Plurality in the Pulpit:
Preaching Together in Post-Christian Canada
Thursdays, February 12, 19, & 26, 2026
1:30 - 3:00 pm ET - online
Plurality in the Pulpit is a three-week online Learning Centre series for pastors, ministry leaders, and lay people, with or without theological training, who feel drawn to preaching in today’s post-Christian context. It’s shaped by decades of pastoral practice, team-based teaching, and lived faith, and it treats preaching not as a skill you master once, but as a craft learned slowly, over time, in community.
This series is based on the book, From Where We Stand: a handbook for preaching together by Randy Hein. Available for purchase here.
This series begins with a simple conviction: the church in Canada is healthiest when many voices help tell the story.
In a moment when preaching has too often harmed, manipulated, or alienated people, we’re invited to imagine something different. Not preaching as domination, but as hospitality. Not performance, but encounter. Not certainty for its own sake, but faithful witness. Preaching, at its best, tells an alternative story, one rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus amid the many competing narratives shaping our identities and imaginations here in Canada.
Grounded in the Canadian context and attentive to realities like deconstruction, declining trust in institutions, collective grief, and cultural fatigue, Plurality in the Pulpit invites both pastors and lay preachers to rediscover preaching as shared, hopeful work.
Together we will learn to:
Understand preaching as a communal responsibility
Engage Scripture with honesty, imagination, and humility
Respond to our cultural moment without defensiveness or fear
Develop sermons that invite encounter, healing, and participation
This series assumes preaching is never perfected, only practiced, and that formation happens best when we learn together.
Who This Series Is For
Pastors exploring team preaching or shared teaching models
Lay leaders discerning a call to preach
People who love Scripture but feel unsure about preaching today
Those navigating faith in post-Christian, deconstructing, or questioning spaces
Week 1: Why Preach? Telling an Alternative Story with a Plurality of Voices
Week 2: Preaching Together - Plural Voices, Shared Authority
Week 3: Preaching Forward - Practice, Craft, and Hope
Week One: Telling an Alternative Story with a Plurality of Voices
Preaching begins with a question: Why does this still matter?
In a world saturated with competing narratives of consumerism, fear, nationalism, and individualism, preaching dares to tell an alternative story.
Increasingly, this story is told not by a single voice, but by preaching teams - pastors and lay leaders, shaped by different lives and callings - whose shared witness reflects the richness and complexity of the church itself.
Drawing on the idea that transformation comes not through domination but through story and the need for it to come through a diversity of voices, together we'll explore preaching as an act of witness: naming the world as it is under the reign of Jesus and inviting the church in Canada to re-orient its life around that story. Together, we’ll reflect on preaching as a lifelong practice, shaped not only by study but by everyday life, grief and joy, work and play, worship and community. We will explore the biblical drama as an unfolding story and consider the preacher’s role in helping the church locate itself within it.
Week 2 - Preaching Together - Plural Voices, Shared Authority
The church in Canada doesn’t need fewer preachers. It needs more voices.
Together, we’ll explore preaching as a communal practice rather than a solo performance.
Drawing on the conviction that the Spirit speaks through a diversity of people, we’ll consider how pastors, tradespeople, caregivers, students, artists, and retirees each bring essential insight to the shared work of proclamation.
We’ll look at models of team preaching and teaching, the shifting nature of authority in a post-trust context, and the role of humility and discernment when preaching is shared. The focus is on cultivating responsibility together - rooted in Scripture, grounded in community, and shaped by trust rather than position.
Week 3 - Preaching Forward - Practice, Craft, and Hope
Preaching is a lifelong practice. Not something you master. Not something you ever quite finish learning.
In this final session, we turn toward how preachers and preaching teams keep growing - with confidence, humility, and room for the Spirit. Building on the earlier weeks, we’ll explore preaching as faithful improvisation within God’s ongoing story: attentive to Scripture, responsive to real communities, and open to what unfolds.
We’ll spend time with the craft of preaching, not to professionalize it, but to make it more accessible. Together we’ll demystify practices like exegesis, hermeneutics, and homiletics, and ask how they serve encounter rather than information. These disciplines aren’t about getting it right, they’re ways of listening more carefully: to the text, to the Spirit, and to one another.
We’ll also reflect on sustainable rhythms of preparation, feedback, and shared discernment, resisting both performance pressure and rigid formulas. Preaching is framed here as shared, hopeful work, rooted in Scripture, shaped by the Canadian and local context and trusting that the Spirit is still at work among us.
Presenter:
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There are two options to access the New Leaf Learning Centre: a monthly subscription or a one-series pass (below). For the monthly subscription, please visit here.
The suggested amount is $30 ($10/week); simply choose your amount in the drop-down menu and “sign up now.”
We would like for you to join us, so if you can’t afford the registration at this time, please reach out to us and we will make sure you are able to participate: admin@newleafnetwork.ca
