Preaching in Place
Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Sermon
- Preaching & Worship
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2022
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Publisher's Description
Why is preaching so often bad? Why is worship so often dull? Why do Sunday mornings so often fail to help the folks in the pews live a faithful life from week to week? And what can be done about it? Many will tell us that there are easy and purchasable fixes. More technology. Less tradition. Virtual worship. Thinking big. The land and the farm model for us a different path. As Mark Rigg shows in this concise introduction to Wendell Berry, the themes that have illuminated the Kentucky farmer's essays, fiction, and poetry for fifty years have a great deal to say to the church. They offer an agrarian model of church where the focus is on the local, the tangible, and the communal. Out of such a model emerges a new approach to preaching. Both congregation members and preachers themselves will find themselves called to turn away from sermons that echo the promises of an individualistic consumer culture and to proclaim instead Jesus Christ in the midst of the local community.
Endorsements (3)
“While the number of Christians worldwide continues to increase, denominations and congregations are getting smaller. Mark Rigg describes this move—and the need for ministry and preaching to reflect a new ecclesiology—in this remarkable treatise comparing Luther’s theology of the cross and Wendell Berry’s philosophical (and, quite unintentionally theological) approach to farming, eating, and being community. Preachers: read Preaching in Place to remind you how to ground your work in the ground God gives you to till.”
“Mark Rigg unveils Martin Luther’s ‘theology of the cross’ as foundational to Wendell Berry’s commitments to place and to rejection of conventional, industrial, and triumphal goals. Focus on a biblical understanding of economic life challenges long-held views of what is central to the church, making it crucial for assessing and changing church practices at this pivotal time in world history. Rigg’s is a prophetic voice, especially essential for preachers because of its specificity and clarity.”
“This little book holds a great gift. Rigg carries on a generative theological conversation with Wendell Berry’s writing and its alternative vision for an economy rooted in place and people, for a way of life connected to the land that sustains us. There is a wisdom here for the preacher—and much more. In an age captive to the dislocating forces of commerce and technology, Rigg’s work will inspire imagination for the distinctive witness of the local congregation.”
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