Preaching “the Baptism of Repentance”: The Spiritual Formation and Renewal of Emerging Adults through the Service of the Word

Preaching “the Baptism of Repentance”: The Spiritual Formation and Renewal of Emerging Adults through the Service of the Word

Kit-ying LAW

The post-pandemic crisis of worship attendance and baptismal formation in Hong Kong Chinese churches reflects a profound liturgical-theological challenge concerning how the baptized are gathered and renewed by the Word, rather than a mere institutional decline or communication breakdown. Focusing on emerging adults aged 18-29, whose lives are marked by transition, fragmentation, vocational uncertainty, digital mediation, and fluid forms of belonging, this article argues that the Service of the Word provides a critical locus for spiritual formation and ecclesiastical formation reorientation. Drawing upon William H. Willimon's account of “peculiar speech” and preaching to the baptized, the argument contends that Christian proclamation must recover its baptismal grammar—namely repentance, death, and resurrection with Christ, the renunciation of false powers, incorporation into the church, and a renewed participation in God's mission.

This proposal is situated within the theological tensions generated by the New Homiletics since the 1970s. While acknowledging the pastoral value of inductive, narrative, and listener-sensitive preaching, a critique is offered against homiletical approaches that over-accommodate proclamation to human experience, therapeutic expectations, or consumer culture. In contrast, preaching baptismal repentance functions as an inherently ecclesiastical act within worship rather than a generic religious address to a secular audience. It speaks directly to a community already regenerated by water and the Word, thereby summoning believers repeatedly into the identity first conferred in baptism. Such preaching does not abandon pastoral sensitivity; rather, it relocates pastoral care within the church's primary act of hearing the Word of the Lord.

This argument is further developed through the resources of the liturgical movement, the lectionary tradition, and the recovery of the Psalms in worship. Within this framework, Taizé worship is understood not merely as a contemporary musical style, but also as a liturgical pattern of repetitive psalmic chant, silence, and contemplative listening that serves to support Lectio Divina and to deepen the congregation's participation in the Service of the Word. For retreatants at Taizé, the weekly rhythm from Friday to Sunday functions as a communal mini-Triduum, moving from Christ's passion and death to renewed participation in resurrection joy.

In conversation with Walter Brueggemann's movement from orientation through disorientation to new orientation, the Psalms provide emerging adults with a disciplined liturgical speech that enables them to inhabit instability without surrendering to despair. Taizé-style prayer, responsorial psalmody, intentional silence, and communal intercession serve as concrete practices that extend the Service of the Word into the ordinary rhythms of κοινωνία.

Finally, contemporary preaching is interpreted within a metamodern context, where hearers oscillate between suspicion and longing, irony and sincerity, critique and renewed participation. Samuel Wells's account of faithful improvisation within the drama of God's salvation offers a constructive ecclesiastical imagination for communities seeking to navigate the tension between baptismal identity and eschatological fulfillment. Ultimately, preaching "the baptism of repentance" restores the embodied and formative power of the Word, forming adults as emerging adults servants of God's Word through Scripture, fellowship, and sacramental memory.