July 21, 2009 | Every week, pastors wrestle with Scripture. They pore over ancient texts, searching for meaning, looking for a relevant word to bring to their parishioners.

But for some pastors -- often those still new to a church -- the complexities of scriptural exegesis pale in comparison to the mystery confronting them when they set foot in the pulpit: the congregation. Looking out, they may wonder: “Who in the world are these people?”

Though most pastors are equipped to interpret a text, they don’t know how to “exegete” a congregation, said Nora Tubbs Tisdale, professor of homiletics at Yale Divinity School and author of “Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art.”

“Congregations really are like biblical texts, filled with layers of meaning,” Tisdale said. If pastors are to practice ministry in a way that is meaningful to a local community of faith, they must first understand that community, Tisdale said.

The need for such skills is a growing concern for denominational officials, especially those who supervise young pastors. While most pastors come to understand their congregations, that knowledge is usually acquired haphazardly, by trial and error, often at a high cost.

“It is increasingly an issue,” said the Rev. Gray Southern, superintendent for the Durham, N.C., district of the United Methodist Church. “There is often a lack of understanding that when a pastor arrives in a community, it has a culture of its own that precedes him or her, and the pastor has work to do to understand it.”

Gray still winces when he recounts the story of a well-intended student pastor who preached to his rural N.C. congregation on the virtues of veganism, which he considered the only authentic Christian diet. In a community that loved barbecue and valued hunting and farming with a sense of sacredness and stewardship, that was a sermon that “didn’t preach.”

The Rev. Dr. G. Wilson Gunn Jr., general presbyter for the National Capital Presbytery, which serves the Washington, D.C., region, said the inability to understand a congregation even may prompt some to leave ministry.

“This is perhaps the single shortfall that leads to pastoral departures, especially for folks just out of seminary,” he said. This fall, the presbytery will launch a facilitated group, required for pastors who have been ordained less than five years, to address the issue of understanding a congregation’s “story.”

Formation and transformation

In a world where pastors may feel pressured to use the latest gimmick to achieve success, some may be tempted to see congregational exegesis as a marketing technique, another way for pastors to boost popularity and exercise control.

But the only acceptable reason for understanding a congregation and its context is theological, experts say.

“It’s because you believe that God is interested in human beings as they actually are,” said James R. Nieman, professor of practical theology and specialist in homiletics at Hartford Institute for Religion Research. “It’s because God is interested in encountering us where we exist. We need to understand the place where people exist so that encounter can happen.”

Nieman, like Tisdale, is one of several scholars who study and write about contextual preaching and ministry. He has reservations about the “exegesis” metaphor, preferring instead the language of “context.”

He cautions that when a congregation is imagined as a text to be read, it easily can become an object, a thing subject to manipulation. Knowing a congregation’s context is not about finding “clever things to say that will appeal to them,” said Nieman, author of “Knowing the Context: Frames, Tools and Signs for Preaching.”

Terminology aside, he agrees with Tisdale, who says that Christian ministry and worship are about formation and transformation. Pastoral ministry must be fitting for a particular congregation, but also transformative.

“If we as preachers are going to proclaim the gospel in ways capable of transforming congregational identity, we first need to become better acquainted with the ways in which our people already imagine God and the world,” Tisdale wrote in “Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art.”

To do that, the pastor must gather as much information as possible, sift it and interpret it, much like an anthropologist or ethnographer studying a new culture, Tisdale said.

The process begins with a “listening heart,” she said.

“It is the notion that you go in with an attitude that says ‘I’m open to learning from you, so teach me,’” Tisdale said. “It’s the attitude that you’re going into a context not to fix someone, but to listen and learn, to understand them more deeply as a brother or sister in Christ.”

Both Tisdale and Nieman were alerted to the importance of congregational analysis early in their careers.

Serving four churches in rural Virginia right out of seminary, Tisdale ran head-on into culture shock. Sermons that would fly in one congregation would bomb in another. Though the churches virtually were indistinguishable demographically, each was unique.