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

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.