Beware Tuneless Preaching...Continued from page 5

3. It has no memory. Tuneless preaching attempts to compose original tunes with little or no regard for two thousand years of worship practice. Timothy Carson describes how the history of Christian worship ricochets between simplicity and complexity.¹⁵ In cycles, it is drawn back to its biblical roots, and builds on tradition while responding to culture. Whenever a time of renewal and reformation impacts worship, yet there is no memory of history and tradition, tuneless preaching predominates. In contrast, reformers such as Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and Knox built on past church worship experience with profound awareness, and preaching resounded as worship. Preaching and liturgy have creatively influenced each other through church history. The Christian year has been especially important for planning throughout the church calendar, yet tuneless preaching invents minature wheels, (often not circular!), week after week.

4. It reduces worship to worship services. Because of its inadequate theology, broken relationships and lack of history, tuneless preaching has swallowed the idea that Christian worship is neatly fulfilled by weekly routines, lasting one hour (or so). Planned as crowd-pleasingly as possible, such services comprise all that the church understands to be worship. The grand biblical concept of worship as a response to God from Sunday to Saturday (Romans 12:1,2), with a seven day scale embracing all work, play, relationships, private time, and public time of the whole congregation has rarely registered.

5. It fails to let Scripture direct the whole act. Tuneless preaching may treat the Scripture text seriously and even immerse within it so that the sermon says and does what the Scripture says and does. A preacher who does this at least gets half the task right. However, tuneless preaching makes no effort to make Scripture shape the structure of worship services. Scant thought is given to relationships between word, sacrament and music throughout the whole act of worship in the light of this word of God. How the service will end is left to custom and routine rather than prayed over and planned within worship’s trinitarian dynamic.

6. It misses out on community-formation. Tuneless preaching majors on addressing “you” in the singular. It applies self-help principles to individuals rather than challenge individuals about sharing selves in community, as Christ’s body. It misses out the biblical command to grow together in Christ, becoming more like Christ in order to bring glory to the Father. Therefore it avoids preaching on unity, love, and reconciliation as primary characteristics of being God’s people.

7. It marginalizes the Lord’s Supper and Baptism. Tuneless preaching generally sees these practices as “add on ordinances” that are rated far below sermons in value. The Lord’s Supper, for example, therefore occurs infrequently, often at fast pace, and is associated with welcoming in new members, pastoral prayer and a separate offering for a fellowship fund. Often, it has little connection with the sermon and, much more seriously, slight experience of encounter and communion with Jesus Christ. Rather than being the crowning act of corporate worship, it is downplayed -- appearing to be an addendum to the sermon that merely delays the end of the service.