I’ve been asked to speak to a local group of pastors today on theocentric preaching. I’ll only have about an hour, so it’s forced me to narrow what I want to say.
My notes for the seminar are available for download (in PDF - requires the free Adobe Reader):
I’m looking forward to today’s presentation. Should be fun.
Steve Mathewson has a great post on how to connect to the storyline of the Bible. This is one of the most important concepts to keep in mind for true theocentric preaching.
Ray Van Neste writes that, contrary to what many think, people do indeed want substantive sermons:
Preachers are often told that people really are not interested in substantive content in sermons. I know of pastors who have been severely criticized for dealing with texts that people did not find easily digestible, or useful enough in drawing crowds. Shallow, generic “life-thoughts” will appeal to some, but there is an increasing number of people who are crying out for substantive teaching as they yearn to know God and to have something weighty enough to serve as an anchor for their souls…
Let us give them real substance, explained and applied of course, but not diluted and dumbed down.
This blog began last year as I was writing my D.Min. thesis for Gordon-Conwell on the subject of theocentric preaching. This Friday, I’m in Boston to defend the thesis. I’m looking forward to the experience, although I suspect I’ll be a little nervous going into the meeting.
I probably won’t be posting the rest of the week. Hope to be back next week.
David Neff describes what happens when preachers forget to connect a text to the bigger story and instead trivialize the text, as he discovered while visiting a church on vacation:
The Old Testament reading from Exodus 3 told the story of Moses at the burning bush. There God reveals to Moses how he plans to fulfill the pledge he made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by using Moses to liberate their descendants from slavery. God not only renews his pledge in this story, he reveals his ineffable name. This is a pivot point in the Bible, a hinge on which the door of sacred history swings.
But the preacher existentialized and trivialized it. He talked not about the doors of history but of life’s stages. Moses was afraid to walk through the door set before him, the preacher said, but he walked through it anyway. We too face doors that we must walk through. End of message. No God. No divine plan revealed. No theophany. Just stages in the life cycle.
The bulletin promised a different preacher for the next Sunday, so I came back.
The next Sunday’s Old Testament lesson recounted the voice of God speaking out of the whirlwind to Job. In Job 38, God asks Job if he knows who “shut in the sea with doors, when it burst forth from the womb” and where he was when God “prescribed bounds for” the sea “and said, ‘Thus far shall you come - and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?” The Gospel lesson was from Mark 4, in which Jesus stills a storm on the lake and the awe-struck disciples wonder aloud, “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?”
The Scripture leaflet in the church bulletin placed this title over the Gospel story: “Jesus stills the storm and shows that he is Lord of all creation.” Mark took this event as a theophany. But the preacher took it as a story about our anxieties when we travel, and offered us a lame joke about a woman who was not comforted by knowing that three bishops were flying on her airplane. The sermon may have soothed some fears, but theologically it crashed and burned. I didn’t come back the third Sunday.
There’s a better way. “Not every sermon needs to rehearse this history,” Neff writes, “but every preacher should keep in mind that each scriptural passage is a part of the whole, a whole that has a narrative shape and that moves toward the End.”