by Darryl on July 7, 2009
This blog post suggests that people are leaving the church because many sermons are polished, but are theoretical and lack the gospel:
Why are people leaving good, established, traditional churches with great facilities, full of quality individuals and extensive children’s programs to attend churches that meet in old schools? Because their pastors have fallen into this trap of theoretical preaching. Therefore, the message is no longer relevant. The pastors are not communicating the life-changing message of the gospel. They are delivering well-polished lectures with biblical points. People know the difference and they vote with their feet.
by Darryl on June 3, 2009
Paul Tripp blogs on the Bible as a theologically annotated story, which helps make sense of the story of our lives:
Your Bible is not a collection of religious stories. No, it is one story, the grand story of redemption. The Bible has one central character; God himself, specifically in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. From cover to cover the Bible is a narrative of the wondrous works of a God. Perhaps the four most important words in all of Scripture are the first four words; “In the beginning God…” You simply cannot understand yourself, your world, and the meaning and purpose of life unless you view them from the vantage point of the existence, character, and plan of God.
Tripp then explains five things that this story gives us. Read the whole post.
by Darryl on April 25, 2009
by Darryl on April 17, 2009
Karl Barth reflects on his approach to preaching after the Titanic sank:
During my time as a pastor… I often succumbed to the danger of attempting to get alongside the congregation in the wrong way. Thus in 1912, when the sinking of the Titanic shook the whole world, I felt that I had to make this disaster my main theme the following Sunday, which led to a monstrous sermon on the same scale.
Fred Sanders reflects on this sermon:
Barth’s seminary trained him in classically liberal Christianity. He entered the pulpit with a set of beliefs that were brittle, insufficiently biblical, and ultimately irrelevant to real people. In the Titanic sermon, you can see him trying to make his liberalism stretch to cover currrent catastrophes. It stretched enough to cover the Titanic, but just barely. This sermon was a real stinker, a real sinker, and it went under pretty fast. But Barth’s preaching career kept going until a few years later when the outbreak of World War I would be an even more titanic challenge to the weak Christianity of his seminary training. When that happened, Barth couldn’t stretch the thin commitments of liberalism to fit the real world.
That’s when he stopped preaching headlines, stopped trying to declare which economic system God hates or what God was up to in the latest disaster, and started preaching from what he called “the strange, new world of the Bible.” And that’s when he found that he had something to say which the world didn’t already know.
more (found via Trevin Wax)
by Darryl on April 2, 2009
I was struck by this thought in Why Johnny Can’t Preach. Gordon is responding to those who have dismissed preaching:
I believe the preaching in many churches is so poorly done that it is not, effectively, preaching…If the patients of a given hospital’s surgeons continue to die, we could, I suppose, abandon the scalpel. We might also consider employing it more skillfully.
My challenge…is this: Show me a church where the preaching is good, and the church is still moribund. I’ve never seen such a church. The moribund churches I’ve seen have been malpreached to death.
by Darryl on March 14, 2009
Kevin DeYoung has an excellent post based on T. David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach. Some excerpts:
After wrestling with the nature of preaching for 25 years, Gordon has concluded that the content of Christian preaching should be the person, character, and work of Christ. Kind of makes sense. Of course, preaching will included moral exhortation, but it is never appropriate, says Gordon, “for one word of moral counsel ever to proceed from a Christian pulpit that is not clearly, in its context, redemptive. That is, even when the faithful exposition of particular texts require some explanation of aspects of our behavior, it is always to be done in a manner that the hearer perceives such commended behavior to be itself a matter of being rescued from the power of sin through the grace of Christ” (70-71).
Gordon sees four alternatives to this type of gospel preaching: Moralism, How-To, Introspection, and Social Gospel/Culture War. That is, instead of preaching Christ crucified and the grace of God, we end up preaching “be better” or “here are three steps to being better” or “are you really a Christian?” or “we need to do more to fight the bad guys out there.” It’s not that we can’t do any of this as preachers–Gordon says there is a place for three of the four (everything but the how-to)–but “the pulpit is almost never the place to do this” (91). What must predominate in our preaching is the person, character, and work of Christ. And everything else should manifestly flow from these things…
more
Sounds like a book that’s worth getting.
by Darryl on March 2, 2009
A great article by Ed Stetzer and Jason Hayes on preaching to the younger unchurched:
Directly connected to the younger unchurched’s aversion to simplistic preaching is their aversion to “tidy” preaching. The Church has somehow forgotten that life is not always about having a neat, pat answer…
This means that the moralizing of our preaching past is out like the 80s. Our preaching should encompass more than do’s and don’ts. It should reach to the why and the how behind our proclamation. Great preaching requires mining truth down to its deepest core and assigning it to resonate within the hearts of our listeners. As a result, our preaching must go beyond appeals to behavior modification, beyond pithy platitudes on being happy and living well. Our preaching must wrestle with the meat and marrow of human existence, because this is what young adults are already doing. Otherwise it is like tossing a fortune cookie to a man starving in the desert.
by Darryl on February 12, 2009
An article by Lee Eclov:
A third way we fog God’s glory is by not showing how he stands behind texts that are not explicitly about him. When I see a play I like, I’m invariably curious about the playwright. What of her is written into this story? What prompted him to give such a powerful speech to that character? Many Bible passages don’t have explicit statements about the attributes of God, but there is no text that doesn’t reveal something wondrous of God. We don’t do the text justice if we don’t help people see God standing in the wings.
more
by Darryl on February 8, 2009
Found this story recently. It’s a sobering warning:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer studied for a year in New York City. He visited a number of churches there, and this is what he concluded: “One may hear sermons in New York upon almost any subject; one only is never handled, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, of the cross, of sin and forgiveness.”
Hope that’s not true of us.
by Darryl on February 5, 2009
I’ve heard a lot of sermons in the past 10 years or so that make me want to get up and walk out. They’re secular, psychological, self-help sermons. Friendly, but of no use. They didn’t make you straighten up. They didn’t give you anything hard. … At some point and in some way, a sermon has to direct people toward the death of Christ and the campaign that God has waged over the centuries to get our attention. (Garrison Keillor, Leadership, Vol. 6, no. 3)
