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Editor's note: This quarter, PreachingToday has focused on the idea of group sermon preparation. More and more preachers are putting together their messages in community, allowing for insightful, idea-producing dialogue with others. In this three-part interview with Bob Hyatt, pastor of The Evergreen Community (Portland, Oregon), we decided to add a twist to the concept: What happens when a preacher engages in a similar type of dialogue—but during the Sunday sermon itself? Under the conviction that the audience doesn't have to be silent, some preachers are embracing dialogical preaching. Though a great deal of sermon preparation is done ahead of time, dialogical preaching takes group preparation to a whole new level, leaving the door open for the community to shape the sermon during the actual worship gathering. In part one of this three-part series, Hyatt offers a cultural and historical apologetic for inviting dialogue into the sermon.

Preaching Today: A growing number of preachers are questioning some of the core values of the traditional homiletic—most notably, the idea that the audience is expected to be largely quiet while the preacher offers something akin to a monologue. What do you think has given rise to recent criticism of a more traditional homiletic?

Bob Hyatt: First of all, the average level of education in our congregations is a lot higher than it used to be. In my community most of the people have a college degree, while a significant number even have master's degrees or doctorates. But it's not only issues of traditional education. Because of the magic of the Internet and sites like Amazon, most of the people sitting in my community have access to the same study tools that I use—the same commentaries and linguistic resources. Generally speaking—and particularly for those of us in more urban areas—we are preaching to congregations that are better educated than before. This should have some implications for how we preach. 

Secondly, I think our society has gotten more interactive and less passive. People not only enjoy but desire a sense of being involved. In general that's a good thing. We want people to participate. Whenever we have public elections or other forms of public discourse, we're upset when we get a small percentage of participants. Whenever we get above-average numbers of people weighing in and seeking to be heard, we see that as a success.

On a personal level, why have you chosen to introduce dialogue into your preaching at The Evergreen Community?

A huge shift occurred when I learned that the more interactive something is, the more people tend to learn or retain. If our goal is truly to see people learn, we ought to use whatever methods are biblically permissible. Inviting dialogue in preaching has become a method of drawing people in and allowing them to participate in the delivery of the biblical message. It has become a way of increasing the learning that takes place.

A lot of younger pastors like myself spent our early years in ministry as youth pastors. Whether it was to junior high, high school, or college audiences, we communicated to great effect in a dialogical manner. For some reason, though, it was expected that when we "grew up" we would leave behind dialogue in our communication. For me, this approach to preaching has been a natural outflow of the way I've always taught. It's never not been this way! I've always encouraged people to ask questions, and I've always asked open-ended questions and waited for a response. It certainly makes sense to interact in this way in a smaller faith community like Evergreen. When we started our own church community, we didn't have a template for what we were supposed to do. We started with about 30 people regularly attending our gatherings. It made sense for me to talk to (or with) them and not preach at them. We were small enough that someone in the audience could easily ask a question if they wanted to, so why would we stop them? It would be silly for me, in a group of 30 people, to say, "Sorry—but I'm the only one who's allowed to speak." They were almost nose-to-nose with me!

Even as we've grown, we've loved inviting dialogue into preaching so much that it's become a stated value in our community. As we continue to grow, we're going to restructure our community to allow this value of dialogue and interactivity to remain. We're not preaching this way for our community to get to a certain size. We're preaching this way because we find it to be a beautiful thing.

Can you anchor this approach to preaching in history? Are there examples of dialogical preaching in the New Testament?

When you read the Gospels, Jesus asked questions and waited for answers in the context of his own preaching and teaching. In fact, what he addressed next in a sermon or teaching moment was often dependent on the answers he received from the people. He even answered questions that people posed to him in the middle of his teaching. That's dialogue. 

Moving further into Scripture, the apostolic preaching we see in Acts is often dialogical. Look at examples in Acts 17–20 and 24. One of the more intriguing examples is found in Acts 20—the story of Paul preaching long into the early morning. If you read the Greek text, the word used in that passage for preaching is dialegomai, from which we get our English word dialogue. The text implies that Paul wasn't giving a monologue all night long; those gathered in the room were discussing the gospel in conversation. As an apostle, he was leading the discussion, but he allowed others to speak.

We should also consider the picture that Paul gives us in 1 Corinthians 14. If we're honest about the text, it does not support the idea of one person doing all of the speaking. Paul does say someone should teach, but the teacher should make room for input from other people, so that everyone will learn and be encouraged.

Let's go a step further: As you've studied church history in general, was dialogical preaching something the church fathers and other pivotal figures practiced?

I'm by no means an expert in church history, but I've read and studied in this area. I find it particularly instructive, for example, that Tertullian was skeptical of marrying the Greek practice of rhetoric or public speech to preaching. He did not feel they should have a lot in common. It's also interesting to note that Chrysostom, the famous father of preaching, was frequently interrupted to answer questions in the middle of his sermons.

From what I have observed, dialogical preaching didn't fall away until the Renaissance and Reformation periods. Both eras elevated the Greek ideals of rhetoric and learning, and in so doing, monologue became the dominant form of preaching. Nonetheless, if you continue to read widely in church history, you'll see that some branches of the church—including the Waldensians, the Lollards, the Anabaptists, and more recently, the Brethren and the Quakers—continued to preach the Word of God in community. For only the last 500 years or so has preaching been mostly monologue.

With history in mind, is dialogue in preaching a new approach? I don't think so. It's just been largely forgotten or abandoned. I don't want to make any huge claims that we've rediscovered the biblical method of preaching. I don't think there's anything unbiblical at all about doing a monologue. The question is simply this: Is that the only way to preach? I think both Scripture and church history answer, "No." 

This is part one in a three-part series. In part two, Hyatt addresses some of the concerns people have with dialogical preaching.

Bob Hyatt is a pastor at Evergreen Community in Portland, OR. He also serves as a church planting coach and the Director for Equipping and Spiritual Formation for the Ecclesia Network. To find out more about Bob or to connect with him, check out bobhyatt.me.