Crossover Preaching by Alcántara Jared E.;Alcántara Jared E.;

Author:Alcántara, Jared E.;Alcántara, Jared E.; [Alcántara, Jared E.]
Language: deu
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830899029
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2015-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

LEAD: Interculturally Competent Strategies for Preaching and Teaching

Listen. The first interculturally competent strategy is to listen. One of the recurring themes in Taylor’s preaching and lecturing is that he calls preachers to careful, reflective listening. In his 1968 address “The Power of Blackness,” delivered to the denominational leaders of the PNBC, Taylor exhorts his colleagues in ministry:

We who minister to people must listen carefully to hear what is being said, to catch the words of truth being uttered in the excessive rhetoric of violence of so many of our best young minds. Those of us who are thirty-five and over came forward in an integrationist generation. We are startled and sometimes angered by younger people as they talk about separatism. Much of this talk is angry, petulant, pointless. We need not abandon the dream of an integrated society, but we need to hear what is real in much current comment.94

In the Beecher Lectures, Taylor makes a more general charge to preachers, claiming that our task is to “to hear and suffer deeply” with suffering humanity, to “listen and to identify the tread of the eternal God’s sovereign purpose marching in the private and public affairs of men,” and “hearing that approaching, fateful footfall . . . to summon men and women” to do the work of God in the world.95

In his sermons, Taylor also explains how deep listening leads people back to God. He states: “Listening ears can hear God in a little baby’s cry. . . . But so often we fail to see and hear.”96 In a different sermon, he focuses on God’s presence within us, stating, “There is a part of us we cannot understand, something within us, if only we would listen, that raises up our heads and lifts up our hearts.”97 In still another sermon, he describes the beautiful listening made possible for one who knows God intimately; one is able to “listen to the songs the angels sing, and know still that there is more beyond.”98

Homiletics professors who practice careful listening know how to exercise respect and responsibility, and they encourage openness in the classroom. A homiletics professor’s willingness to listen is attitudinal; it involves an “orientation toward openness,” to use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s phrase: a pedagogical stance in which dialogue, mutuality, and humility shape one’s convictions as an educator.99 An ability to listen to and participate in dialogue is predicated on one’s orientation toward openness. Unless one is open, Gadamer says, meaningful dialogue is not possible.100 Moreover, openness is a key way to acquire knowledge and gain aptitude, the first two A’s of the 3A Model of Intercultural Competence Proficiency.

In Teaching Community, bell hooks uses the phrase “radical openness” through listening to refer to the “will to explore perspectives different than one’s own and change one’s mind as new information is presented.”101 Notice hooks’s verb choices: explore and change. The focus is not on who we are as teachers, but on who we are becoming as learners. In Teaching to Transgress, hooks contends that

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