Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Clint Schnekloth

Home
Progressive Christian
Preaching In The Purple Zone: Ministry In The Red Blue Divide: A Review

Preaching In The Purple Zone: Ministry In The Red Blue Divide: A Review

Last updated on: August 19, 2019 at 3:40 pm by Clint Schnekloth

Preaching In The Purple Zone: Ministry In The Red Blue Divide: A Review 2019-08-19T15:40:16-05:00 Clint Schnekloth

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Megan Rapinoe, in her now famous speech in New York after winning the World Cup, included this call to action: “This is my charge to everyone. We have to be better. We have to love more, hate less. We got to listen more, and talk less. We got to know this is everybody’s responsibility, every single person here. Every single person who is not here. Every single person who doesn’t want to be here. Every single person who agrees and doesn’t agree… There’s been so much contention in these last years. I’ve been a victim of that. I’ve been a perpetrator of that…but it’s time to come together.”

The week following, Donald Trump initiated a national feud with a series of racist tweets in which he told congresswomen they should go back to their home countries.

This is the nation we live in, and the tenor of our discourse. Clearly, we do indeed need resources as preachers for “ministry in the red-blue divide.”

Enter Leah Schade. Schade’s first book, Creation-Crisis Preaching: Ecology, Theology and the Pulpit already positioned her as one familiar with purple preaching. Preaching on climate change means wading (literally) directly into the purple. Readers have grown to trust her wisdom in bringing difficult topics into the pulpit.

Now with her new book, Preaching In The Purple Zone, Schade continues to take the issue head-on. Intriguingly, although the title of the book focuses on preaching in the purple zone—implying the focus would be on getting beyond partisan politics—the real center of her work is examining a more dialogical approach to preaching itself.

Many readers of this magazine are likely familiar with the very popular, and widely practiced, inductive approach to preaching popularized by authors like Fred Craddock and Barbara Brown Taylor. Inductive preaching is a dialectical way to bring listeners along on the journey of discovery the preacher has been on in their engagement with the biblical text. In this sense, it attends to the movement between speaker and listener.

However, Schade points out this inductive method—sometimes called the New Homiletic—still privileges the preacher’s insights over that of the assembly.

So Schade introduces us to the theory of new homileticians who propose forms of conversational preaching. Then she introduces us, over the course of the rest of the book, to her sermon-dialogue-sermonmodel, with case studies, model sermons, and even an appendix of resources to announce and support the deliberative dialogueshe proposes.

It’s helpful to know the basic model. In its simplest form, the preacher first preaches a prophetic invitation to dialogue. Rather than simply launch into antagonistic propheticism, which Schade argues fails typically to get the response desired, the preacher begins by opening space for dialogue around a difficult topic. This sermon has a series of prescribed steps: point out the dialogical aspects of a specific biblical text; determine what’s at stake; identify the values; explain how God, Jesus, and/or the Holy Spirit is active; recognize what the dialogue is teaching; suggest possible next steps.

After this first sermon, the congregation schedules a deliberative dialogue. This session, anywhere from 90 minutes to a few hours in length, itself has a specific structure to it: introduce the topic; establish ground rules; share how this issue impacts you personally; evaluate the pros and cons, consequences and benefits of possible approaches to complex problems (often three options); reflect on the pros and cons of these options to identify common themes and shared values; suggest and discuss next steps for taking action.

The preacher, having participated in this deliberative dialogue with the community, then returns to the pulpit the following Sunday and preaches a second sermon, one drawing on the process of dialogue that has taken place, and is continuing to take place, in community. This second sermon may still be prophetic in the sense that it expresses “unrelenting hope about God’s activity to transform church and society in a present-future sense based on the principle of justice” (120). But the sermon-dialogue-sermonmodel makes use of the preacher’s “unique position and opportunity to model a dialogical approach to a contentious issue while also examining it through the lens of the gospel” (121).

Schade was first inspired to develop this model for preaching after conducting a 1200 person survey of clergy. Her research led her to the conclusion that many pastors do not feel trained or prepared to preach in the “purple zone.” So they simply avoid controversial issues altogether, both because of the inherent risks involved, and because many doubted whether it would make a difference in the life of their congregation.

There are many strengths to Schade’s proposal, not least because of its unerring commitment to deepening what was started in the New Homiletic, a real attention to the hearers of sermons, but now also with a more round-table approach that brings the whole people of God more fully into the preaching task.

Nevertheless, it does raise the participation bar significantly. Given most congregations are not regularly in the habit of gathering midweek to discuss contentious issues, one might wonder how realistic the proposal is.

But then, all calls to unity, like the one from Megan Rapinoe, raise the bar. When we hear calls to come together, take responsibility, listen more, be better, we then ask, “How?” Schade meticulously lays out the details of the how, puts them into practice, and offers examples of how it all goes down.

In this sense, even if it is difficult, Leah Schade has given us a clear path to love more, hate less, and together be a living sermon that prophetically emerges not by avoiding life in the purple zone, but by directly engaging it.

—

This review appears in the most recent issue of The Christian Century.

Previous Post

August 13, 2019

The New Moral Minority

Next Post

August 26, 2019 A Blessing For Those Beginning Fall Semester

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category #blacklivesmatter advocacy Avengers baptisms Capitalism church growth clergy silence corporate ethics Creation Care Donald Trump elections Evangelicals Evangelism Friendship hermeneutics Immigration Intersex introverts Jesus Labor Liturgy Lutheran MLK Jr. New urbanism Pentecost philanthropy Poem political theology Post-program church Prayer private devotion Reformation Refugees sacraments Scripture Secularity Sin small church social media Sovereignty Trauma-Informed Theology travel Trump Uncategorized wealth white supremacy Workers worship Youth

Select a Month January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 January 2016 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 May 2014 March 2014 June 2013 January 2013 December 2011 December 2010 February 2005 February 2004

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who carried Jesus' cross partway to Golgotha?

Select your answer to see how you score.

A Roman centurion Peter James Simon of Cyrene

Books by This Author Books by Clint Schnekloth

See All Titles »