Tucked away deep within Baptist history there is a tradition your preacher doesn’t want you to know about.

It’s called “sermon building,” and I’m told was en vogue for British Baptists in the late 1600s.

Sermon building was a practice that embraced the whole gathered community’s role in proclaiming the Word each Sunday in worship. The designated preacher for the day (this position too was shared) would begin the sermon, and after this offering the floor would be open for others to add to the proclamation as the Spirit moved them.

I’ll leave it to you and your personnel committee to mull over how this relic of our tradition might inform who preaches at your church this Sunday. But I’ve been thinking about how sermon building might inform the upcoming “Conference on Sexuality and Covenant” and the conversation that (hopefully) will follow.

If we as a “movement” treat this issue and conversation like a typical sermon, with merely one voice—however established and informed—speaking on behalf of the community, we will have squandered our greatest asset: the wealth of perspectives, insights and vessels of the Holy Spirit that we have worked so hard to steward.

No, I believe that if this conversation, and others that are sure to follow, is to represent and sufficiently reflect who we are as a people of faith, it must be more like a sermon that is built. A sermon we build together–not just by tolerating the many voices we have among us, but embracing them and loving them, and celebrating the common values we share that allow for such a mosaic.

Another interesting tidbit: to describe their unique manner of proclamation, those early Baptists often used the word “prophecieth,” which for them seemed to mean about the same thing as “preaching.” When the community would proclaim the Word together each Sunday, they understood it to be a work of prophecy. An “inspired” work–a work built of and in the Spirit.

I hope it’s still true for us today. I hope we understand our preaching to be of the Spirit. Not just the sermons we hear and offer on Sunday morning in our own congregations, but more importantly the greater sermon we are all building together.