Hallo again to all.

Bad preaching.

From time to time, when we walk out of church after the final dismissal and postlude, we shake our head invisibly and say to ourselves 'My goodness, but that preacher was bad.' We had one of those days recently.

We travel on business quite a bit, and that business travel typically wants us to be on the job Monday morning. We could travel on Sunday, but then we'd miss church altogether. Our custom is to travel on Saturday, attend church in the destination city on Sunday, and be ready for work the next morning. It is usually an upbeat experience, even when the preaching is cringe-worthy.

Our society seems to have an ambiguous relationship with badness. We sometimes hear someone comment 'That was so bad it was good.' Short video clips of bad behaviour are often memorialised online as humour. Televised sporting event commentators often focus as much on mistakes as well as skilful play. Newspapers publish articles 'Why women can't resist bad boys'. The protagonists of novels and cinema are often the villains and not the heroes; it is unsurprising to read such protagonists described glowingly as 'bad-ass'. The type font 'Bad Cabbage' was very popular in adverts some decades ago, though we suppose no one knew its name. The list of examples could go on and on, but we think you get the idea. Oh, one more example we cannot resist is the cult surrounding the wealthy off-key soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, described by one music historian as 'the world's worst opera singer'.

Several different aspects of preaching can be bad. The words of the sermon can be clumsy, illiterate, illogical, incorrect, or merely annoying. The rhetorical style of the spoken delivery can be bad. The style that distresses us the most is when the preacher speaks in a way that conveys the preacher's belief that he or she is the centre of the story, and not the scripture it is based on. Our favourite preachers always make us believe that they are directly channelling Jesus; after we hear bad preaching we can often describe the preacher's hairstyle and brand of wristwatch (they being more interesting than the sermon's content).

Not only are there so many ways to be bad; sometimes 'bad' is in the mind of the beholder. A late relative of ours treasured a 1954 RCA record album release of Florence Foster Jenkins' singing, and tried more than once to get us to listen to it. Not long ago a distressed friend asserted that a certain sermon was bad because the preacher had titled it 'Ninth Sunday after Pentecost' and not 'Feast of the Transfiguration', having evidently forgotten that in 2017 that ninth Sunday was the assigned date to celebrate the Transfiguration. We suspect almost nobody else noticed, though the error was fixed on the church website some time later.

When we experience good preaching, we usually feel educated and edified. When we experience bad preaching, we sometimes try to salvage the experience by re-reading the assigned scripture and attempting to figure out what it was that the preacher was trying to say. We don't always succeed at that; some preachers are just thick. But we do always wait in line afterwards at the back of the nave to thank the preacher and say we enjoyed it. Though we are sometimes elusive about what we mean by 'it', we are always grateful for their service to the church.

See you next week.

All of us at Anglicans Online