Wow, fancy that. The big talking point from Saturday’s Royal Wedding seems to have been the sermon. Yup, double-take right there: the sermon. When was the last time you heard a ‘preach’ – or perhaps a preacher – make international headlines?!

But it’s a sermon that has also divided. Some were quick to pour praise on Bishop Michael Curry’s thirteen-minute address: engaging, refreshing, attractive. Others not so much: either too long (8 minutes longer than the 5-minute brief apparently!), or too-showy, or more significantly, offering a “Christianity-lite”.

I’ve been preaching fairly regularly for about eight years – not too long in the grand scheme of things, but long enough to care about preaching. Ok, it’s all too easy to have Roast Preacher for lunch every Sunday, but given I’ve never heard a sermon so widely discussed in the UK, and given it’s been a big talking point amongst friends, both online and at church, here are 9 observations as part of the conversation:

1. First off, to preach to 1.9 billion people (and how many more afterwards) – and then to have your words and manner analysed worldwide… Well, yikes.

So my first thought is: Rather someone else than me. There’s a sense in which whoever was tasked with the job should get a bit of respect from the rest of us – and a bit of slack, perhaps. You’re never gonna please everyone.

2. But, that said: to be a preacher of the gospel is a high calling, one that brings with it responsibilities.

You are not simply an orator or an entertainer; you are nothing less than a herald of Christ. So, whilst as sermon-listeners we should never duck what God’s word might be saying to us, that doesn’t mean we don’t also hold our preachers to account and seek to weigh up their words. 1.9 billion people is a tough gig, but it’s also 1.9 billion people hearing words from a Christian pulpit, in the context of opening up the Bible. Just like me last Sunday, just like every Christian preacher across the land, it matters how Curry preached. We want to hear God’s word to us, but it’s ok to consider, critique and discuss too. I remember an old pastor telling us to be like the Bereans in Acts 17:10-12, who, after hearing the apostle Paul, “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what he said was true.”

3. The passion.

Ah yes, the passion. Probably the most-used word in describing Saturday’s sermon. Oh, to have sermons preached with passion. As one self-confessed atheist – and former leader of the Labour Party – tweeted:

The sad thing here is how surprising this was for so many people. (Ok, yes, it was also pretty funny seeing some of the Royal faces not quite knowing how to handle it). As ABC Australia put it,

“From the outset, it was clear that this was not going to be a standard Church of England sermon, which tradition dictates should be delivered in the tone of a very shy person asking the way to the train station.“

Ouch.

If I’m honest, all I can remember about William & Kate’s wedding sermon in 2011 is that it was a non-event. And by the way, I’m sure the same could be said about many of my own sermons. If only all ministers/pastors/vicars – and bishops – showed such passion!

And it wasn’t simply enthusiasm. This was a passionate persuasion. Curry engaged people: the eye-contact, the pauses, the connection – did you see the smile he got from David Beckham?! He knew his material and where he was going. He had crafted his words and rhetoric carefully (Ian Paul details some of this helpfully). So preachers, what have we been doing that people are so surprised by passion?

4. This was a preacher who had found his own voice.

One of the things we’re often told at ‘preaching class’ is to be yourself. Don’t try and be someone else. So for starters, that means the rest of us shouldn’t all try and preach exactly like Michael Curry next Sunday. Ok, yes, maybe we’d do well to take a leaf out of his passion book. But we’re all different, and so, for example, passion won’t look the same in everyone. But as Michael Sadgrove pointed out, I think it was clear that this guy was comfortable in his own skin. As a preacher, there’s something I envy about that.

5. To quote my friend Hugh Bourne, “it vindicated preaching as a highly effective means of communication.”

So often we’re told that preaching is old hat: people just can’t concentrate anymore. They want conversation, not one-way monologues. “To reach x, you need to quit preaching (x of course can be substituted for just about anyone: millennials/the working class/men, etc).” I think those 13 minutes have blown that out of the water. If people do decide they might just set foot in a church in the hope of hearing an engaging sermon, then let’s give thanks to God in his sovereignty for that. And God forbid that we stop working on our sermons.

6. Love is glorious.

Curry was big on love. The Times‘ even quoted Curry for their front-page wedding headline the next day: “There is power in love”.

Ok, so maybe we kind of expect that at a wedding. Indeed, a few people have pointed out that Curry hasn’t said anything “unusual” in that regard.

But to give his words credit, it was more than just saying “love matters”. It painted a beautiful and compelling vision of human life shaped by love. There is a lack of love across a world – in our commerce, our institutions, our families – we know that and feel that, and so we connect with Curry’s desire for something more. As someone said, “It captured doubters with a vision of hope. It gave a glimpse of the world we long for.”

7. But did Curry’s vision of love really showcase the glorious love of the gospel?

Now, here’s where someone starts to say, “Yeah, but you can’t expect him to say absolutely everything in just 13 minutes.” Sure, but I wonder if that’s ducking the question. Shouldn’t preachers be masters at deciding what to include and what not to include. (By the way, it seems remarkable that despite forty years of ministry, Curry says he was surprised to go over his official time limit by 200% !). One of the best preaching exercises someone set me was to get me to turn a 25-minute sermon into both a 10-minute sermon and a 2-minute ‘elevator pitch’. What do you cut – and how do you retain the heartbeat of your message? The idea is that time should never be an excuse for missing the heart of our message.

And then you see what Curry didn’t say. He was big on love, but it was chiefly a call for us to love. This sounds ‘Christian’ – but for all that it is glorious and noble and the aspiration of the Christian life, it isn’t the Christian good news. As Tim Keller puts it, we need good news, not just good advice. Because what happens when we fail to keep on loving? This, as I always tell couples, may seem a strange thought when you’re staring into each others’ eyes and the skies are metaphorically blue (and which wedding day isn’t like that?), but what happens when the clouds gather, a few years down the line? What happens when feelings change? When lovers ‘fall out of love’? When selfishness wages war in our hearts?

As Stephen McAlpine said, every wedding needs a cross. Even Royal Weddings, as anyone who has seen The Crown or read the papers over the last thirty-seven years knows. And not just a Jesus who dies on the cross as an example of sacrifice, not even a vague sacrifice “for the good of others,” but a Jesus who died to rescue sinners and to win forgiveness. Every bride and groom – and every human – needs to be faced with the reality of our own sin – yes, in a gentle and appropriate way – and to be shown that we have a Royal Bridegroom who gives his life to love the unlovable.

To those who think this is wanting to have our cake and eat it, maybe it’s helpful to see the concern is not so much that Curry just made a few poor choices about what to leave on the cutting room floor, but that the gospel of forgiveness of sin through faith and repentance was probably never was on his radar. And that takes us to the question of what’s going on below the bonnet in Curry’s theology…

8. Sermons never stand alone.

The preacher and ‘the preach’ are inextricably linked. That’s just a Bible principle. We’re not professionals performing an act. The person – their conduct and lifestyle – matters, and this is important for understanding some of the pushback against Curry’s sermon. Curry is the leading Bishop in The Episcopal Church (TEC), the American branch of the worldwide Anglican communion. More significantly, TEC has effectively been under sanctions since 2016, following its “fundamental departure” from Christian teaching when it changed its doctrine on marriage. Not just that, but TEC – under Curry – have been taking to court those churches who have stood up to those changes. Churches holding to historical Christianity have been stripped of their buildings and assets. Over the weekend I heard the leader of one such church wondering how exactly that fits with the “power of love” referenced in Curry’s sermon.

Therefore it’s no surprise that many have taken the Archbishop of Canterbury’s invitation to Curry to preach in England – and at a wedding, no less – as making a mockery of those sanctions. Curry then partook in a Thy Kingdom Come Beacon event at St Albans’ Cathedral. If you hold to an orthodox position on sexuality, it’s hard not to interpret this as a clever step towards normalising TEC’s teaching within the Church of England, which is currently at logger-heads on the issue.

Now, the most common response to this goes something like: “The sermon wasn’t about sex, so what’s with the big deal – and wasn’t he great!” But I wonder if that’s exactly the point. The normalising has occurred. In a sense, it doesn’t matter what he said. His position in the pulpit establishes his theology’s place at the table.

9. Lastly then, how do we talk about the sermon?

It’s very interesting to see how this sermon has divided people. Glen Scrivener parallels it to the Yanny or Laurel debate that raged online last week.

It’s complex, because many of the responses have not just been responses to the sermon, but responses to the responses to the sermon. Still following? In other words, you seemed to like it, so I need to show you why you’re being naive. Or, you seemed to write it off as heresy, so I need to show you’re why you’re a cold, heartless fundamentalist.

And part of the complication is that we’re just not used to having Christian sermons being broadcast on national TV – and then discussed unceasingly on social media. The only time we get remotely close to that is The Queen’s Christmas Broadcast, Hugh Palmer’s slot on The One Show, or someone grabbing a live mic to share their testimony.

So there’s a sense in which many of us want to celebrate it – as well as use it as an opportunity to get others thinking about Christianity, rather than simply bemoaning it. Of course, part of that opportunity may be expressing that a world full of love would be incredible, but that you feel Curry could have done more to showcase how God’s love makes that possible. And yet, we also need to allow that space for winsome conversation and critique – rare in a social media age – which is particularly pertinent given Curry’s role as leading a branch of the Church that has departed from orthodox, historical Christianity.

But the dress was nice, wasn’t it?

Now, for something a bit different…

Disorientation and the Inevitable Crisis of Biblical Illiteracy

In Yuval Levin’s much-praised recent book, The Fractured Republic, the political analyst comments on how one of the defining marks of American public life thus far in the twenty-first century is undoubtedly disorientation. He writes:

“It’s as if we cannot quite figure where we stand, and therefore where we’re headed…we live in a period of profound transformation.”

For Christians, this disorientation feels even more pronounced. We feel the force not just of societal change, but of our faith’s rapidly changing place within that society. Like the early remnants of a sandcastle after the first tide has come and gone, we see the clumped heaps of a tower that remains and so find ourselves at once both wistfully looking back to supposed ‘glory-days’, and anxiously looking forward, apprehensive of the change that’s still to come.

And perhaps the most marked of these signs of disorientation is what pollster George Barna has called the ‘crisis of biblical illiteracy’. Indeed the very phrase is enough to draw out knowing shakes of the head and deep, long, sighs from the faithful.

Sadly it’s a crisis that makes for fairly dramatic statistics. One poll revealed 12% of American adults believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Here in the UK the Bible Society surveyed children aged 8-15 and found that a third couldn’t identify the Nativity as a biblical story. That percentage doubled for Jonah. Can you take more? One in three children thought Harry Potter was in the Bible, and over half thought The Hunger Games might have been too. For a second it’s ditzy funny, and then you realise it’s just plain desperate. DeYoung & Gilbert have described how the Bible’s increasingly peripheral place in the West has “spawned a rising generation of postmodern biblical illiterates”.

Moving from Familiar Stories to Finding Our Place in The Story

But how do we tend to respond to these statistics? Well, there’s probably two typical quick-fire reactions. The first is blame. Biblical illiteracy? Yep, that’ll be the fault of our consumer culture’s carte-du-jour of endless options. And, of course, throw into the mix the distracting banality of social media, and if together those aren’t enough of a ’cause’, then we can always assign fault to liberal Christianity’s gentle erosion of a high view of Scripture. Blame.

And the second reaction? Well, it’s obvious: more Bible, right? We need to fight for the Bible back in our schools, lobby the Bible back in the town hall, and of course press for a new reformation and put confident Bible teaching back in the pulpit. Unless we get more Bible then we may as well give up any hope of people being able to distinguish their King David from their Dumbledore, or their Peter from their Peeta. Biblical Illiteracy + more Bible = biblical literacy, right?!

But whoever came up with that ‘not seeing the wood for the trees’ idiom was onto something. Because when it comes to knowing the Bible, being able to identify a few trees is a very different thing to standing in awe of the whole forest. Maybe in our fervour to reverse this outbreak of biblical illiteracy, we’ve forgotten that facts and stories are not what we’re after.

The real challenge of biblical illiteracy is moving beyond familiarity with Bible stories to introducing people to the Bible’s big story.

And never mind surveys of British schoolchildren, those of us in the pastorate probably need to up our game for a start. Surely the ultimate evidence of biblical illiteracy is when Christians don’t even treat the Bible as one big story. Surely that shows we’ve misunderstood what the Bible is for? Not only can we suffer from a recurring inability to read Bible verses in the context of their particular book, but – and perhaps more devastatingly – we often fail to place those books within the context of one overarching biblical narrative. 

Why would we want to see a generation grow up well versed in the accounts of Joseph, Joshua, and Jonah, if they still failed to set them within God’s great story of redemption. Herman Bavinck put it well when he noted that the Bible doesn’t consist of “a number of disconnected words and isolated facts but [that it] is one single historical and organic whole, a mighty world-controlling and world-renewing system of testimonies and acts of God” (Reformed Dogmatics, 340).

And as we see this big story, we see a bigger Jesus: a Christ who doesn’t just rock up by chance in Israel one day, but one who has been promised and longed for. The Author has stepped onto the pages and has come as a better Adam, a perfect law-keeper, a suffering servant. He will right every wrong, stand in our place, restore us to our Maker, and bring about the perfect world we long for.

Only God’s Story Can Bear the ‘Burden of Identity’

Of course, those of us who feel we have benefited from having the Scriptures taught to us as a unified story will feel particularly strongly about this. I remember being handed a copy of Vaughan Roberts’ God’s Big Picture as a fresh-faced teenager and being told to dive deep. Wow, I felt like I’d never spotted Luke 24:27 before. Then it was on to Graeme Goldsworthy’s According to Plan and my mind was well and truly blown. So of course it’s right that we care about right exegesis and bang the table for biblical theology.

And yet what if recovering the Bible’s big story is actually about more than ‘right theology’? What if this was the very thing our fractured world needs right now?

In the face of the gaping cavern of biblical illiteracy, what if sharing this ‘big story’ is what will truly bring the hope and stability that is so absent in our disorientated cultural moment?

A fascinating series of articles appeared in the Irish Times earlier this year, examining several common cultural identities currently inhabited across modern Europe. And yet the editor, Ian Maleney, observed that despite their diversity, there was a shared characteristic amongst them: the “exhausting and attritional effort” it takes us to both maintain these identities and then ‘perform’ them in front of others. We are desperate for something that relieves us of the “burden of identity”.

One telling example was the notion of the ‘hipster’. Maleney comments on how it has become almost cringeful; too obvious, too intentional, another “visible, shameful evidence” of this burdensome quest for meaning. He then concluded the series with this striking comment:

“Living in a world that says we can always do better, a world that consistently presents the impossible and unreachable as ordinary and everyday, we live with the cruel optimism that we might uncover “a meaningful narrative” about who we are. This is the dream. Where can I get it, and how much does it cost?”

Like a plane desperately struggling to find its equilibrium in the midst of heavy turbulence, our culture is desperately turning to these personal narratives to find hope and permanence, but slowly finding they can’t just can’t take the strain. 

Thankfully, this is where resources like the recent evangelistic series, Life Explored, or Glynn Harrison’s excellent book, A Better Story, are helping us move in the right direction. For kids (and adults!) there’s The Jesus Storybook Bible and The Big Picture Story Bible. Likewise, it’s been interesting to observe how various university Christian groups in the UK have been using the concept of Story in their evangelistic mission weeks to seeming great effect, and it was also the focus of this year’s Evangelism Conference (talks available here).

As we feel the disorientation of a growing cultural unfamiliarity with the Bible, our response is not to champion the Scriptures for the sake of Bible trivia, but rather to communicate that in this book we have the only story of reality that can bear the weight of our personal struggles for meaning and substance.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Written by Barry Cooper & Nate Morgan-Locke, and presented by Barry, Nate, and Rico Tice, Life Explored is a seven session DVD-based series that seeks to “show how our deepest desires for happiness can only be satisfied in one person, Jesus Christ”. It is suitable to run in a small group, one-to-one, or even in a bigger setting, like a whole church gathering. When LE first came out I had the opportunity to talk with Nate about his hopes for the course, as well as the process and rationale behind it. You can read that interview here.

Each session features two films, two Bible readings, and one Bible-study: the first film is a ten-minute story piece (albeit with no dialogue or narrative), intended to gently and thoughtfully raise the session’s theme. This is a noticeable development from the format of LE’s older brother Christianity Explored, which I’ll pick up on later.

The quality of these films is second to none; each story is beautifully and elaborately shot, ranging from the dramatic account of a prospector risking his life in the Californian gold rush, to an emotional snapshot of a geisha and her family in Edo-period Japan. Most are fairly intense, although the middle episode provides some light relief as we dive into suburbia and glimpse a tragi-comic account of materialism’s never-ending lure. The other film in each session is a teaching film, with the three presenters taking it in turns to engagingly open up the Bible for about twelve minutes, speaking into the issues raised by the session’s theme – and more on that later too.

Drawing You In

My impression is that quite a lot of UK churches have already begun using LE since its release in September 2016. Some of these would already have been using Christianity Explored – in other words, they’re at home with CE Ministries and The Good Book Company – but my sense is that LE is also drawing in a wider circle of churches.

Key to understanding LE is knowing that it sees itself not as an alternative to CE, but as an additional resource that can be used before someone has done CE. I think it’s fair to say that LE feels like an easier invite than CE – in other words, I can see how someone might give LE a go before they’re willing to commit to CE. That’s probably a result of a combination of factors: on one level the name itself comes across as less exclusive; an invitation to explore the meaning of life feels like less of a commitment than seven weeks studying ‘Christianity’. This is then backed up by the publicity, which asks the non-threatening and invitational question, ‘What’s the best gift God could give you?’ But there’s also the fact that one of the major elements of LE are the ‘story’ films. Though they don’t hold back in terms of intensity of emotion, they certainly change the mood of the session; you almost feel like you’re getting a visit to the cinema together each time!

Good for Everyone

And yet LE is certainly not superficial, basic or merely introductory. That’s because the questions and issues raised are engaging, universal, and soul-searching: What, if you lost it, would make you feel that life wasn’t worth living? What keeps you going in difficult situations? What comes to mind when you hear the word “God”? Actually, I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly our conversations became ‘deep’ and personal. We weren’t just sharing knowledge or learning new facts; we were persuasively being encouraged to reflect together on how we were choosing to live our lives.

And that’s where we come to what LE is trying to do, if I can put it like that. Three things to mention here:

• Firstly, the angle LE takes is to ask the question of where we’re looking for lasting happiness. Boom. We all want to be happy, right? I’m engaged straight away. The films and Bible interaction then work together to provoke us to consider whether the things we’re living for are bringing us what we want, or whether actually – and quite strikingly – they might be imprisoning us. The ‘story’ films especially expose this by getting under our skin and positing that we’re each like the different characters in our own ways. And the claim LE gradually then makes is that it is only the triune God of the Bible who can bring us this happiness that we crave. Without realising it, we’re essentially introduced to the Bible’s category of idolatry: the claim that we’re captivated and captured by counterfeit gods, good things that have become ‘god things’. This is adeptly done, and is a perceptive way to connect with those who might freely acknowledge that they effectively ‘worship’ something or someone, but who perhaps may struggle to grasp the idea of breaking God’s commands.
• Secondly, this approach inevitably raises the question of who we think God is – and whether the God we do or don’t believe in is actually the God of the Bible. I think LE does this very powerfully. And this is why, in our limited experience, LE proved to be brilliant for Christians and non-Christians alike – and importantly – Christians and non-Christians together. It meant there was an atmosphere of Christians and unbelievers together talking about discovering who God is, and about how we can all lose sight of this. Whereas other courses can end up feeling quite ‘them and us’ (and to some extent that is obviously important), LE felt like we were all journeying together.
• Thirdly, LE does all this by taking guests through a whistle-stop overview of the Bible’s plot line, beginning in Genesis 1 and ending six weeks later in Revelation 21. The idea is that because most people are pretty biblically illiterate, it’s vital to paint a broad brush-stroke sense of God’s purposes for the world – and how we fit into that. This was helpful, although I think it sometimes felt like the teaching film was quite ‘full’, because the presenters were trying to combine idolatry/character of God/Bible overview.

Leading LE well

LE is definitely worth running as a course, but it is worth being aware that people will inevitably engage differently with the opening films. I remember Nate saying that when they were trialling the LE material it was often the Christians who struggled with the ‘story’ films more than non-Christians. Perhaps that’s because some Christians will tend to want ‘the point’ to be clearer, whereas the aim of these films is more to open up the issues and provoke people. That said, depending on your group, it may be worth gently helping participants to link the stories in the films to each session’s theme. For example, one participant in our group wondered why the ‘story’ film isn’t ever referred to in the ‘teaching’ film. Footage is used, but the presenters never reference it, so that probably means it is important that the course leader does.

Also, it’s worth noting that Episode 2’s ‘story’ film (effectively the first one of the series, given Episode 1 is an introductory montage) is probably also the most confusing. I had a conversation with another church leader recently and it turns out they’d understood the film in a completely different way to how I had (for what it’s worth, I went for an Edenesque depiction of the relationship between God and humanity – amIright?!). Maybe that’s just the joy of art, but, because it’s the first one, it might help to have a little bit of reassuring explanatory input from the leader at some point in the session. There was also a slightly embarrassing moment for me in the final session (#7) when I completely failed to spot something fairly obvious in the opening film, and this was then ‘helpfully’ pointed out to me by the rest of the group. Good for the humility, anyway…

To be fair to Nate & Barry, they’ve picked up on this issue of leading and linking, and have created a really helpful set of ‘Leaders’ Commentary’ videos for each episode, freely accessible if you register your LE course. These were really useful to watch in advance, and I’d scribble a few notes down about how to orchestrate the session well. More information about these commentaries and Barry’s own ‘cheat sheet’, a handy summary version of some the key points in the commentaries, is here.

“God is offering himself to me…”

One participant on our first course put it like this: “halfway through LE the penny dropped, as I learnt that God is offering himself to me.” That’s hugely encouraging, because that’s really the heartbeat of the material: to see that the greatest gift God could give us – and has given us – is himself.

LE feels fresh, whilst being faithful, and is creative in the way it connects, whilst still being clear in the way it confronts. I suspect the more you lead it, the more you’ll become comfortable with leading it – and hopefully the more you’ll rejoice as its drip-drip-drip approach of shining the spotlight on the character of God helps others – and yourself – to find true hope and life and joy in God himself.

You can pick up Life Explored resources, including Leaders’ Packs, Participant booklets, and the DVD, from the Good Book Company here. A trailer is below:

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of Life Explored from the publisher, but I hope this is still a fair review.