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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."

PreachingToday.com: Some would contend that introducing dialogue into the sermon could create a subjective atmosphere—one that fosters "truth by democracy," little concern for historical or grammatical issues, or an elevation of a more postmodern ethos. Are these concerns valid?

Bob Hyatt: I would say the concerns are valid but probably overstated. We should always be concerned about teaching correctly, whether in a small group or in a large worship gathering. We must always strive for the elevation of truth. But before I get to issues of avoiding a more subjective atmosphere, let me ask this question: Isn't it possible that truth can come from more than one voice? If I've effectively taught the Word of God to my community for 5–10 years, surely somebody has learned something. Does anyone besides me have something to say on whatever subject or passage we might be discussing that morning? I'm not arguing for the audience to offer 30 minutes worth of material, but might they have 30 seconds of insight? Might they have a good illustration from their lives? Might they be able to answer an open-ended question about how a particular principle from God's Word applies to their lives? I would hope so!

From a biblical standpoint, I know I cannot be the only one in that community who has the gift of teaching. I might be the one who's been assigned primarily as an elder to bring the Word of God on a regular basis, but if I want to give other people a chance to speak so that everyone can learn and be encouraged, I need to be intentional about it. I need to allow others who have the gift of teaching to exercise that gift, even if they haven't yet sharpened it to the extent that I have.

Now, in order to avoid a more subjective atmosphere, the person who's leading the discussion has to be just as prepared as a preacher who operates in the traditional homiletic. Even though I do dialogical preaching, I still write a manuscript of my sermon. I know exactly what I'm going to say during the worship gathering, but I've also chosen certain places to ask open-ended questions. I'm still going to share the things I feel God is saying to our community through the passage, but I also want to involve other people.

Other communities that practice dialogical preaching may do it differently, but I certainly would not want to fly by the seat of my pants, having us all come together, open up the Bible, and see what comes out. If no one has spent time in prayer and preparation, that's not good stewardship of the teaching gifts of the church.

On a more serious level, some even worry about the possibility of introducing heresy into the church by way of dialogical preaching.

The concern over heresy is certainly a serious issue. Erwin McManus says there are two things that are present in every healthy church: sexual immorality and heresy. If a church is truly alive and active, people who don't yet know Jesus will be present. In other words, in any healthy church—whatever the method of preaching—you're susceptible to wrong teaching or heresy. Whether we're doing a monologue or preaching dialogically, we must constantly judge ourselves and our communities by the Word of God. If you're committed to submitting to the authority of the Word of God, to the Holy Spirit being the teacher, to Jesus being the pastor of the church, and to the development of a great group of elders, you can do dialogical preaching in a manner that is honorable to God.

I'm not arguing for the audience to offer 30 minutes worth of material, but might they have 30 seconds of insight?

I'm amazed that in our community, the people that talk the most are the people who are the newest. Occasionally they will say some pretty freaky things! But I love to watch the whole community respond—myself included. As I look around the room where we gather for worship, I see the shifts in body language until somebody eventually says, "You know, I hear what you're saying, but I don't quite think that really catches the essence of what Scripture is saying." More extreme moments like these have only occurred 10–20 times in our history, but what is beautiful is when people get correction from somebody who's sitting next to them, rather than someone who's standing in front of them.

When people have disagreed with me in the teaching, I prefer that they say it to my face. I like to know when I've said something that is hitting people wrongly or when I've said something that's confusing. It's instant feedback. Preachers generally have to wait for questions until after they've delivered the message. I get it right away. Somebody says, "Wait a second. I don't know about that … " and I have a chance to interact about their concerns right on the spot.

With these concerns in mind, how would you then define the role of the preacher in dialogical preaching?

There's still a need for what people consider proclamation. I tend to think of my sermons in three parts: the first part consists of a number of open-ended questions to get the ball rolling; the second part has me talking a little less and the people a little more; the third part is where I "get on my horse and go." In that final part of the sermon, I tend to ignore any hands that are being raised, because I know that this is where my study, my prayer, and all my preparation come to a head. It's the part of the sermon where I say what it is that I feel God is saying to our community through this text.

There's still a critical role for the preacher and proclamation as we've known it; I just want the whole community to be involved in that proclamation by speaking to one another, giving good examples of things, answering questions, and even bringing up points that I didn't think of in my time in the Word.

Most counseling theories agree that if you hand somebody the answer, it usually means little to them. As they share their problems with you, you may know fairly quickly what it is that they need to do to get out of the hole they're in. But if you allow them to process the information, asking them the right questions along the way, they will often come to a conclusion on their own—maybe even the same conclusion you would have handed them. True change happens in that moment. That's the kind of change that I'm aiming for in dialogical preaching. I want people to come to the conclusion that I'm about to tell them anyway. Through good questions and an ongoing time of discussion, I want to lead them through the text in such a way that they are intuiting what I'm going to say right when I say it. When that happens, it's like there are little light bulbs going on all over the room. That's the sweet spot of dialogical preaching: when we're all moving together in such a way that people know exactly what I'm going to say—and then I say it.

PreachingToday.com: You have briefly summarized what a typical dialogical sermon looks like in your church. Please take a moment to show us the process in greater detail.

Bob Hyatt: Sunday really starts on the Monday before. We post the passage that we're going to walk through in an on-line forum, asking the whole community to read it, meditate on it, and begin to ask questions of it. Sometimes we get little participation in that forum. Other times, we get a ton. It depends on what grabs people's attention or how arresting the subject matter is. When the on-line forum doesn't produce a strong conversational thread, I can still work with conversations I have with people throughout the week. They'll ask me how I'm going to handle something they noticed in the text, and I might give them a preview of what I'm thinking and bounce some ideas off of them.

Once Sunday rolls around, I open the discussion of the passage with a series of questions that reflect the question the text will ultimately answer. After a time of conversation, we'll move into the passage, making our way through it verse-by-verse or chapter-by-chapter to see how the Bible addresses the issues we've raised.

In the middle of the sermon, I try to lean a bit more on the audience. There are times—and this might be too much for some people—where I will run up against an interpretive question in the text, and I will leave it up to the community, asking, "What do you think?" I am almost never disappointed. Someone usually comes up with the answer I would have given. The power of the moment, though, is that it comes out of the mouth of the community. It's a unique opportunity for those who have studied the passage throughout the week to say, "I thought about that, and here's what I've concluded in my study."

After this more intense time of dialogue, as I've already said, I tend to "get on my horse and go." I've spent a lot of time studying, praying, and meditating on the implications of this passage for our community, so I use the final part of the sermon to lay those implications out for the people to see. Hopefully other people have already contributed to that sense of what the text is saying to us as a community, but it's my goal as the teaching pastor to frame the implications and challenge us as a community.

We usually follow the teaching with a time of singing and response before I ask a few final questions to make sure we've all said what needs to be said. It's a final chance for people to agree, disagree, offer an "amen," ask questions, or make another point.

Someone usually comes up with the answer I would have given. The power of the moment, though, is that it comes out of the mouth of the community.

The dialogue that opens my sermon varies in length, but the final two parts—consisting of dialogue and my own reflections—last 40–45 minutes. The final question that I ask at the end of the gathering usually runs about 10 minutes.

How can those in a more traditional setting introduce dialogue into their preaching?

It does become nearly impossible to do dialogical preaching when a church is over a certain size. Large numbers of people are not made for verbal interactivity. However, anyone can do this to some degree through the power of on-line forums. The text doesn't have to be some surprise that the people unwrap on Sunday morning. Post the passage in an on-line forum the week before. There's nothing wrong with even posting a few thoughts about where you're planning to go in Sunday's teaching. Ask the people a series of questions: What do you think? What is your response? What questions do we need to answer? What implications do you feel need to be teased out of this passage? When I do this with my community, I'm constantly amazed by the things I didn't think of in my time in the Word. I have a limited perspective, so I love to hear how the passage is impacting others before the sermon happens.

Sermon preparation groups are also a way to indirectly introduce dialogue into the sermon. I have a friend who pastors a church of 1,500–2,000. He meets with a sermon prep group on the Friday morning before the Sunday service to discuss what he's come up with in his preparation.

For the last 20 years or so, churches have handed outlines or blank pieces of paper to the congregation for sermon notes, but have you noticed there are never any essay questions on them? The people are only asked to fill in the blank or are told exactly what to write. What would happen if you took five minutes on a Sunday morning and said, "I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to write out your response on the sheet that you have in front of you"? Dialogue doesn't always have to be verbal.

What are some resources to help a preacher learn more about dialogical preaching?

Doug Pagitt's Preaching Re-imagined tackles dialogical preaching head-on. Regardless of what you think about Doug or his theology, if you care about the craft of preaching, you should interact with his book. Hear him out, because he presents a fantastic case for involving people. If people take the time to read his description of a typical Sunday worship gathering for his community, Solomon's Porch, they'd be surprised. It's very different from the free-for-all picture that a lot of people have painted in their minds.

David Fitch has also addressed some of these issues in his book, The Great Giveaway. I would also suggest preachers take a look at Joseph R. Meyer's Organic Community.

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.