If a minister starts preaching and uses strange slanty-stories in the sermon that the congregation don’t understand then maybe it isn’t the place for it in church. Or at least there needs to be someone explaining it.
But how do you explain a poem without wrecking it?
Growing up Northern Presbyterian like yourself it was about explanation and information rather than imagination and metaphor. But then its not just in the church. My family would never be seen reading poetry, or looking at paintings and if they are paintings it would be landscapes of the North. Like Wellbrook Beetling Mill or The Sperrins. Realistic landscape or portraits where the only way to go with art.
Some maybe its part of our culture in general that doesn’t deal with the imagination the best

But I get your point.

“How do we allow for this and encourage this in the life of the church, when it’s so much easier to assume growth happens the same way for everyone, through the right kind of sermon or book or discipleship course?”

…Could it be something to do with allowing the body of Christ-ness shape the church, rather than the church trying to shape the body of Christ? By which I mean rather than moulding people into our lkeness, we help people discover how God has wired them, how the Spirit is changing them and providing outlets and freedom into which they bring who they are in their under-the-Lordship-of-Christness/following-Jesus-ness. From that point we each whollly understand and rejoice in the wholeness of the gospel for the wholeness of humanity and creation…?

Good comeback, Jayber.

I suppose the Ethiopian eunuch is an example of where Isaiah “told it slant”. The baffling mystery of the words transfixed the eunuch and it was at this point that Philip “told it straight”.

In the resurrection narratives there is also the regular theme of Jesus telling disciples everything “written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms”.

It is interesting that so many of the New Testament stories feature orthodoxy being given to people whose lives were already shaped and owned by orthopraxy.

Just as the centurion’s gifts to the poor had risen as a pleasing fragrance to heaven, are there people today who are unwittingly worshipping God, pleasing him, and ultimately his?

Is this the context in which “repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations”?

I’d forgotten that he also says that years later, someone sent him a transcript of the original sermon, and the line about confession and tears and great laughter wasn’t in it. It was improvised on the day. Buechner writes, “On just such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that, I suppose, hang the destinies of us all.”