Walter Brueggemann on what does, and does not, happen when local congregations meet, in a podcast interview on Homebrewed Christianity, ep. 27, October 8, 2008, a month before the 2008 U.S. presidential election. This excerpt begins approximately five minutes from the end of the interview.

What we have to start with is that the biblical text is more interesting and important than anything else we have to say. But that requires a great deal of reeducation of the pastor and the congregation because so many pastors and so many congregations are looking for simplistic answers that are clever and cute. And there aren’t any clever, cute answers that will now help us in the situation we’re in. It just requires harder work than that.

[W]e’ve done this incredible dumbing-down. We need to work at helping congregations engage in hard intellectual work. But that’s very difficult.

I went to an Episcopal church yesterday and it was marvelous. But I looked around during the scripture and nobody was listening. In fact, they had a high school girl read it, and they didn’t even have the microphone on. Nobody was even upset or restless that they couldn’t hear the text. Because they don’t expect anything from the text.

Well, I don’t blame those priests. I blame the whole church culture that has communicated to people that nothing important is happening here. And how we get at that requires great intentionality now. And it’s going to be a longterm comeback. I’m not sanguine about doing something between now and the election. We gotta do what we can do.

We are in a sorry state in the church. A couple Sundays of heroic action doesn’t cut any ice, I think.

What we have to help people see is that when the local congregation meets, we are engaged in an act of alternative imagination. People don’t know that.

Annie Dillard says in one of her books [Holy the Firm] that if people understood what was going on in church they would wear crash helmets. But nobody wears crash helmets. Nobody even stays awake. We’re in a very sorry way. To recover from that is huge now.