Preaching in a Changing Culture: An Interview with N.T. Wright

N.T. Wright is the Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the preeminent New Testament scholars writing today. Prior to his 2003 appointment as Bishop, he served as Dean of Lichfield Cathedral, and was canon theologian at Westminster Abbey. He is the author of more than 40 books, and is one of the most influential voices in the 21st century Christian church. Wright was one of the featured speakers at the recent International Congress on Preaching in Cambridge, where he was interviewed by Preaching editor Michael Duduit.

Preaching: As Bishop of Durham and in your writing for the church, you are regularly in contact with church leaders. What do you see as the greatest challenge preachers face as they try to communicate the gospel in today’s culture?

Wright: It varies enormously between churches to churches. And even within the churches there are wide differences. I think in Britain it is significantly different from the United States. There is massive ignorance about what Christianity is, about what the Bible says, about who Jesus was, and so on. That goes right through our culture -- even people with PhD’s in other subjects remain remarkably ignorant about what the Christian faith really is. So often the preacher has to be quite careful to spell things out, to explain what’s going on. Even the faithful few in our pews probably don’t know very much and need to be reminded.

Now in America there is in many churches a much more widespread sense of the importance of adult Christian education and adult Sunday school’s and so on. This is much more rare in the UK – almost entirely non-existent, sadly. So when I go to lecture in America I am aware that it is a different context entirely. I think that is probably the biggest thing, the sheer ignorance.

The second thing would be that behind that ignorance there is still this basic assump

tion that God is upstairs and we are downstairs, and that religion and spirituality are all about escaping from downstairs and going on to upstairs. Whereas the whole point of Jesus’ confirmation of the kingdom is on earth as it is in heaven is the coming together of the two. So I think we are constantly having to remind people that the old language about going to heaven when you die is important at one level, but that the really important thing is God’s new creation, resulting in resurrection. That is what the cross is all about because that is dealing with the sin and the death that would have left us disembodied. So we have a huge misunderstanding that we have got to get out from under. It is quite different in America, a quite different level.