Early on in Moby Dick, Melville has this great statement about preaching, comparing it to the bow of a ship.
“What could be more full of meaning? — for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow” (Melville, Moby Dick, p. 60).
Preaching is an instrument of cultural transformation, not because preaching is motivational speaking in a highly charged religious manner, but rather because preaching reveals the Christ, who is the Savior of the world.
So church services are not rallies. The speaker is not there to get the troops whipped up so that they go out there and “make a difference.” They will make a difference, and God bless them, and future historians will be able to write learnedly about it. But that is not the mechanism that makes this work.
Because of sin, the world is chaotic, formless. There are remnants of the previous forms, but sin has done its destructive work. Over this chaos, the Spirit of God moves on the face of the waters. And then what happens? God speaks, and when God speaks, He names. And when He names, what He names comes to be. And He speaks through His ordained speakers.
We have to get away from this notion that naming is a matter of attaching labels so that we can keep track of things. Naming shapes, naming forms. When I speak of the coming glories in the future of this sorry planet, I am not predicting, as though I were an observer on a balcony somewhere. “Don’t bother me right now,” the preacher might think. “I am busy making a new world.”
And of course this elicits a charge — just who do you think you are? Oh, I don’t know. Just a nobody that is not sufficent for these things, just like St. Paul wasn’t either, only much worse than that.