhear a conversation from the table on their left informed by the core tenets of modernism, while the table on their right is practicing the virtues of postmodernism. In time, one philosophy becomes more prominent than the other. Invention and significant events, like the printing press, the internet, and climate change, drive the movements in a society. The American church, situated in culture, is never immune to the reigning philosophies of the age. These philosophies generate expectations in congregants and shape church culture. The pulpit is at the center of these expectations and bears the weight of the church’s formative potential. At times, the expectations of the church members conflict with those of the preacher or her preaching style or content. Amy-Jill Levine (2024) confessed in an interview, “At some point, everyone is uncomfortable in the pew”. People became uncomfortable en masse in postmodernism. Such dissonance can exacerbate when the cultural philosophy of the preacher fails to connect with that of the church member, and in such situations, spiritual formation chokes. The following subsections further elaborate on cultural and philosophical alignments and dissonances with church member expectations and how the field of homiletics has responded.

2.1. Modernism and Homiletics

Modernism arose around the turn of the twentieth century alongside an eruption of scientific discovery and inventions. “At the core of Modernism lay the idea that the world had to be fundamentally rethought”, and this was done through grand narratives, individualism, and reason—with a measure of absurdity (Victoria and Albert Museum n.d., p. 1). One voice, the white male, predominated preaching in this era, extolling the grand narrative of the Bible from a singular lens for the purpose of salvation (a transformation from death to life). Christians were encouraged to reason with the scriptures, to study them independently, and to trust the authoritative voice of the preacher. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1971) encapsulated the homiletic of modernism when he said preaching should be “Logic on fire! Eloquent Reason!” (p. 54).

Billy Graham earned the title “America’s preacher” because the masses trusted him (Elving 2018). His sermons, intended to bring people to salvation, were replete with phrases like, “the Bible says” and commands to repent (Graham 1996). Authoritative assertions such as these moved millions to accept Christ. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s sermons aired on the radio in this era, and people trusted him to offer what became known as life situation preaching. With authority, Fosdick identified a human problem and solved it with a passage from the Bible. His cultural milieu was not hospitable to a person composing a letter to the editor in response to a Fosdick sermon to express a counter-narrative or to complain that a problem he explored might be nuanced quite differently from another social position. Instead, the audience was comfortable to position itself to accept a well-reasoned truth from the Bible from these homogenous voices.

2.2. Postmodernism and Homiletics

Faith and culture move in a symbiotic relationship, at times responding and often reacting to one another. Therefore, as the U.S. shifted from modernism to postmodernism in the second half of the twentieth century, the church’s expectations from the sermonic event changed as well. No longer was the church willing to be the “javelin catcher” of sermonic truth (Craddock 2001, p. 46). Television ushered counter-cultural artifacts into America’s living rooms in this era, and as a result, large factions of North Americans no longer expected the white, middle-class, male to have the monopoly on truth (Collins 2000). Large portions of society conceded that the Civil Rights Movement and feminism had valid points. The Feminine Mystique is rumored to have “pulled the trigger on history” in the 1960s, shooting down the male metanarrative (Toffler 1970). The plight of the human condition, once preached by Fosdick with a universal biblical solution, was now understood as complex and varied. America, offended and inspired, ravaged the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird (Barajas 2015). Exposure to hidden voices revealed that the novel was only fiction in pretense and that the injustice of Tom Robinson’s conviction could have been righted if only a woman or a person of color was allowed on the jury. Potentially, pricked consciences in these societal confrontations between truth and the powerful at the end of the modern age informed the all-white jury’s guilty verdict against seven of the eighteen defendants in the Mississippi burning murder trials in 1967, three years after To Kill a Mockingbird was released in theaters (FBI 2014). Outside of the deep south, “the [Mississippi] murders galvanized the nation and provided impetus for the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2” (FBI 2014).

Philosophers began to articulate the cultural shift and were quick to highlight its benefits. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984), considered by some to be the father of postmodernism, roused the West with this call to rebellion: “Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name” (p. 82). Postmodernism, a cultural state marked by skepticism, formed U.S. society, and by extension the church, in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The first thorough exploration of postmodernism is largely agreed to have been penned by Lyotard (1984) in his work, The Postmodern Condition. He attributes computerization and “the machine” as precipitating the philosophical shift:

Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made. Access to data is, and will continue to be, the prerogative of experts of all stripes. The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers.

(p. 10)

In a surprise turn, an extension of Lyotard’s “machine”—the internet—was invented, and it curtailed Lyotard’s fears that the voice of the ruling class would continue as sole decision makers. Floods of access to information opened on the internet in the postmodern era, and “experts of all stripes” had a URL to share their experiences and beliefs. Thanks to “the machine”, alternative narratives were being heard and taken seriously. Whereas modernism found its genesis in science, reason, and even nationalism, postmodernism was born in skepticism, media, and the voice of the oppressed.

The church was slower to accept this new reality. After all, it remained, more or less, people gathered around the Bible as grand narrative, a book that many, most notably evangelicals, still refer to as the last bastion of absolute truth (Ham 2010; Keffer 2019). Even so, in the pews, the truth was out about Truth. Referring to the preaching in the modern age, homiletician Fred Craddock (2001) explains that there was a time when, “To have placed more responsibility on the listeners, to have left alternatives open to them, to have permitted response to be the conclusion, would have been to create panic and insecurity, and thus to totally frustrate the flock” (p. 46). But that shift in authority, from preacher to congregation, became the expectation as the postmodern church became more skeptical of absolute truth and its connection to those in power. Younger generations were no longer receptive to biblical interpretation and application through one worldview, typically that of the middle-class, white, U.S. male. Craddock (2001) declared at the turn of the century, “the hearer is not only capable of but deserving the right to participate in that [inductive] movement and arrive at a conclusion that is the hearer’s own, not just the speaker’s” (p. 52). Delayed, but in response to the philosophical shift from modernism to postmodernism in the years around the millennium, democracy, releasing of authority, induction, and storytelling entered the pulpit mightily (Lowry 2019). The postmodern worldview justified this shift in sermonic composition and preaching style, as Craddock, Brown-Taylor, Buttrick, and other practitioners of the New Homiletic taught (2019). The New Homiletic inductively explored new heroes from biblical pericopes. In the postmodern era, churches were as likely to hear a sermon from Bathsheba’s perspective as David’s, Vashti’s as Mordecai’s, and Hannah’s song as Samuel’s. The metanarrative of modernism was irreparably disrupted, and the marriage between truth and power eroded.

Postmodernism began to dissolve after the millennium. Lyotard’s “machine” allowed space for anyone to tell their story on TikTok, to counter a narrative, to self-publish a memoir, start a blog, or create a “news” channel on YouTube. Eventually, benefits of postmodernism, like the erosion of the monopoly on truth by those in power, were tempered as universal access to the internet led to truth entropy. By the turn of the millennium, Bob Dylan (2000) is crooning, “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie”. Postmodern became the curse word for a plurality of subjectivities, distrust, and the consequent desertion of metanarratives that left people unmoored. The limits of postmodernism amalgamated with rising post-Christendom in the U.S., and church members’ expectations for preaching shifted yet again.1

3. Metamodernism

Scholars give credit to Vermeulen and van den Akker (2010a) for coining the title “metamodernism” to describe the West’s philosophical era from about 2010 onward. The shift to metamodernism is attributed to many factors, including climate change awareness, pervasive digital information, the collapse of centralized power, and the decline in respect for authority (Gaiduk and Tarapatov 2022). It is difficult to describe the era that one is currently inhabiting, since analyses of causes and characteristics are most accurately done in retrospect. Therefore, defining metamodernism and the church’s faithful response to this philosophical shift is a challenge. Even so, we can assess enough characteristics of the shift to support and describe a cooperating homiletic that meets the expectations of the people of its age.

Because meta means with or beyond, metamodernism includes and goes beyond both modernism and postmodernism. It is not a linear compartment after postmodernism, but rather the way contemporary Western people are navigating the ongoing influences of modernism and postmodernism. For instance, metamodernism abandons the notion of uncovering the full truth but presses to know something. Metamodern treatises often include descriptions like oscillate, paradox, and complexity. Luke Turner (2011) wrote in his Metamodernist Manifesto that the time “shall be defined as the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons. We must go forth and oscillate!” (Turner 2011).

The metamodern person deeply desires truth upon which to stand but recognizes that any trustworthy truth is complex, perhaps irreconcilably so. The truth is so complex that perhaps it cannot be ascertained at all, and a metamodern person is more comfortable in that mystery than a modern person who rejects mystery for industry and science. To the metamodern, dismissing a voice is to catastrophically interrupt the pursuit of whatever truth may be known. Even with all the voices at the table, metamodern people are not expecting to find it. It is “a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism. Metamodernism moves for the sake of moving, attempts in spite of its inevitable failure; it seeks forever for a truth that it never expects to find” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010a, p. 2).

Though metamodern America is less Christian, metamodern people are mythmaking, holding the immanent and transcendent frame in clumsy balance. Vermeulen and van den Akker (2010b) observe increased divine and religious allusions in the landscape. Brian Dempsey, in [Re]construction: Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth, also observes:

Some of this generation are daring to imagine transcendence again. There is a revival of the mythic; sublimity, narrative, depth, meaning, and reorientation are once again being sought out and can be seen within metamodern artforms. And yet, precisely because one knows this transcendence cannot be unequivocally asserted (indeed, quite the contrary), its entertainment as an idea is of an essentially different sort than (pre)modern naiveté. It is indeed a sense of transcendence arising out of and ultimately held in check by the acknowledged immanent frame.

(Dempsey 2018)

For the preacher, it is especially noteworthy that, in addition to the recurrence of oscillation, paradox, and complexity, the terms hope, romanticism, and transcendence also characterize metamodernism.

3.1. Metamodernism and Homiletics

A homiletical response to metamodernism that seeks to form the congregation into the image of Christ for the sake of the world must bear in mind the expectations of the generation’s worldview.2 I identify two factors at play in the metamodern congregation: a postmodern “pragmatic idealism” that seeks complex truth and the decline of Christianity. The scope of this paper proposes a homiletical response to the former, but the two are intertwined, since postmodernism’s skepticism toward monolithic narratives is partially due to the abuse those narratives have caused. Craddock (2001) proposed the New Homiletic to respect the Christian’s ability to make sound meaning of biblical truths in a postmodern era. The case for distributed pulpit power in a metamodern age is not solely that the people in the pews are trustworthy to derive and make meaning of biblical pericopes, but that the corporate church is not. Abuses of power, financial and sexual scandal, corruption, the idolatry of nationalism, and hierarchies rooted in gender and class have eroded the church’s reputation and contributed to the skepticism of the sole sermonic voice. Pervasive abuse and harm from the pulpit justify postmodern rejection of the univocal preaching voice. In this regard, Craddock and the New Homiletic have an enduring model, one that shifts the authority from the pulpit to the pew. The authority of meaning making in a metamodern age must remain shared but also symbiotically expanded across a plurality of voices in the pulpit and the pews with space for multiple truths, mystery, and complexity (ideally, with space for counter-arguments, rebuttals, and doubt). This paper explores the specificities of this model.

3.2. Alternate Homiletical Responses to Metamodernism

In its better forms, metamodernism is a cultural state that seeks the dynamic middle way between nihilism and hope rather than an extreme pendulum from one cultural philosophy to another. Le Cunff expresses this ideal like this: “We went from modernism—‘Make it new! Let’s shape history!’—to postmodernism—‘There is no truth! Nothing really matters!’—to metamodernism: ‘Maybe things are not this black-and-white? Maybe there’s a middle ground?’” (Le Cunff 2022, p. 1). Holding the tension between worldviews is a noble ideal that metamoderns are calling us to entertain. However, humans have struggled to peacefully coexist in the hospitable, listening, middle ground that ebbs and flows with the testimonies of competing truths. This struggle has left many Christians wounded, offended, and frustrated with churches where simplistic sermons failed to hold the tension (Barna Group 2023). The pursuit of complex truth has devolved into power plays and violence. Truth has fought the fight, leaving bloodshed in the streets and pews, falling far short of the utopic middle ground. Thanks to postmodernism, metamodern people are wise to the toxicity of the lone voice. Yet, years entertaining everybody’s truth has created people who are as nostalgic for a common truth as they are leery of it. As a result, some Christian circles have followed nostalgia into a dogmatic singularity of truth, or in extreme cases, invented truth. Melanie Bockmann (2023) cites the “Make America Great Again” subculture, with its romanticized optimism, as metamodern; however, it is manifest in a perverse form with “distortions to the concept of ‘truth’ in an era of fake news—where the worst of postmodern cynicism is paired with the most blindfolded optimism of modernism to create metanarratives that have been illegitimately crowned as truth” (p. 26). Fear has motivated this malformed middle way, and it has infiltrated pulpits and thus malformed the church.

In this worst form, “post-postmoderns no longer pretend. Their view of the good is openly celebrated and marketed to the masses as precisely what it is, a view of the good that they are seeking to legislate over and against rival visions of the good” (Williams 2016, p. 2). Thus malformed, metamodernism becomes a truth war where Christians use pulpits to refute any benefit of postmodernism, to reclaim a lone authoritative narrative, oppress alternate stories, and abdicate responsibility for harm. This differs from the truth debates in modernism, where there was an assumption of one metanarrative. The contemporary version is reactive, abating fear of the unknown with the reconstruction of a familiar foundation that forbids counter-wagers or doubt. This fearful reaction is outside the virtues of Christianity, and any homiletical response should be born of more Christoform inner places.

Even so, fear is not a surprising reaction to the philosophical shift. From Peter and Paul’s conflict in Galatia about Gentile inclusion (New Revised Standard Version 1989, Galatians 2:11–14) to the beating of Ann Lee in 1782 for preaching in public (Brekus 1998, p. 90), the disruption (or “deconstruction” to use metamodern language) of religious truth unsettles those who benefit from power and authority in the previously held truth. The inclusion of marginalized voices and alternate narratives in metamodernism causes suspicion about the reliability of the foundation upon which the church is standing, and “This does not bode well for a community that was founded on a list of non-negotiable fundamentals that have been regarded as truth, who have used those fundamentals as gates to determine who is in or out, who is saved or lost, and who is right or wrong” (Bockmann 2023, p. 28). In some circles, preachers have reacted against postmodernism with this neomodern gatekeeping. Such a homiletic grossly misses the expectations of metamodern congregants in their midst. A Gospel-laden homiletical response is possible, one that tends to the wounds of postmodern nihilism without defaulting to the dogmatisms of modernism.

3.3. Metamodernism, Trust, and Truth

Whether metamodernism finds us destroying each other with competing truths, isolating with those who share our same truth, or persistently listening to others’ truths in search of a higher truth, scholar Ihab Hassan affirms that truth once again matters to the West. Hassan says the type of truth metamodern people desire is not “an absolute, transcendent, or foundational Truth”, but rather, a truth that “rests on trust, personal, social, cognitive trust” (Hassan 2003). “What is trust?” Hassan asks.

It is more than consensus. Trust depends on self-abnegation, self-emptying, something akin to kenosis. It requires dispassion, empathy, attention to others and to the created world, to something not in ourselves. But ultimately, trust demands self-dispossession. That is why truth and trust must remain spiritual qualities—not simply psychological, not merely political, but, above all, spiritual values.

(p. 7)

By this definition, trust requires the opposite of the truth wars that North America, and much of the North American church, is experiencing. According to Hassan, it requires kenosis, which cooperates well with proposals from postmodern homileticians like Lucy Rose (1997), who advocate for “roundtable preaching”. On the heels of postmodern homileticians who shifted the locus of authority from the preacher to the congregation (a demand of the postmodern audience), Rose proposes that the sermon is a “wager of meaning”, an informed opinion offered to the church to begin a conversation of counter-wagers. Shared power and the release of authority to the congregation communicates trust. Through the kenotic homiletic, the preacher communicates, “You trust me to wager a truth I experienced in this text, and I trust you to absorb it responsibly. Consider how it aligns to your experience with God, where it rubs, and I trust you to share those reflections with us”. It requires mutual trust for the sermon to be the beginning of a conversation about moments where transcendence breaks into the immanent frame in ways that potentially disorient and reorient us. Metamodern preaching demands “a posture that respects complexities, interconnections, overlapping narratives, and polyphonic dialogues, which—through disagreement, difference, and diverse perspective—lead people not toward truth, exactly, but rather into an ongoing ‘truth process’” (Bockmann 2023, p. 35). Metamodern congregants expect a “truth process” more than a homogeneous truth.

Embarking upon the truth process requires as much formative work before and after the sermon as it does within it. Trust in a community cannot be matured by the talking head in the pulpit alone, no matter how humble or pastoral the presence. Trust-building disciplines, beyond the scope of this paper, must accompany any homiletical response to the metamodern age. David Lose (2003) and others proposed homiletical responses to postmodernism that “preach truth without succumbing either to a modernist foundationalism that quickly becomes univocal, even hegemonic, speech or to a postmodern constructivism that seriously undermines, if not eliminates, the possibility for speaking of truth at all” by “engaging in critical conversation” (p. 111). Lose’s methodology for “critical conversation” is largely based in Ricoeur’s rhetoric, linguistics, and confessing the faith. It has hints of modernism. A metamodern audience seeks not Lose’s “critical conversation”, but what Gayatri Spivak calls “critical intimacy” (Lose 2003). She describes this metamodern characteristic as the tendency to deconstruct beliefs from the innermost self and notes that people bother to deconstruct only that which they love. “You are doing it from the inside, with real intimacy. You’re kind of turning it around. It’s that kind of critique” (2016). Social media sites with “exvangelical” hashtags are havens for postmodern and metamodern people who are publicly and messily deconstructing beliefs that are dear to them. They nonchalantly abandon beliefs that are not. Faith is a core belief, deeply held and deeply loved for its connections to family, traditions, heritage, and personhood. The metamodern church can extend Spivak’s “critical intimacy”, where beloved truths are deconstructed, by welcoming this process in the church with people they love. A shared pulpit among people who love and trust each other is a prime space to turn around what metamodern Christians care deeply about, to pursue what remains true within faith, to perhaps reconstruct its remnants into a workable faith. Reasonable critique has not been abandoned in the age, but because of the pervasiveness of digital information, metamodern people emphasize critique within trusting relationships. If opportunities for critical intimacy are not available in church, more so fostered in some way from the pulpit where truth claims are predominantly extended, metamodern people will seek it elsewhere, because, according to literary critic Ihab Hassan, intimacy is akin to reality. “A postmodern aesthetic of trust, I have argued, brings us to a fiduciary realism, a realism that redefines the relation between subject and object, self and other, in terms of profound trust. Are we not close here to something deeper than empathy, something akin to love? Are we not broaching, beyond realism, Reality?” (2003, p. 17). Metamodern people are hungry for something real, and they will look for it in “something akin to love”.

Loving relationships have trust and space for “critical intimacy” where paradoxical truth claims can be shared and analyzed. These metamodern expectations can be met in the church with a reimagined homiletic. This homiletic could eliminate the need for Christians to search for reality in secular spaces, but the vocational preacher must be aware of metamodern expectations and the consequences of postmodern deconstruction in the church. Metamodern Christians who remain in churches know the damage that can occur in univocal hegemony when fear takes over in the face of alternative stories. They also know the instability of postmodernism’s truth assortment. Even so, pressing and complex problems exist, and metamodern Christians are hopeful that preaching remains a viable avenue for addressing them, but it will require a reimagined mode of delivery that allows for complexity and intimacy more than mere reasoned rhetoric. “These complex problems cannot be solved without the audacity of Modernity and the nuance of Postmodernism. What is required is an integration of these virtues while moving past the gridlock. What is required is to transcend and include” (Cussen 2022, p. 1).

Truth was immanent and real for hundreds of years, so the anxiety that imbues postmodernism is reasonable and pervasive. Lose alluded to his fear when he said in 2003 that postmodernism risks the elimination of speaking any truth at all. Most metamodern people, as Hassan claims, believe that truth once again matters, but it is slippery. It might not be attainable to the group gathered at the moment. But metamodern people are patient and able to hold the tension of conflicting truth claims, rooted in reason and experience, with an understanding that truth is dynamic. They “deconstruct toward truth” (Bockmann 2023, p. 27). They are willing to have truth stretched and formed into new shapes as voices are added to the narrative. They simultaneously do not believe in a metanarrative and pursue one. Abramson describes the tension metamodern people accept between personal truth and the universal truth one might find in a metanarrative.

Metamodernism embraces the paradoxical. For instance, in negotiating between modernism’s belief in universality and postmodernism’s belief in contingency, metamodernism posits that certain ideas can be “objectively” true for an individual even though the individual also understands that they are not universally true. … This paradoxical relationship between how we conceive of truth “locally” and how we conceive of it at the level of society allows us to constantly exhibit and participate in paradoxes, as we are simultaneously aware and accepting of how we individually operate and how that differs dramatically from how others do (Abramson 2015, np).

Therefore, metamodern audiences understand that there will be times when the collection of voices does not fit together. Like a family with a jigsaw puzzle strewn on the table, they may doubt that the puzzle can come together at all. But metamodern people are eager to sit around the table and try, if for no other reason than to relish the anticipation of insight and the time together. In time, complex truth might emerge through the paradoxes in the diverse, intimate relationships.

Psychologist Gregg Henriques (2020) claims that metamodern people find truth in patterns and recurrences. He claims that they search for common themes in the void of a common narrative. Metamoderns seek “themes that come together in a coherent, non-arbitrary manner, where the different parts resonate with one another and mutually reinforce each other” (np). The people in our churches today are seeking truth from an integrated pluralism—a characteristic of metamodernism. Their ears are attuned to hear a plurality of voices speaking about an experience someone had with God in the once-common, now-mysterious narrative around which they are gathered. From my experience, they are empathetically postured to hear “self-emptying” eyewitness accounts of God in the text and in their world. Metamodern Christians are prepared—if not expecting—a homiletic akin to a shared pulpit culture in which to pursue truth. This example illustrates how a shared pulpit culture meets metamodern expectations: Three church members were trusted by the congregation to preach their respective truths in a series on Exodus. A middle-aged, Black woman spoke her truth on Exodus 1 and the Hebrew midwives. The sermon extolled cunning trickery in the face of evil for the sake of honoring life, for God is a God of life. Another sermon was preached by a white, gay teen on Miriam’s Song in Exodus 15. His truth was that everyone’s gift, along with the fullness of every person, has passed through blood and water and is therefore welcome in the Promised Land. An older, white man preached the next week on Exodus 13:17–22. He wagered a truth that sometimes in life, God leads us “the roundabout way”, but we can trust we will arrive at our destination if we stay together and listen to those with the gift of faith. The church, at the conclusion of this experience of integrated plurality, was invited to discern what themes “resonated with each other” and “mutually reinforced” (Henriques 2020). Therein they found a complex truth about the value of spiritual gifts within the people of God to stand on that did not stand over.

4. A Shared Pulpit Culture in Response to a Metamodern Age

The New Homiletic reached its formative limits in the decline of Christianity in America. James Thompson diagnoses the problem this way: “[inductive preaching] functions best in a Christian culture in which listeners are well informed of the Christian heritage. [today] people have little knowledge of biblical content” (Thompson 2000, p. 9). The church struggled to situate an inductive sermon within the biblical grand narrative as it became less familiar with the Christian story. As a result, the risk of errant meaning, or meaning so fragile it was intangible, made the narrative and inductive aspects of the New Homiletic untenable outside of most Christian spaces. For this reason and other metamodern reasons outlined above, the contemporary church requires a homiletic that is responsive to its complex worldview. In their book, Church Refugees: Sociologists Reveal Why People Are DONE with Church but Not Their Faith, Packard and Hope (2015) claim that young people who are going to return to church will require that “there are many different voices coming from the pulpit” (p. 88). A shared pulpit is a homiletic to address contemporary concerns that retain the New Homiletic’s democracy of authority.

A shared pulpit is more than mere substitute preaching, and it is far more intentional than an “open mic” morning (Hannan 2021, p. xii). I am defining a shared pulpit in this way: A shared pulpit is a church culture that is radically hospitable to the Word of God through the diverse voices within the congregation, nurtured and protected by mentoring, who are trusted to preach on a rotating or regular basis, empowered by the gifting of the Holy Spirit. A shared pulpit church culture extends its hospitality from the understanding that the one same Spirit is in every member of the church, gifting some for speaking gifts. An embodied pneumatology goes beyond the cognitive belief that the Holy Spirit indwells believers; it offers the sermon space to whole persons—their bodies, voices, unique experiences, religious heritages, and passions for pericopes and biblical themes—who stand in diverse positions within the text and the church. The one clear truth the lay preacher discerns from the text and its application (their focus and function, to borrow Tom Long’s language from The Witness of Preaching, Long 2016) is welcome for the church that has been formed to desire this diversity of the embodied Word as they have lived through the worst of modernism and postmodernism.

The practice of rotating voices in the pulpit has limited formation possibilities if it is not done within a hospitable church culture. The congregation will receive the sermons of fellow church members with skepticism if there is not already a pre-established culture of hospitality. Defensive reactions will arise in members when a sermonic point is made that reflects the speaker’s unique position in the text if the church has not yet experienced the benefits of such diversity. For instance, if a Lutheran church member, preaching to a church that comprises a myriad of denominational heritages, makes a point in the sermon that is informed by Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms, such a point will be received as a viable solution to America’s conflation of faith and politics only if the church trusts the preacher. Believing the preacher is for their good and loves them is a prerequisite to having ears to hear. Likewise, a reputation for humility and love is a prerequisite for the preacher to have the right to speak the Word before the people. Doing life together outside of the corporate worship space nurtures a culture that is hospitable to diverse ideas, and the culture is solidified and strengthened through eager listening when the church testifies about the resulting Christo-formation that comes from these experiences. This paper argues that a shared pulpit, as an embodiment of its broader hospitable culture, has the power to form the church more into the image of Christ because the listeners are eager to collect eyewitness accounts from those that they trust for their complex pursuit of truth.

The postmodern audience developed ears to hear wagers over authoritative imperatives. The metamodern audience has ears to hear wagers of meaning from those they trust and know. Postmodern Christians became skeptical of parables taught with singular meanings or epic stories taught with unidimensional heroes and villains (e.g., preserving David’s heroism at all costs and portraying Bathsheba as a seductress). Postmodern Christians welcomed the idea of characters once deemed villainous being reintroduced as heroes. Consider Vashti, who disobeys her husband and is removed from the King’s favor, not so that the righteous Esther can take the stage, but because she, through God’s prevenient grace, miraculously knew her body was holy, and righteously shouted, “No!” to its use for cheap and abusive entertainment (Esther 1:12). This sermon is markedly more powerful when it is proclaimed in a shared pulpit to a metamodern audience, not from the same (male) preacher who preaches every week, but from the voice of a once-abused woman. Her truth with this text is spoken into the lives of the trusted, gathered to critically intimate together, celebrating good questions as much as clear answers in an ongoing conversation.

A basic tenet of homiletics within the context of local preaching is that the congregation must be exegeted along with the text. A preaching mentor challenged, “Your voice is not qualified to be heard unless you have heard the voices you expect to hear you”. In any philosophical age, the preacher’s love for the church is a prerequisite for a local sermon, and the congregation’s trust in the preacher is a prerequisite for congregational formation. Knowing precipitates love and trust. And fiduciary trust, according to Hassan (2003), is the premise to realism in a metamodern age. An open pulpit, nurtured by a seminary-trained minister whose only toll for access is love for the people of God and a gift for exhortation, will inevitably form the church into wonder over God’s expansive truth as they mutually love and listen to grow in trust with one another.

4.1. Shared Pulpit Methodology

If the shift to postmodernism justified more than one voice in the pulpit, the more recent shift to metamodernism is reason to share the pulpit with care. A shared pulpit does not discount the expertise of the seminary-trained pulpit minister, but it gives way for the Spirit to be the ultimate expert, as the congregation extends responsible space to those gifted with exhortation to offer their own wager of meaning. The vocational preacher mentors those who participate in the shared pulpit as an expression of love and trust-building within the community. Responsibly dispersing power meets the expectations of metamodern people who, like their postmodern predecessors, are skeptical of univocal authority. In fact, “Postmodernization deemphasizes all kinds of authority, whether religious or secular” (Norris 1999, p. 238); therefore, contemporary church members are intrinsically resistant to formation from univocal sermons from an authority figure. In contrast, multivocal sermons in a hospitable homiletic extend humble and measured paradoxes wherein formation occurs for all parties.

In my context, those who not only identify an exhortation gift within themselves but also have a community that confirms this gift are invited to complete two required preaching training sessions. The confirmed gift may be akin to storytelling or testimony. For some, the gift has been an ability to extract a meaningful truth from complex passages. Others have been told that they are inspired “bridge builders”, as they are able to construct a practical application that seems reasonable to the intent of the text. “The gift of preaching” is interpreted loosely, allowing room for varied homiletical styles. I facilitate the two required training sessions either in person at the church building or on Zoom. Each session lasts about two hours with adequate time for discussion.

4.1.1. Preaching Training Session 1: Engaging the Text

The first training session begins by listing our assumptions and expectations about preaching. We explore the substance of quotes like, “The nature and purpose of African American preaching is to help people experience the assurance of grace (the good news) that is the gospel of Jesus the Christ” (Thomas 2013, p. 17); and “God wishes his Word to come through the medium of our person; and to simply borrow someone else’s sermon is to fail God’s purpose for us” (Achtemeier 1998, p. 4); and consider the validity of the guideline, “An hour in the text for every minute in the pulpit”. Preaching training typically is done in small groups of three to five, so the training itself is a means of trust-building and formation.

Preaching is defined as a wise wager of meaning from a selected biblical text extended to the body of Christ for the purpose of formation into the image of Christ for the sake of others (Mulholland 1993, p. 16). This definition of preaching is also inspired by Lucy Rose (1997), who is the homiletician who most connects to my mission for preaching in a metamodern age. Rose did not endorse a shared pulpit in her postmodern work, but it is a reasonable extension of it because society, due to concerns over spokespeople’s susceptibility to misrepresentation and patronization, has shifted into an era that expects to hear truth from the source. The preachers-in-training are mentored to explore a variety of preaching purposes from the chosen text. The purpose of the sermon they compose might be to remind the church of what we believe. It could be to invite confession or behavioral change. The formative result upon the church may cast out the powers or reorient our common way toward the light of Christ. Regardless, as Jana Childers (2004) said, “Preaching is meant to do something” (p. 47), and the “something” can never be to bring glory to the preacher. It is always for the sake of the other, for the sake of us. The art of preaching is contrasted against a soapbox, a book review, or a class. This conversation sometimes reveals that participants are eager to preach with such a motive in mind. This is the space for clarification about what preaching is and is not, to share stories about how self-glorifying preaching harms the church, and to explore deeper gift discernment that analyzes distinctions between teaching and preaching.

Participants learn the difference between expository and topical sermons in the first session. Church members are invited to preach expository sermons. Should a topic of concern arise within the church, I—the seminary-trained homiletician—preach through it. To begin with a topic and enter the Bible to craft a wise wager of meaning across multiple passages to alleviate a pressing strain in the flock is the work of a shepherd. We define an expository sermon as the extraction of one wise wager of meaning to offer the church after deeply abiding in a single passage formatively and informatively. We practice this together through Jesus’s healing of the woman hunched over in Luke 13:10–17. Formatively, we practice lectio divina with the passage. I also invite them to apply imaginative prayer and visio divina in their own time. They are asked to spend two weeks formatively engaging the passage they are preaching before picking up a commentary.

The first session ends with a lesson on how to choose reliable conversation partners in scholarship to analyze the text informationally. Many of them explore Google Scholar for the first time in this session. They learn how to use interlinear tools on Biblehub and the necessity of reading more than one translation.

Preaching training typically occurs before the start of a new sermon series. I discern from the needs of the congregation what the series should be, for example, The Parables of Jesus. I create a Google document that is shared with those who have completed the preaching training (or who are in the process). The document explains the mission and vision of the series. In the case of the series on Jesus’s parables, we listed possible parables, followed by a calendar of Sundays through the duration of the series. Invited members then signed up to preach a parable of their choosing. I preach weeks that are not chosen. I request that they not begin composing the sermon, but limit their preparation to formatively and informatively engaging it to hear its possibilities from the seat of the church members they know and who have trusted them to preach. Their assignment before the second session, one month later, is to apply the lessons from session 1 to that passage, ultimately composing two sentences: one truth of God they experienced from it (the focus), and one way it has the potential to form the church (function).

4.1.2. Preaching Training Session 2: Composing the Sermon

The second session begins by sharing the focus and function statements that the members have composed since the first session. Compassionate critique fine-tunes these guiding statements. I am checking for clarity and theology while trusting the fruit of their time in prayer and study with the passage, confident that the same Spirit of God is in them as is in me. Metamodernism does not entertain micromanagement.

I teach the basic differences between inductive and deductive composition in the second session. The merits of one style versus the other is a debate for academic spaces among the formally homiletically trained. In this space, both formats are given due credit, especially considering that deductive sermons are often easier to construct, and these are novice preachers. Examples of each style are listed in a handout so they can go home and listen to Craddock inductively preach “When the Roll is Called Down Here” (Craddock 1987) on Romans 16 in comparison with Andy Stanley’s “me/we/God/you” (Stanley and Jones 2013) formatted deductive deliveries.

We talk about voice and the long journey to discovering one’s own. I encourage them not to mimic another’s voice, but we acknowledge the reality of the phenomenon to imitate someone else. We share obstacles to expressing one’s voice, and I extend strategies to overcome them. Nancy Lammers Gross’ (2017) work, Women’s Voices and the Practice of Preaching has proven helpful in this process. Her premise resonates with many women who are training to preach for the first time:

The voice is a full-bodied instrument.

Many women struggle to speak.

Many women struggle to speak because they are disconnected from their bodies.

(p. xx)

However, James Joyce (1991) wrote a similar sentiment about a man in The Dubliners: “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body”. For many, men and women, to preach from an embodied voice requires personal transformation. We must heal wounds we have from being silenced or dismissed in the church due to our personhood. One way we heal wounds in preaching training is through the process of gift affirmation and compassionate nurturing. Impostor syndrome, “a behavioral health phenomenon described as self-doubt of intellect, skills, or accomplishments among high-achieving individuals” (Huecker et al. 2023, p. 1), can disembody preaching, but the preacher can re-enter her body with reminders that the Spirit of God is the authority in the pulpit; she is a faithful vessel, commissioned and trusted by the church who loves her to offer a Word from the Lord. I have witnessed preachers-in-training transform from breathless words, artificially low tones, insecure upward inflection at the end of sentences, lack of eye contact, and persistent fidgeting to preachers who speak with full breath in their natural tone. They become confident to look their church family members in the eye when they preach and proclaim declarative phrases with appropriate gestures. Lammers Gross (2017) calls this type of preaching to “body forth”:

To body forth is to hold nothing back. It is the most hospitable act I can imagine for the preacher to offer her whole self in offering the word to her hearers. … When the preacher bodies forth the Word in sermon, she does not merely say, “This is a good idea; you should think about it”. Rather, she is saying, “This Word has a hold on my life, on my whole self, and it has a hold on your life as well”. … When we allow the Word to come alive in us and are open and vulnerable and willing to allow our whole body to be involved, we invite the Word to come alive in our hearers.

(p. 85)

Lammers Gross asserts that to “body forth” transforms the preacher and the church; therefore, it is a critical step in preaching that intends to form the congregation into the image of Christ. This type of transformation is not complete in a couple of preaching training sessions, but it does begin there. When necessary, I have facilitated additional sessions to help preachers-in-training “body forth” by practicing reading scripture from the pulpit with confidence. We have practiced looking each other in the eye while giving and receiving blessings to one another. I have sat in various seats in the auditorium, encouraging the preacher to project their voice like a hug around the room horizontally rather than like a baseball hitting the back wall vertically. In this way, a shared pulpit is an expression of transformational hospitality to the preacher-in-training, for the voice of God is welcomed to project through their body. This authenticity, a virtue of metamodernism, also helps the church to hear the inspired wager that embraces them on Sunday morning.

The second session ends with congregationally specific guidelines on length, inclusive language, citations, and how to end a sermon. I give the trainees Craddock’s (2011) “Thirteen Ways to End a Sermon” (p. 157). They are sent to compose their sermons.

4.1.3. Shared Pulpit Wagers and Counter-Wagers

With their required training sessions complete, we trust the mentee to compose a sermon from their chosen text. I am available for assistance, and I recommend trustworthy resources for their specific text. I request to see a draft of the sermon about two weeks before the preaching date. This is not an attempt to micromanage the message, but an extension of shepherding love for the preacher-in-training and the congregation. For example, I may request a preacher-in-training trade out one of their sermon stories about the ill effects of divorce on children because they were unaware that another church member had recently been served divorce papers and was terrified of the effect it will have on his children. Sometimes, the theology needs to be slightly refined. Most of the editing process, however, is about maturing the preaching gift by noting where a story could be included, a transition smoothed, or a point clarified. I extol the voice of the preacher, honor their experience in the text, and trust the inspired purpose of the sermon. Together we hold the journey of maturing in the gift of preaching as precious, a means of transformation for all in witness of its delivery.

In a few cases, more than one member wanted to preach the same passage from the Google doc. Instead of discouraging this, I have encouraged the members to each craft homilies to be preached back-to-back on the same Sunday. For instance, we had three preachers choose the parable of the Prodigal Son in the series on parables. A 30-year-old man from Colombia who came to Christ as an adult in an evangelical space preached from the perspective of the older son; a 19-year-old man, who is a Methodist, Ghanaian nursing student, preached from the perspective of the prodigal; and a 40-year-old, white, American woman who is a schoolteacher offered her wager of meaning from the perspective of the father. The congregation welcomed the paradox of meaning from the parable and met on Zoom that night to discern together what common truth could be derived from the complexity that might form them closer to the image of Christ for the sake of the world.

Rose’s roundtable preaching process encircles Sunday in a shared pulpit culture because the initial wager on Sunday morning is rounded out with the Sunday evening Zoom call, where the sermon is counter-wagered by the church members. I facilitate the conversation, but the preacher of the day trusts the conversation will oscillate in respect and grace because the congregation trusts that the Word initially offered came from love and knowing. It is during these Sunday evening conversations that aspects Bockmann (2023) identifies as metamodernism are on full display.

A metamodern homiletic is an approach to preaching that recognizes doubt and questioning as building blocks for growth; reframes its relationship with metanarratives and “truth”, such that those who are questioning find themselves not stymied, but stimulated; positions the preacher as principal doubter, as a midwife for the birth of knowledge and understanding rather than the arbiter of all biblical wisdom; listens to and echoes polyphony; finds a way to exist in the tensions of uncertainties; expands the social imaginary and opens up group space for inclusivity of diversity; and preaches not “the” truth, but rather orients listeners toward the pursuit of truth that exists in possibility regardless of our ability to access it.

(p. 25)

The shared pulpit is the initial space for this “inclusivity of diversity”, but it is in the Sunday evening Zoom call where Rose’s roundtable preaching model moves, in true metamodern form, to pursue a multi-faceted truth that it does not necessarily expect to find. The Sunday evening call begins with the members sharing where they experienced the presence of God during our time together that morning. Everyone says something, a metamodern reimagining of transcendence, thus affirming the reality that the Divine nature is being revealed to each person in the room. We transition to a time for questions and answers, but answers are not expected.

I regularly facilitate the conversation with I Wonder/I Notice (IWIN) methodology. The Montessori-based Godly Play Foundation coined the hermeneutical method IWIN, and Shaunna Hannan (2021), at the Pacific-Lutheran Theological Seminary, proposed IWIN as a helpful homiletic for contemporary American churches, accessible to anyone in the congregation (p. 86). It does not require a master’s degree in biblical studies to wonder in a Gospel parable or notice a reorienting detail in an Old Testament narrative. IWIN supports Hassan’s observations about the metamodern age. He posited that trust is developed through kenosis, listening to others, and creation, a gesture that invites humble wondering and noticing. Hassan positions trust-building in a metamodern age not in philosophy, but in spirituality; therefore, the church is an ideal location to wonder and notice together what is happening in the text, each other, and God’s work in the world. In this new age where truth and trust go hand in hand, trust is enhanced through wondering and noticing together.

IWIN insights are sometimes paradoxical. Members ask what others think or request, “Tell me more”. A member might ask the preacher of the day, “This is what I heard you say. Is that accurate?” or “What other insights did God give you as you spent time in the text that you couldn’t preach this morning?” The members are free to counter-wager the preacher’s focus, and every discussion ends with how we as a community can move forward with the truths derived from the day’s passage. After all, though truth is elusive, when trust is established, a metamodern church is motivated to move together into something. Packard and Hope’s (2015) poll data say that deconstructing metamoderns are “much more interested in the gray spaces between their certainties. Furthermore, they were unconcerned about ensuring that those around them view the world as they do. None of these things—neither the doubt, nor the questions, nor the disagreement—should preclude them from acting together on behalf of God” (p. 78). The church desires to act together in response to what they receive from the pulpit, even without consensus, because they have been formed by their worldview and the hospitable practices of the church to believe that plurality can foster—rather than confuse—faith.

5. How a Shared Pulpit Culture Forms the Church

Modern people have a metanarrative, and they gather before a pulpit with a sole preacher to tell them what the familiar pericope of the day means. Postmodern people come to church skeptical of someone they do not trust instructing them on a definitive meaning of an increasingly unfamiliar story. Postmodernism shifts sermonic expectations, and metamodernism has shifted them further. Ironically, nineteenth century author and Episcopal clergyman Philips Brooks’ famous line from 1888 has never been truer: “Preaching is truth through personality” (Brooks 1877, p. 5). Trust in the preaching personality is irreparably broken in many metamodern Christians who were malformed by the troubled marriage between truth and power in the modern and postmodern ages. In the U.S., the number of “practicing Christians has nearly dropped in half since 2000” (Barna Group 2020). Those for whom the break in trust was reparable are working to deconstruct the malformations within themselves that were carved by heavily guarded and authoritative pulpits. For those metamodern remnants who dare to linger on threads of hope and glimmers of transcendence, a hospitable pulpit within a church that has proven itself trustworthy through love and time has the potential to reform faith.

5.1. The Formation of the Vocational Preacher

Much can be said about how a shared pulpit culture forms the vocational preacher. For one, the shared pulpit offers a much-needed sabbath from the expectation to produce a weekly sermon. Potentially, it releases the vocational preacher from weekly following the wise rule of modernism, “an hour in the text for every minute in the pulpit” to embrace one needed for metamodernism, “an hour in their homes for every minute in the pulpit”. In addition, mentoring church members to mature in the gift of preaching exposes the value of revisiting the basics of homiletics. The preacher stays sharp in the craft.

Furthermore, trust is built symbiotically. If the vocational preacher expects the church to trust them to preach, a prerequisite to preaching in a metamodern age, the preacher must in turn trust the congregation to have a meaningful Word. As mentioned, Rose (1995) did not endorse a shared pulpit in her works, but it is a reasonable metamodern extension of her homiletic. She recognized the formative effect on the vocational minister of listening to the wisdom of church members:

In preaching we articulate wagers, go public with our interpretations, frame our meanings, as one possibility in the zigzag, erratic journey of God’s people. My story or yours is neither more nor less important than the story of every other believer, congregational groupie, or hanger-on who hopes against hope to trade second-hand beliefs for first-hand discipleship. In fact, in this topsy turvy world, at times it is the preacher, particularly when we are in need of a season of silence, who becomes the groupie, the hanger-on, and it is a church member who speaks the life-restoring word.

(p. 30)

Life-restoring words from the church members’ sermons mature the characteristics of Christ in the vocational preacher. The message of the Spirit changes the preacher with the church. She witnesses the expansiveness of God’s work when the church member recounts their experience with God in the text.

The preacher also could mature in humility. The formative potential of a shared pulpit corresponds to the vocational preacher’s humility. An embodied pneumatology undergirds a shared pulpit culture. Limiting exhortation to whoever is behind the pulpit stymies the formation of all parties: the preacher of the day, the church at large, and the vocational preacher. The gift of preaching comes from the Spirit of God. Therefore, a non-seminary-trained church member has the inherited capacity to preach a sermon that moves the church to weeping. It could be a sermon the church talks about for years and refers to as, “One of the best sermons I’ve ever heard!” One example of this in my context was when a young, Black, neurodiverse woman preached her first sermon. It was on Jesus’s words about the cost of discipleship in Luke 14. Church members continue to refer to this sermon five years later! It was critical that my pride not interfere with the Spirit’s work through this young woman. Pride is chiseled when a member’s sermon blesses the church in a way that the vocational preacher’s sermons have not in months. The Spirit’s Word through the sermon forms me alongside the rest of the church only inasmuch as I remember that the formative power of preaching comes from the Spirit and not from position or title.

Peter reminds the early church that preaching is a gift for the church and born of the Spirit. “It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you, in these things which now have been announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven—things into which angels long to look” (1 Peter 1:12). Therefore, Cantalamessa conceives of preaching as a sacrament, a means for the church to encounter the living Christ in a transforming way. The sacramental content of preaching is Christ, “whereas, ’in the holy spirit’ indicates the method of preaching namely, the manner and the means with which it should be announced” (Cantalamessa 2010, p. 25). As a historical event, Jesus’s preaching is finished, but it “exists still as a sacrament” every time the Word is preached, for it brings people into the presence of the Holy Spirit, thus transforming lives. I can attest from personal experience how extraordinary it is for the vocational preacher to experience transformation with the congregation because of the sacrament of preaching in a fresh voice. The Spirit of God through diverse preachers stirs confessions, renews commitments, and reorients the people toward The Way; and the vocational preacher can participate in this in real time alongside the people of God in the pews if she is willing to sit down and humbly receive the sacrament. A shared pulpit forces the vocational preacher to recall that “in Christ we are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit”, not by the seminarian’s ingenuity or charisma (Ephesians 2:21–22).

The gift of preaching is not the vocational preacher’s to hoard nor gatekeep. 1 Peter 4:10 commands that the church use its gifts, and vocational preachers mature in Christ’s vision when they, like Christ, see something holy in another person and call it out for Kingdom use. Through a shared pulpit culture, a preacher has the freedom of time and mental capacity to look up from the text and peer into their congregation to discern where else the gift of preaching may be, and then embark upon the sacred process of nurturing that gift in others. Nurturing a hospitable pulpit culture requires the preacher to step out of the center stage and literally open space for the Spirit to reveal Christ in another’s body, experience, voice, and style. This act of distributing power is formational for the vocational preacher as it is a way to participate in the way of Christ and the culture of the Kingdom of God. In her dissertation on congregational formation under the care of a female shepherd, Cheryl Russell (2023) asserts, “Flourishing is not possible where power is not filtered through kenotic love” (p. 104). Hassan (2003) suggests that metamodern trust requires kenotic love. There is no flourishing without trust. Vocational preachers would be wise to confess the sins that the clerical title has caused in past eras, and—as a move of healing for metamodern congregants who are brave enough to continue walking through church doors—to surrender to a leadership style more akin to Jesus, where power is given away for the sake of others, status is irrelevant, and control is housed in the will of God alone. In such congregations, the Spirit forms the temple of God.

5.2. The Formation of the Lay Preacher

Jesus said of preaching, “For this purpose I have come” (Mark 1:38).3 Thus, participating in the sacrament of preaching, like Jesus did, inevitably forms the preacher-in-training into the image of Christ. This paper explained further facets of this formation process in the lay preachers, most notably, in the description of the preaching training. Additionally, the layperson’s speaking gift matures in a hospitable pulpit homiletic when the preacher continues to preach beyond the first sermon. As mentioned, however, masterful first sermons deeply convict the church and reveal the supernatural power of the Spirit, a phenomenon that also convicts the lay preacher. Jesus proclaimed the Gospel by the power of the Spirit (Luke 4:18; Matt. 12:18), and Jesus breathed the Spirit onto the disciples before God poured out the Spirit at Pentecost (John 20; Acts 2). The church is familiar with these biblical narratives, but the transcendent breaks into the immanent domain when lay preachers experience the outpouring of the Spirit through them in the sermon. The effect of this experience is life-changing and faith-sustaining. Many lay preachers in the church where I serve have testified to being physically sick with anxiety moments before preaching for the first time, but then being overwhelmed with a peace they cannot explain as soon as they stand behind the pulpit. They have described a love for the church they have never felt before when they look the Body in the eye from the pulpit space. “I saw them like Jesus does”, they have said. Several have recounted experiencing chills, a physicality of the Holy Spirit stirring within them. Nearly all vocational preachers can testify to similar moments, but when a rotation of church members can likewise participate in the phenomenon of anointing, similarly described in their ancient text, the preaching event becomes intimately sacramental across the church, which transforms not only the preachers in rotation, but the church, too, because when epiphanies enhance faith, it is contagious.

Furthermore, God heals and redeems lay preachers’ spirits when their voices, often silenced or dismissed in neomodern church spaces, are instead welcomed and affirmed. The re-embodying of one’s voice, to become comfortable and confident in it as an instrument of God’s reconciliation, is participation in the new creation, where all things are made new. Lammers Gross (2017) concludes from various studies across the past fifty years, “the character of the girl, who she is, is defined in relation to her body, not her mind or her soul” (p. 48). This is not as God intended, but it reflects the reality of women in the U.S. It also sheds light on why many women do not know who they are when they are displeased with their bodies or not at home in them. The Gospel’s solution to over- or under-emphasizing flesh is the incarnation. The incarnation introduces us to Christ, who grew intellectually, physically, spiritually, and socially, and who invites us to re-inhabit our flesh as tabernacles of Divine love.

I have met several women who assumed their spiritual gift was something situated behind the scenes, like encouragement or hospitality, not because they particularly enjoyed it—or, because the work through their hands especially equipped the church for service or matured it (Ephesians 4)—but because they were terrified or ashamed to bodily stand in front of the people of God, often because of religious trauma related to the female body. When a church forbids women and girls from standing to silently pass communion trays but allows them to do so while seated because the former would violate biblical commands against women speaking in church, women internalize (often subconsciously) that their bodies—and their voices—are unholy. Regardless of the reasons given for why they cannot practice certain gifts or fulfill certain roles, women internalize this truth behind the misinterpretations and misapplications of Scriptures: Your body cannot be seen in the church. To invite women from religiously abusive backgrounds into the pulpit without attention to the emotional and psychological harm they have experienced can cause further harm, and the vocational preacher needs to shepherd carefully. However, the slow movement of returning to their bodies in the homiletical process is to rebuild trust in God’s declaration of goodness over their bodies. The formative effects of reclaiming the goodness of one’s body as the dwelling place of God reach far beyond preaching. In metamodernism, trust and truth go hand-in-hand, and according to Lammers, “Gospel Truth and the body go together” (Lammers Gross 2017, p. 84).4

Unabashed, skeptical hope is a perplexing feature of metamodernism. Vermeulen and van den Akker (2010a) describe it like this:

[Metamodernism] oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern.

In the shared pulpit, we teach lay preachers to locate one meaningful truth of God in one biblical text for them to preach before the congregation. This process is a spiritual practice of locating “hope” in a sea of “melancholy” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010a). To participate in the sermonic process swings the preacher into knowingness, even if what they wager to know in the pulpit is nothing more than a glimmer of transcendence. The truth may be complicated and fragmented, but the practice of locating it within the story of God and surrendering to the Spirit’s ability to form it into words transforms the preacher into an ambassador with faith like Mary, who—still surprised and perplexed—burst into the room, declaring, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18)

Finally, the preacher-in-training is formed into Christ’s image through love. The transformation that happens in a person who dedicates themselves to the sermonic process—from praying through an initial reading of the text to Sunday morning delivery—is typically reserved for the vocational preacher, but a shared pulpit culture disperses the transformation. The lay preacher can come to love the Word and the people of God in a new way that only a conscientious preacher can. In the sermonic process, a moment arises where the preacher must ask—to avoid hypocrisy and to love the people well—“Am I willing to be formed by this Word in the same way I’m asking it to form them?” Intimate and challenging sanctification occurs long before the preacher enters the pulpit. Christ-like humility is nurtured when love over self-aggrandizing agenda is the primary prerequisite for preaching. Preaching in love matures the preacher in the discipline of considering words. After all, “A bad word is every word said without love” (Cantalamessa 2010, p. 9). Lay preachers have told me after preaching training that they are not ready to preach because they do not yet know the people in the room well enough to love them as Christ does. They have confessed that a truth is too raw for them to be able to craft a sermon that is laced with love: “Perhaps I need to be content with the sermon God is preaching to me in the text, but not preach it to the church yet”. A lay preacher recently wrote in his sermon draft notes, “I took this part out because I imagined myself as [a church member] listening to it, and it didn’t sound loving anymore”. Christ-like love discerns; it measures words, counts the cost, and self-empties. The homiletical process matures all these virtues.

5.3. The Formation of the Church

Finally, a shared pulpit forms the church at large. According to 1 Corinthians 14:3, 31, a Word from the Lord “strengthens, encourages, instructs, and comforts”. In the biblical story, the spoken Word of God affects people: it causes listeners to recommit to their faith (Exodus 24:3), it establishes unity (Galatians 2:1–9), it moves people to worship with their whole bodies (Nehemiah 8), it prompts repentance (Jonah 3), it leads to baptism, and it gives followers of Jesus the courage to share their belongings (Acts 2). Hearers of the Word recognize Jesus Christ (John 4). Nicodemus questions (John 4). Mary ponders (Luke 1). The spoken Word moves others to walk away (Mark 10:22), spit (Matthew 26:67), kick people out (John 9:34), and throw stones (Acts 7). To quote Childers again, “Preaching is meant to do something”, and metamoderns sitting in the pews bear witness that it has done something indeed. They have experienced both shame and edification through sermons. They have digested a heavy diet of divisive doctrines, atonement theories, and dogmatic declarations. The power of the spoken word through any preacher forms people for better or worse, which bolsters the premise of this paper: to welcome varied and trusted voices into the pulpit is to form the church in Christ. Hassan’s (2003) and Henriques’s (2020) points on trust and themes demonstrate how a shared pulpit culture can be a means of healing for the congregants wounded by univocal preaching.

In review, Ihab Hassan (2003) claimed that metamodern people, unmoored by the chaos of innumerable truths, yearn for truth again. They are oscillating between and reaching beyond the truth found in modernism’s reason and postmodernism’s subjectivism to discover truth that resounds within relationships of trust. In a metamodern age, trust is the premise to reality. Churches have historically been places where deep and long-term relationships are formed around the spoken Word. As such, the church—pulpits specifically—is positioned to be a reorienting place for the unmoored who are looking for stabilizing truth in this age. However, the pulpit space must be reimagined and reclaimed as trustworthy for it to heal the broken trust that has unmoored much of the contemporary church. This paper also cited Henriques (2020), who suggested that recurring themes reveal truth in a metamodern age: “Themes that come together in a coherent, non-arbitrary manner, where the different parts resonate with one another and mutually reinforce each other”. Themes that recur univocally are not convincing; however, the church can be convinced of stabilizing and enduring truth when they hear themes recur across the diversity of the church. A shared pulpit synthesizes these two aspects of the metamodern age by nurturing a culture where a community hears common themes resonate through a plurality of trusted voices, thus revealing a foundational Gospel upon which to stand and move together.

For example, the church where I serve was straining under various convictions about the mode, timing, and consequence of baptism. The church was composed of about a dozen denominational heritages, and the significance of the sacrament to some elevated the conversation to dogmatism while others held the practice looser. Church members’ conclusions about baptism arose from what they previously had heard from univocal pulpits in more homogenous church contexts. This doctrinal strain escalated during a sermon series on the book of Acts. Eighteen different church members preached at least once during this sermon series in our shared pulpit. Each preacher engaged their assigned text through the preaching training process, formatively and informatively, encouraged to do so as if they were engaging the text for the first time without presuppositions. As a result, the congregation heard sermons about the earliest Christians living out their faith for some time before being baptized, as in the case with Apollos (Acts 18). Church members who prioritized Spirit baptism heard sermons about Lydia, who was baptized with water without mention of a Holy Spirit baptism (Acts 16); and those who prioritized water baptism heard sermons about the Holy Spirit’s baptism upon the Gentiles before their water baptism (Acts 10:44–48). A vocational preacher’s agenda could not be blamed for emphasizing one mode over another because various preachers were wagering meaning from several baptism texts in Acts.

The Sunday evening Zoom counter-wagers during this series were tense. Fear emerged as previously held truths about baptism were questioned and began to erode. The church was invited to keep listening and note recurring themes in the Acts sermons. In addition, they were encouraged to listen to the preachers’ stories about their baptisms and to receive each testimony as a Word from the Lord. In the end, the church listed what truths might be localized within the individual and what truths about baptism were common among them, as revealed through the patterns that emerged in the sermons in the series. Abramson suggested that metamodern people can hold paradoxes like this. “Metamodernism posits that certain ideas can be ‘objectively’ true for an individual even though the individual also understands that they are not universally true” (Abramson 2015). The church proved itself to have a metamodern worldview when it embraced this tension in the Acts series.

In-home, trust-building, pastoral conversations were required in addition to sermons, but in the end, the church articulated a common truth about baptism upon which to move together that was overwhelmingly informed by the recurring themes they heard in the Acts sermons. They concluded that faith finds water, eventually; the Holy Spirit hovers around water; and baptism is a communal sacrament. Certainly, more specific truths about baptism lived on in individual members, but the shared pulpit challenged them to acknowledge some people in their church—individuals they love and trust—believe in different details.

This process is paradigmatic of the metamodern age. Michel Clasquin-Johnson (2017), from the University of South Africa, affirms the metamodern acceptance of plurality in his paper on religiously informed metamodernism.

If we had asked metamodernism to supply us with a way to understand religious belief and practice, we could hardly have asked for more than this. The person who sincerely believes in the creation story presented in the book of Genesis also knows for a fact that the dinosaurs were killed off by a giant comet 75 million years ago. The person who knows perfectly well that the wafer of bread was created in a bakery down the road out of flour, yeast and water also knows that it is the body of Christ. To the modernist mindset (and the profoundly modernist biblical literalist), this is a contradiction that must be resolved by choosing one side or another. To the postmodernist it is an ironic situation ripe for deconstruction. To the metamodernist, however, the fact that there is a paradox does not mean that one is wrong and the other right, or that one has to be relegated to a mere ‘subjective truth. … Paradox, in this context, is not limited to contradictory truth claims. It is an existential acknowledgement of differences, differences between you and I, and differences within my own experience’.

(p. 3)

The congregation where I serve rejected modernism’s urge to reason into a simplistic, homogeneous position on baptism. They ultimately also rejected postmodernism’s skepticism toward truth claims. They, with guidance, embraced a metamodern truth process that arrived at a common understanding informed by recurring themes that emerged in wagers about the biblical text from people they trusted. A homiletic of integrated pluralism exposes common truth in an age without a common narrative so that a community can be formed to act within its complex story.

The formative effect of a homiletic of integrated pluralism contrasts the solitary preaching voice that is typically practiced in churches. One preacher cannot offer the whole Bible to the congregation, even if he ties himself to the lectionary. The fullness of the biblical narrative—to include its paradoxes and complexities—forms a congregation more than a truncated one. Fred Craddock’s (2001) controversial claim that each preacher has one text that “is so central to [their] theology and beliefs, so life-giving in its nature, so pregnant with meaning that all of [their] preaching flows out of that text” may be over-reaching (p. 138). The slightly broader “canon within a canon” hypothesis, however, proved accurate in my setting, and its effects stymie congregational formation.

Whereas Craddock situates the locus of a preacher’s sermon corpus in one verse, André Resner (2017) claims that preachers have a “working gospel”, a theological take on the canon within a canon. He defines it as an “imaginative, theological, and hermeneutical force that drives the way the preacher conceives, plots, and delivers sermons” (p. 18). He says that one’s working gospel “is theologically constructed, biblically influenced, and bears the fingerprints of one’s ecclesial and liturgical heritage” (p. 21). A working gospel, according to Resner, shows the church the way from one state of being to another. If this is true, the preacher’s working gospel inevitably forms the congregation into the preacher’s theology, which emphasizes the biblical plotlines the preacher prefers (even unintentionally) and the effects of their ecclesial upbringing. A shared pulpit mitigates this narrow exposure of the gospel and its subsequent monolithic formation, which meets metamodern expectations for plurality of voice.

A modernist preacher might be anxious about the plurality of messages that could come from a shared pulpit. There could be an urge to micromanage it and censor manuscripts when the lay preacher’s working gospel differs from their own. A metamodern shepherd, however, has been formed to invite the tension. In the latter space, the church is comfortable to sit in the differences “between you and I” and “within my own experience” (Clasquin-Johnson 2017) for extended periods of time, to converse about the paradoxes and notice what themes emerge, which the church can embrace as Truth.

The vocational preacher in a church with a shared pulpit should help lay preachers identify their working gospel to communicate it clearly because it has validity. For instance, one preacher could interpret Exodus 15 with the working gospel, “God sees physical oppression in the marginalized and delivers them from slavery to freedom”, a sermon that forms the church under Liberation Theology. Another preacher could interpret the same text through the working gospel, “God changes humanity’s death sentence from sin to salvation by passing them through the water”, that forms the church toward personal salvation. Neither is wrong. Both are good news. Yet, each molds the church differently. Congregational formation is deep and complex when the church receives the first sermon from someone whom God has liberated from bondage and the latter sermon from one they have witnessed God rescue from darkness to light. The church will trust those voices because they speak from embodied experiences, and that trust will form a manifold truth. A lone vocational preacher cannot be that voice in all circumstances.

I sought to unearth my “working gospel” to better understand how it might be forming the church. I compiled the majority of my sermon manuscripts over a three-year period into a database to form a WordCloud (Figure A1). I combined synonyms, like “Christ” and “Messiah”; word forms, like “clean”, “cleaning”, and “cleanses”; and eliminated conjunctions and other filler words. I programmed the WordCloud to weigh words that I used 300 times or more in the 60 sermons that were chosen.5 These were some of the results: I used the word like hundreds of times, not as filler but to craft similes. The word Spirit only slightly beat out the word John, revealing a potential canon within the canon. In fact, I preached from the fourth gospel three times more than the synoptics. The word I used the most was God, twice as often as Jesus and 30% more often than Christ and Jesus combined, which led me to question whether my (since resolved) faith struggles of the time were infusing my sermons and thus forming the church theologically more than christologically. Other words I used often were tabernacle, blood, and children. I said children twice as often as I said Paul. I used the words die, mystery, darkness, and night more than the words glory, joy, or Gospel. I only said hell five times in three years, the same frequency with which I said Mexican, flaming, and gender. I did not utter the words Bible, baptism, or Satan even 100 times each. I mentioned the elements water and fire more than the word Lord, and I said wisdom more than peace. Cross or crucifixion barely made the list.

Richard Foster claimed that people relate to God primarily as their Lord, Savior, Teacher, or Friend (Foster et al. 1991, p. 25). Diana Butler Bass (2001) added to the list Presence and Way. If we can trust my experiment, Wisdom is a seventh avenue. Vocational preachers are not immune to favoring one aspect of Christ over another, as Lord, Savior, Friend, or Way, and preaching—born from a real experience with God in the text—will often be oriented around that aspect. A preacher who predominantly connects with Christ as Teacher will likely preach didactically. A preacher who connects with Christ as Savior will guide the church from sin to the cross. A preacher who connects with Jesus as Friend may not preach sovereignty or say Lord very often. And a preacher like me, who connects with Christ as Wisdom, will say the word wisdom more than Paul or Moses. My recurring sermonic themes were knowing, reconciliation, Goodness [written in manuscripts with a capital “G”], Story, creation, and Life. The “working gospel” forming the church through my solitary preaching voice was, “If you abide in the mysterious and unfolding Story of God, Jesus can recreate you from one who is dead into a people who are known and fully human”. This is good news, but it is not the only good news.

Members of the church need to hear about Christ as Lord and be invited into God’s sovereignty. Others have had the Lordship of Christ crushed upon them and desperately need to hear about Jesus their Friend, who invites them to move back into their body as a tabernacle of the Spirit. The lost need guidance from a sermon that wagers a way through the wilderness, while others could benefit from a few didactically preached sermons from a Rabbi or a Sage. An open pulpit, responsibly hospitable to those in the church who have discerned a speaking gift, forms the church into the fuller story of God, and thereby the body of Christ, for the sake of the world.

5.4. Limitations

A shift to a hospitable homiletic has tremendous potential for transformation in all parties; however, systemic shifts are rarely easy, and there are limitations to the model. The spiritual gift of preaching (or adjacent speaking gifts) in multiple church members is necessary for a shared pulpit. Such representation is rarely lacking in larger churches, but small churches may find themselves in seasons where few church members have one of these gifts. In these cases, it is appropriate for the vocational preacher to preach exclusively. Modifications to the proposed model could be applied to mitigate malformation from the monolithic voice. For example, the church could forego traditional preaching altogether and engage preacher-facilitated dialogue about a biblical text in lieu of sermons.

It is also possible for a shared pulpit to stretch the congregation beyond the acceptable level of paradox into chaos, especially if theological or doctrinal conclusions are consistently unclear. As presented, metamodern people long for a metanarrative within which to find community and truth, albeit complex. Therefore, theological pillars must emerge from within the trajectory of the homiletic culture upon which members may construct a shared story. Congregants can become dismayingly lost without concrete landmarks, which undermines an intent of a shared homiletic—to address the metanarrative needs of metamodern people. This risk is mitigated when the vocational preacher acutely listens to the congregation and is aware of their dismay and needs for theological clarity. The vocational preacher can facilitate conversations in such moments that press for areas of agreement and that guide the church to the confessions of the faith. For example, outside of the sermon space, I ask the church, “On what do we agree?” I facilitate this conversation until the body language and tension relaxes in the members and they are equipped with at least one solid theological pillar in the story of God upon which to build together that week. “On what do we agree” can be a meaningful communion engagement that precedes the church physically walking to ingest tangible elements that represent the unquestioned core of their shared faith.

Additionally, the vocational preacher can pause shared pulpit participation and preach several sermons in a row herself to help the church move back from chaos into healthy paradox. In this case, the vocational preacher would be wise to reiterate a common theme week after week so that the church feels secure and then able to hear and receive multivocal sermons.

Finally, as presented, metamodernism is not a replacement for modernism or postmodernism. It exists with and beyond these social philosophies. Therefore, some church members live more by modern or postmodern ideals, while others are characteristically metamodern. “There is one body, but it has many parts” (1 Corinthians 12:12). In the same way a hand gifted in craftsmanship should not attempt to be a shoulder gifted in preaching, a modern church member should not be ignored or coerced into a metamodern mindset. It is impossible for a vocational preacher to meet the expectations of every church member’s sermonic expectation, and some church members who lean toward modernism may not ever be comfortable with the kenotic authority of a shared pulpit. This limitation can be mitigated through one-on-one conversations with these members about the value of shared preaching. Trusting relationships, nurtured outside of the Sunday worship service, also help modern-leaning members receive sermons from members who are not formally theologically trained.

6. Conclusions

Fake news and lies for profit have profoundly affected those who remain in American churches. The technological age, at its best, extends hospitality for the silenced to speak and be heard, thus redefining what the masses once considered to be truth as mere propaganda. Postmodernism’s megaphone was overdue and necessary for justice, but not knowing which truth to trust has left many Americans unmoored. At the same time, the U.S. simultaneously entered a secular age, so its common cultural narrative disintegrated along with absolute truth, which affected the American church. Amid postmodernism, David. M. Gunn (1987) said, “It is not an exaggeration to say that the truly assured results of historical critical scholarship concerning authorship, date and provenance would fill but a pamphlet” (p. 66).

In response to the change of the times, many preachers continue a dogmatic homiletic, or worse, embrace a sort of neomodern one that clings ever tighter to what had been determined as absolute truth by the publications of the powerful in the age of modernism. People who are prone to look to the past for stability and who need absolute clarity still fill these pews to hear sermons that emphasize right belief. Many postmodern people deconstructed out of religion, but for metamodern people, there remains a hope that “church—and the pulpit—can be reclaimed as sites of conversation rather than conclusion” (Bockmann 2023, p. 33). This is not to say that a metamodern pulpit avoids coming to any conclusions. On the contrary, it pursues truth every week through humble wagers, small pieces of a complex puzzle, so that the congregation has space to appreciate the beauty of each part as much as the whole image.

From experience, the themes that emerge from the diverse voices in a shared pulpit by and large reflect the historical confessions of the faith. This validates the metamodern claim that truth is in patterns, because even when we extend the frame of examination by 2000 years, reliable patterns emerge. What the ancients gleaned from the text about who Christ is, we glean as well. What Christians from throughout the world concluded as characteristic of God’s ways in Nicaea, we find characteristic in our experiences as well. The confessions offer the unmoored metamodern church a trustworthy foundation upon which to stand—conclusions—while they interpret the paradoxes of the church’s faith and practice, like the mode of baptism and how to know Jesus as both our Friend and Lord.

At times, wrestling the paradoxes means deconstructing long-held beliefs. More than one church member has been reticent about embracing Jesus as anyone other than their Lord. But a shared pulpit culture is patient. It is a culture that listens and is hospitable to hearing one more voice. It is a culture that welcomes the preacher who proclaims, “I know Jesus as my friend, and I wager this Bible story supports that association”, next to the preacher who says, “I know Jesus as Wisdom, and I wager this Bible story supports that association”. The church formed into a shared pulpit culture believes her truth and his truth, even when it is paradoxical, because they love and trust each other. As a result, they come to know Jesus who is Friend and Wisdom.

The disillusioned postmodern may have walked away from the church, but the metamodern Christian is oscillating between that nihilism and hope. The swings toward hope occur when patterns emerge, when a trusted church member preaches about a transcendent moment they encountered with God in their engagement with the biblical text. The consequence of this hope, enlivened by a shared pulpit, transports a metamodern Christian from deconstruction into the undeconstructable. Bockmann (2023) asserts that for the metamodern preacher, the pursuit of truth “is the process of deconstructing what is deconstructible in order to orient ourselves toward and preach toward what is undeconstructible (an undeconstructible truth), even if we never quite get there” (p. 36). The church has found its way to stand on the undeconstructable for 2000 years, and a culture of radical hospitality that extends even into the sacred space of the pulpit is a compelling means of continuing this position in a metamodern age.

For some people, the ripple effects of losing objective truth in the academy and the church is a crisis, but this paper seeks to present it as an opportunity. Lose (2003) asserts, “The possibility latent in the loss [of certainty] is the rediscovery of a vibrant faith that rests not on objective data but on the confessions, truth claims, and shared experiences of the Christian community” (p. 7). The modern expectation of certainty burdens the preacher with proving biblical truth claims with historical–critical exegesis, archeology, and apologetics. Postmodernism released the preacher from this burden, but instead tasked her with a more democratic one: to release the authority of the Word to the people (though the delivery remained univocal.) The burden of the metamodern preacher is to wager a truth from the biblical text into a diverse and intimate faith community for compilation so that the congregation might be formed into the image of Christ.

Congregational formation will inevitably be stymied if that preaching voice is univocal. A metamodern audience is too skeptical to receive homogenous truth claims and is further skeptical of such claims made outside of trusting relationships. A shared pulpit culture cultivates spiritual formation in a metamodern age because it welcomes the voice of all who are empowered by the Spirit with gifts of exhortation; therefore, the Spirit can use preaching as a sacrament through diverse bodies, stories, heritages, and beliefs, and as a result, the church encounters a fuller image of Christ. To welcome these gifts into the pulpit complicates truth, but this meets the unique expectations of metamodern people for integrated plurality. Truth patterns emerge, and the church can locate the undeconstructable. A well-nurtured shared pulpit culture is a homiletic that responds to the needs of the metamodern age, and in turn, the vocational preacher, the lay preachers, and the church are formed into the image of Christ, who also “began to preach” (Matthew 4:17) for the sake of the world.