I was recently leading a sermon lab at Luther Seminary when a preacher, nearing the end of her sermon, paused and said, “Well, normally, if this were my congregation, this is the part where I’d say, ‘Turn to your neighbor and talk about …’”
From the way she said it, you could tell this was ordinary in her congregation. Conversation during the sermon wasn’t an experiment; it was part of the culture of proclamation.
Immediately, another student responded: “I could never do that in my congregation. They wouldn’t talk to each other. They wouldn’t know what to do.”
That exchange stayed with me—not because I’m interested in promoting one technique, but because it exposed a deeper question: What does it mean to invite the assembly into preaching itself?
Preaching in most traditions is experienced as monological. One person speaks; everyone else listens. Even when sermons are engaging, the form still suggests a one-way movement of speech.
But what if preaching were understood less as monologue and more as shared event? Not as casual conversation or performance, but as a theological claim about the assembly’s role in proclamation?
The question is not simply whether people should talk during sermons. It is whether the sermon is something done to a congregation or something that happens among them. That raises a deeper issue: How do we cultivate the congregation’s agency as hearers?
Many congregations have been trained into passivity. Even when hearers are attentive, the sermon often leaves little room for response. Preachers can fill every silence, every pause, every opening. Often preachers even move on so quickly after posing a rhetorical question that there is no space for an answer to form in a hearer’s mind.
Early in my preaching, a listener told me, “You’re actually funny, but your jokes land late for me. By the time I get it, you’ve already moved on.” She named something essential: Response requires space. The issue, then, is not whether interaction is added, but whether space for response exists in the moment at all.
Group improv offers a helpful lens. A scene begins with a declaration—someone establishes a world: where we are, what is happening. But the scene only comes alive when others respond and carry it forward.
Preaching works similarly. The sermon sets a scriptural scene: “This is what we are attending to; this is what God is doing among us.” But proclamation becomes richer when the assembly is invited to inhabit that scene and respond within it.
That response may take many forms: silence, recognition, spoken reflection, communal speech. The point is not a particular behavior, but participation in meaning-making rather than passive reception.
Participation also begins before worship. Research consistently shows that when people engage Scripture ahead of time—through reading or conversation—they arrive already inside the interpretive world of the sermon. They are not starting from zero when the text is preached.
I know a homiletics professor who refuses to preach in a congregation unless she has first studied the text with members of that community. For her, the sermon must emerge from shared engagement with Scripture. The voice in the pulpit is already shaped by the congregation’s questions and insight.
Participation, then, is not a single technique but a developing capacity.
It might begin with small shared responses in worship. It might grow into moments of silence or congregational speech. It might take shape in post-sermon conversations around tables. In some settings, it even extends into improvisational preaching, where congregational responses shape what happens next in real time.
Different biblical texts may also invite different forms of engagement. A lament may open space for shared grief. A parable may invite interpretive debate. A prophetic text may press toward confession or response. Scripture itself can shape not only what is said, but how the congregation is invited to participate.
Central to improvisation is attentiveness to one’s scene partners. Good improvisation is not simply spontaneity; it is disciplined listening. What others offer genuinely shapes what comes next. It is a practice of mutual care, in which speaking and listening are held together in an ongoing exchange.
That ethic matters for preaching. Participation is not about generating activity for its own sake. It is about forming communities capable of listening to one another—and to the Word—with care.
These practices do not need to begin with “Turn to your neighbor.” In fact, they rarely should. More often, congregations are formed gradually into participation through smaller practices of shared attention, silence, and response that slowly expand a community’s capacity for mutual engagement.
Sermons are not simply information delivery. They are acts of communal perception—ways of learning to see, discern, confess, and respond together. What matters is not uniformity of method, but attentiveness to formation: how a community learns, slowly and faithfully, to become a place where proclamation is not only heard, but shared.
