Alcántara has a couple of burdens which I find compelling. One is that he is trying to engage the rise of the non-White, non-Western church – a phenomenon happening in the USA, at some pace and in plain sight. For him, those who teach preaching will need to ‘account for and engage with an intercultural church with an intercultural witness to an intercultural society’ (27). The second burden is that he wants to look past writing just another book on the biblical, theological, and spiritual proficiencies needed for preaching. There are already lots of them. No, he is focused on two further proficiencies needed in this new emerging context: improvisational and intercultural proficiencies.

This book is a case study on this preacher, the ‘firstfruits of an improvisational-intercultural approach’ (294). Taylor is ‘ahead of his time’ (39) … (he) ‘anticipates the needs of twenty-first century preaching’ (53) … and he makes what Alcántara calls crossover preaching to be ‘visible and viable’ (28). Part of what makes Taylor a captivating case study is that he considered himself to be ‘rooted, but not restricted’ (142) to his African-American heritage. ‘Culture is important, but it is not a prison’ (286). How can the gospel do its transgressive, reconciliatory work if we are rooted and restricted in our own culture and race? The gospel is in the foreground, culture is in the background. ‘Instead of decentering the gospel so that he might center on being black, (Taylor) decentered blackness so that he might center on the gospel’ (190). [NB: It is a bit reminiscent of the reasons the NBA player, Jonathan Isaac, gave for standing during the national anthem a few days ago].

However, let’s come back to these two proficiencies and see if we can make sense of them.

If you are already thinking about the jazz musician, then you are on the right track…

This improvisation is ‘the ability to do a new thing in a new way as guided by convention, intuition and interaction’ (95). This is not wild spontaneity, or extempore preaching, that Taylor is modelling. For Alcántara, Taylor’s improvisation is characterised by three practices (103-135): 

(i) Here is Taylor himself: ‘I write out a full mansucript of every sermon I preach. Some of the material is lost in the actual delivery, but material I hadn’t planned comes to me while preaching. The one makes up for the other’ (113, emphasis mine). In other words, he improvises. There are differences between the sermon-as-prepared and the sermon-as-preached. ‘His manuscript was more like a manutemplate from which improvised sermonic discourse could emerge’ (72). He allowed for ‘free space within the framework’ (111). This is a ‘controlled spontaneity’ (97). It is ‘not ad-hoc, but highly prepared’ (71). And so, building on Robert Smith’s image, Taylor ‘prepared notes on the page in order to be ready to play notes off the page’ (78). Can you overhear the jazz musician? Yes, of course, you can. With both jazz and this vision of preaching, the focus is on ‘careful preparation as the primary pathway to spontaneity, originality and innovation’ (76).

(ii) A second practice is ‘attuning to the space’ (93) where the sermon is being preached. ‘As the space changes, the sermon changes’ (116). ‘Hallelujah’, sings my soul. Pulling out old sermons and preaching them unchanged is disrespectful of the change in ‘space’ – and listeners. I’ve watched this happen in my work with Langham Preaching. It is not right. Increasingly, my own practice has been to prepare a ‘three-quarter baked’ sermon beforehand and then, to arise early in the mornings, in order to complete my preparation after I am in the new ‘space’. Multiple sermons prepared like this in Pakistan, especially, come quickly to mind and they are, arguably, the most memorable preaching experiences of my life. To illustrate his point, Alcántara takes a single sermon of Taylor’s and tracks how he changes that sermon from one setting to another (117-124).

So that is the improvisation proficiency. It is a PhD thesis but once I get my head around what was being said, the ideas were simple (although the practice still looks hard).

You get the sense that Alcántara is a bit frustrated. Today there is a lot of writing and talking about interculturalism as a ‘phenomenon’ to celebrate, but where and how are people developing in it as a ‘proficiency’ – actually thinking and acting differently (89). It is a bit like climbing a mountain. People are stopping to enjoy the view atop a preliminary rolling hill when there is a summit still to be scaled! As I have already blogged, this is one of the concerns I have about the current focus on racism and Black Lives Matter. Will there be lasting change? How does such lasting change happen? 

Alcántara finds in Taylor an example of intercultural competence, that ‘cultivation of knowledge, skills, and habits for effectively negotiating cultural, racial, ethnic and ecclesial difference’ (80). The author has developed a 3A Model that opens up how this competence develops: ‘knowledge acquisition, behavioural aptitude and transgressive action’ (196-209). It is superb – and then, as with improvisation above, he demonstrates how Taylor lived this competence. It is ‘neither fast nor easy’ (209) to develop. It takes high levels of ‘curiosity, motivation and commitment’ (209). There will be plenty of failure along the way, just as I encountered when I was humiliated by failing one of the online quizzes used to test intercultural competence!

I loved the way we are provided with a ‘biblical and theological rationale for intercultural competence’ (220-235). He just slips it in. It is so important if we want to ‘think and act differently’.  ‘Crossing borders comes naturally to those who, like God, have a heart for shalom to come to all peoples’ (223). In Christ, God was the supreme border-crosser. For this to happen with us there is this need to ‘decenter the center’, namely our selves, as we ‘cede our place’ to another. The French phrase, après vous (“after you”), comes to mind. I became so excited because one of the Hindi phrases I love to use (which can fool people into thinking I know Hindi well – and I don’t) is पहले आप (pahlay aap) – or, “after you”. It is the sort of thing you say in the queue waiting for tea/chai, but it is also a metaphor for the border-crossing life of intercultural competence! So if I can play with Alcántara’s affirmation: ‘In a sense, preachers say pahlay aap to the gospel itself as the sun around which identity markers orbit. To be clear, saying pahlay aap to the gospel does not require abandoning cultural classification, but requires decentering them from this-wordly centrality’ (235).

Well, Alcántara does a nice job with the final chapter – and with another book!

He offers some strategies. Practical advice. Accessible ideas. More ‘inspired by Taylor’s preaching (than) exactly derived from it’ (294). But this stuff is gold. It is ‘required reading’ for students of preaching. To help us remember, he leans on three acronyms.

1. With improvisationally competent preaching, it is about ‘setting the PACE‘ for teaching preaching in the future (239-267): 

Play

Attune

Collaborate

Experiment 

I felt so reassured by one comment especially: ‘experiment with forms’ (263-266). For years I have had the conviction that we need to give preachers a variety of tools, or approaches to sermon form, in their tool bag. The Book of Acts does it like this. The variety of biblical genre suggests we do it like this. One size does not fit all! So, yes, I am going to preach a topical sermon this next Sunday. Very rare for me, but I am going to do it. We need ‘diverse arrows in the one quiver’. It has been a lonely conviction, but not any more…

2. With interculturally competent preaching, it is about ‘taking the LEAD‘ (267-294):

Listen

Engage

Assess

Decenter

I’m always collecting new ideas on evaluating the sermon. Loved the idea of letting the one who preached be the one with the last word – and then the footnote from Tom Long about letting any critique of the sermon be phrased with the question, ‘What is the ‘growing edge’ of this sermon?’ (274).

Pain

Redemption

Eloquence

Apprenticeship

Context

Holiness

The first chapter highlights the way suffering shaped Taylor’s life. It is always valuable to engage such stories of ‘preaching with a limp’. The second chapter urges the ‘we would see Jesus’ conviction. The final chapter describes holiness as ‘the currency of integrity’. All valuable, but a few extended comments on the other three chapters:

Eloquence and ‘resolving the lovers’ quarrel between eloquence and preaching’. Yep, he delves into 1 Cor 1-2. He affirms that eloquence is about pictures and poetry, not just sweet-sounding, and therefore suspicion-arousing, rhetoric. It is still an interesting discussion.

Apprenticeship and the relative merits of training preachers in formal and nonformal settings. ‘Teaching preachers to preach is the church’s job’ (76), with imitating, or emulating, being the African-American tradition, a bit like Augustine’s analogy of how babies learn to speak. And then noting, by quoting LaRue: ‘In many white churches one is declared to preach through certification. In the black church one is declared fit to preach through demonstration‘ (76).

Context and this was fabulous (if you’ve got this far in this very long post!) as it was full of echoes of John Stott’s ‘double listening’: the need for preaching to be ‘faithful’ and ‘fitting’. timeless and timely, ‘ascending and descending Jacob’s ladder’ (104). It is that ‘space’ mentioned above, respecting listeners. ‘We are good at saying the same thing in the same way that we’ve been taught, but bad at saying the same thing differently’ (87). Like Ezekiel in chapter 3, we need to ‘sit where people sit’ and like Paul in 1 Cor 9 we need to ‘become all things to all people’ … but don’t miss the last verse – for the sake of the gospel! (9.23). And then, echoing the first book, his three strategies for contextualisation (95-103): 

(i) De-center ourselves, by interrogating our cultural value system and by moving toward rather than away from God’s people; 

(ii) Increase the arrows in our quiver, by learning a multiplicity of sermon forms and by surrounding ourselves with diverse conversational partners; 

(iii) Become a border-crosser, by being students of preaching traditions other than our own and by allowing our cultural identity to shape us, but not to circumscribe us. ‘Border-crossers know how to be ‘at home’ in more than one context and situation’ (102).

Yep, this black preacher, facilitated by this Hispanic author, sure did motivate me 😁.

nice chatting