Critical Concerns With Gospel Presentations

November 7, 2011November 7, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

I recently gave a lecture on the subject of Salvation to a great group of folks from various churches. I spoke candidly about some concerns I feel regarding how the gospel is preached in our churches. Let me share my concerns here. Some of these might be worth pondering further:

1. The Gospel is about Christ. As one writer has put it, it is about being brought into the intimate circle of God’s knowing himself in the Trinity. The focus is theocentric and Christocentric. It is not supposed to be me-o-centric, or behave-o-centric, or even creed-o-centric.

2. The Gospel requires clarity about which God we are referencing. As I have written on this site (and elsewhere), there is too much assumed awareness in terms of the identity of the God we are speaking about. The gospel often doesn’t feel like good news because listeners have zero desire to be brought into relationship with a distant despot (often their view of God is closer to a biblical understanding of Satan than the true God).

3. The Gospel is about relationship. It is not primarily about behavioural reform, or creedal assent, or social conformity. Don’t get me wrong, what people believe matters, and the gospel will bring transformation to a life. My concern is with the number of people in our churches who believe the right things, live the right way, and yet apparently, or admittedly, have no real love for Christ. 1Corinthians 16:22 – selah. Love cannot be forced, but functions via invitation and response.

4. The Gospel is, and is more than, justification by faith. This biblical truth has to be part of our gospel presentation, but it is not the full extent of the presentation. Whether we focus purely on justification, or on other aspects of the gospel, there is a danger that our message reinforces the very sin problem we believe the gospel solves. That is, listeners who are absolutely self-obsessed, can be offered the solution to their worst fears (hell), so that they get to go to a nice future (heaven) . . . all without any repentance toward Christ, without any change of heart, without any transformation from death to life.

More tomorrow . . .

Hearing the Text

November 4, 2011October 31, 2011 / Peter Mead / 4 Comments

This post is not about amplification, nor about the place and role of the Bible reading. Both issues would be worth considering, but not today. I’m talking about the message itself. It is troubling when you hear a sermon and can’t quite seem to hear the text coming through.

This is where the big idea approach to preaching is so on target. If the big idea of the text is the control mechanism during message formation, then the text should be coming through. Sadly though, too many preach generic messages that essentially disconnect from the text itself.

I suppose preaching is essentially very easy for some folks. A thirty-five minute message is really only a couple of minutes of “worked material” that builds tenuous links between the text and the message. Once the text is tied in somehow, the standard message content can flow freely without hindrance. Easy.

Some people do this by leaving the text behind. It is read, a couple of comments are made, and then the message moves on from the text into generic sermon zone.

Others do this by pulling from the text the three things they want to find there. Perhaps something pointing to human sin, and something to do with God, and maybe something along the lines of consequences, or perhaps a vague segue to Calvary, or whatever. Thus the narrative is plundered for intro links to the message the preacher intended to preach.

Let me encourage you to make the preaching text more than an introduction for the message, or an introduction for the points. Allow the text to be master over the sermon.

Seek to preach so that God’s Word is communicated and God’s voice is heard. Seek to preach so that listeners can clearly hear the text and its influence on the entire message. Seek to genuinely preach the Word.

How Long, O Preacher?

November 3, 2011October 31, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I’ve written before about sermon length debates, and may do so again. But this post is not about sermon length. It is about the ticking clock. From the moment the sermon begins, how long until . . .

Tick. . .

1. Relevance – That is, until the listeners get the sense that this message is relevant to them. Don’t leave application until a little section at the end, that is way too long. Show them from the very beginning that this preacher, this message, this text, is relevant to them.

2. Grace – That is, until the listeners are clear that Christianity is not about our performance and diligent dutiful behaviour. Don’t preach behavior and conformity and religiosity and law for most of the message and then throw in a bit of grace at the end. It is easy to do a law before grace approach that doesn’t just short-change grace, it positively rips it off. Undermine the religious misunderstanding, don’t reinforce it. Too many are still convinced the Bible is all about the rules we need to strive to obey, but are sadly unaware of the radical grace that stirs inside-out life change.

3. Delight – That is, until the listeners get a sense from your demeanour or expression that knowing Christ is a good thing. It is easy, in the seriousness of the preaching event, to fail to show the joy of the Lord. The pulpit is not the place for crass humour or inappropriate levity, but if we don’t have reason to be joyful, then nobody does!

4. Smile – That is, make sure number 3 shows in more than your words. Just saying you are joyful doesn’t convince anyone if there is no other hint of it!

5. Shuffling – Ok, changing category slightly, but how long until your listeners are shuffling, coughing, looking around, fidgeting, etc.? If this happens during your message, presume the problem is your preaching, not their level of maturity and spirituality. In fact, this may occur sooner that you’d like, because 1, 2, 3 and 4 have not come as soon as they should have.

This is a random list, but I’m sure other things could be added where the clock is really ticking!

Vinegar and Preaching

November 2, 2011October 31, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I never liked vinegar growing up. In recent years I’ve developed an appreciation for balsamic vinegar on salad, or cider vinegar on crisps (i.e. chips if you’re across the Atlantic). But I don’t think I’ll ever develop a taste for it in the pulpit.

What am I saying?

1. The seriousness of the message can cause us to come across as sour. The spiritual deadness of the lost, the reality of coming judgment for those who spurn God’s love in the Son, the harsh effects of sin in this broken world . . . these things all add up so that we don’t feel great levity in the pulpit. Fair enough. But let’s not give the impression that there is no joy in knowing God, or that the news we bring is something other than great news.

2. Some preachers turn every positive statement into vinegar by forced applications. “Christ has overcome the world! Have you?” or “So husbands, will we go from here and love our wives as Christ loved the church? Probably not.” Be careful not to rush to application in such a way that every positive becomes a burden. We should be relevant in our preaching, but often the relevance should not come from what we must do, but from leaning into what Christ has done.

3. Jesus wasn’t sour. We are His ambassadors. This means that we don’t just represent God’s Word (as in the content), but also we represent God completely – our demeanour, our character, our emotion, etc. Do people who hear you preach get the sense that Jesus is winsome, compelling, engaging, or do they assume he must also be sour, bitter and twisted?

Let’s prayerfully ponder this issue, lest we pickle the people in the pews.

Bring Back Ba’al?

November 1, 2011November 1, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Following a recent set of posts on this site, I’ve added a further piece on the Cor Deo blog. Should we bring back Ba’al? I have no desire to promote any despotic and demonic deities, but I do wonder if we are too quick to assume that people are on the same page when it comes to the term “God.” As preachers this is critical. I was listening to Mike Reeves again recently at Transformission (click here to find Mike’s talks), and he made a very clear point in his first talk about why the good news isn’t typically perceived to be good news by the world around us: because of the god they think we are inviting them to. Anyway, should we bring back the ba’als? Click here to see today’s post . . .

Not Even a Hint – Racism in the Pulpit

October 31, 2011October 31, 2011 / Peter Mead / 9 Comments

The last couple of weeks have seen two high profile footballers accused of making racist remarks to opponents. The world is rightly disgusted by this, even in the context of highly competitive and even combative sporting battle. How much more should we in the church avoid all hints of racism?

If you are an overtly racist preacher, this post will not get to the heart of the issue. I am writing more for those who don’t try to support a race discrimination position by twisting Scripture and becoming defensive. I am writing for preachers who may accidentally give a hint of racism without intending to do so.

Here are three ways I have seen preachers fall into hints of racism that might prove helpful.

1. Cut out references to a “black heart” – Maybe in the context of a mimed drama it might be ok, but probably not. Because of the way “black” and “white” are used as race markers, we have to be careful in using them as references to sinfulness and righteousness. The Bible does speak of white robes, but a black heart? Though your sins be as scarlet, sure, but not a black heart. I heard one preacher make reference to “your disgusting black heart.” He did so seemingly oblivious to who was sitting in front of him. And to make things worse, he himself was from a place associated with racism in the past. Probably best to just avoid the use of “black” as a reference to sin. Not even a hint.

2. Generally don’t mimic accents from the pulpit – Again, I haven’t heard this done in a mocking way. But it can feel mocking nonetheless. I have experienced this with US folks faking a British accent, and with British folks faking a US accent (neither are very successful, which can lead to the feeling of implicit mockery). When preaching Bible stories we are preaching about people in the Middle East, or Africa, or Mediterranean Europe. Don’t fake an accent if it could be taken as mockery. Not even a hint.

3. Watch out for easy targets – In the English context there is much talk about racism and wanting to kick it out of sports, TV, etc. Yet there seems to be open season on anti-American comments, or anti-French jokes. I’m fully English and patriotically so, but I find myself reacting inside to anti-US comments from preachers. In the context of the body of Christ united across Jew/Gentile lines, it just doesn’t seem appropriate. Let’s go for a “not even a hint” approach, why not?

Are there other ways preachers inadvertently give a hint of racism in their preaching?

The Memorable Outline Myth – Part 2

October 29, 2011October 29, 2011 / Peter Mead / 9 Comments

So yesterday I did the unthinkable. I pulled the pin from a grenade in the sacred space where the notion of a memorable outline is revered as the chief end of preaching. I suggested that people might not be best helped by a set of textual labels that typically lack applicational relevance. I even suggested that people might not review what we have made so memorable!

As I wrote yesterday, if the text yields a clear and applicational sequence of thoughts, by all means preach that. But I fear that in many cases a pre-commitment to paralleled alliterated points may undermine the following aspects of preaching:

1. Is the text being presented authentically? If you are dissecting and squeezing the text into an outline form, you may well be doing it an injustice. Very few texts are actually written as equal paralleled thoughts. Don’t give people a clever outline at the expense of really opening up the inspired text.

2. Is the listener motivated to return to this text, and the rest of the Bible? If they feel incapable of “finding the three points” in a passage, they are less likely to be opening their Bibles (which is what they really need on Thursday, not just a vague memory of three uninspired descriptive labels from Sunday).

3. Is energy poured into future recall being lost from present impact? Would it be better to have them feel the full force of the text’s impact at the point of preaching, and then be motivated to read more later in the day and the next day, rather than striving to cram in uninspired labels as a memory aid to help them remember a message that may have been only somewhat impactful on Sunday?

4. Is the main idea being undermined by a commitment to a longer list of lower value statements? If you put your energy into one carefully crafted applicational representation of the main idea of the text, that single sentence summary would be more memorable and reach further and make more of a difference than a set of well-stated points that reflect smaller segments within the text. Let the whole strike home to the heart in a single thought.

5. Is the projection of the outline teaching listeners bad listening habits? That is, are we communicating to them that the point of preaching is primarily education, that the goal of listening is recall and that the measure of spirituality is the taking of notes? It’s weird, but when my wife opens her heart to me and speaks, I don’t reach for a pad and a pencil, I open my heart and I listen.

The Memorable Outline Myth

October 28, 2011October 28, 2011 / Peter Mead / 5 Comments

I think this post will tread on some toes. I do it in love.

I think there is a myth among preachers and among listeners, a myth that may be distracting energy from and dissipating the potential impact of the preaching event. It is the myth of the importance of conveying a memorable outline. It goes something like this:

Everybody knows that good preaching will offer a memorable outline of the points of the message, a set of “hooks to hang your thoughts on,” as it were. With this memorability, listeners will be able to go away and recall the message later in the week, thereby being changed by an encounter with God’s Word throughout the week. In fact, this is so important, why not project the outline on the screen – it seems silly not to.

A couple of quick challenges, then I’ll suggest what may be lost in this pursuit of memorability.

A. How often do those who actually write down the outline go on to review and benefit from it, let alone those who walk out of church with just their memories to rely on?

B. How often do preachers actually make their points applicational so that remembering the outline will be life changing, rather than offering labels or titles for content that functions essentially as a set of poor commentary headings?

Now I know that this post is throwing a couple of grenades into a pretty sacred space for many preachers. Let me offer a token caveat – if a text yields a clear, memorable and applicational sequence of points, praise the Lord and preach it!

I do believe every sermon should have an outline. I am not promoting confused preaching. But I think the outline is really the servant of the preacher. The outline is for my sake, not theirs. There are other things that are much more important for them to feel the impact of and walk away with.

Next time I will finish the post by suggesting various aspects of preaching that may be being undermined by this memorable outline myth. And I won’t wait until Monday, I’ll post it tomorrow.

Easier to Read One

October 27, 2011October 27, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

The other day I spent a great morning with a friend reading through some fairly weighty church history. For a couple of hours we stretched our thinking and responded with heavy hearts to an in-depth overview of medieval theology. One paragraph in particular caught my attention and my mind went back to this blog, especially in light of the Lit! review a couple of days ago.

I won’t try to give all the details here, but essentially the book was engaging a debate over the state of theological thought in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Was the fourteenth century about decline into chaos, or was it heading toward the harvest of medieval theology? And then what happened in the fifteenth century? Was it all progress and growth, or was there largely a retreat to the great masters of the thirteenth century? And our thoughts should go on to consider what really happened in the sixteenth century as well – was that all progress, or was there some significant relapses there too?

Your brain might be stretching trying figure out who was around in those centuries, but that’s not the point, here’s the sentence:

[The intellectual decline is attributed to] “the indolence of ‘easy-going scholars,’ who found it ‘so much more convenient to study one author rather than ten or twenty.'”

Ok, one more bit, then back to today:

Like war-weary Europeans who surrendered to strong-arm rule in the late fifteenth century, many argument-weary scholars appear to have given their minds passively to the intellectual giants of the past on the eve of the Reformation.

So fast forward to today. For most Christians, the preacher is the closest they typically come to a Christian scholar. But the question that sits up to be answered is fairly obvious, I think. Is my church being fed by preacher(s) who are enriched by good reading, or by preacher(s) who are “easy-going scholars?” It is, after all, so much more convenient to study one author rather than ten or twenty.

If you’ve read this site with any sort of frequency, I’m sure you’ll have noticed that my real passion is to get preachers to genuinely preach the Word (rather than just preaching from, or using, or in association with, the Word).

But I would also encourage wider reading too. Some preachers hardly read anything, and there is a “thin-ness” to their ministry. Other preachers constantly read one author, and there is a “superficial tone of emulation” in their ministry. Let’s be preachers who read, who read widely, who read quality, and who read so as not to give our minds passively to intellectual giants of the past, or the present.

Tweaking Ingredients in Preaching

October 26, 2011October 23, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

I spent my first few years in Italy. One enduring result on this is a long-term liking for Nutella. The original and best chocolate hazelnut spread! Australians might love their vegemite and the Americans their peanut butter, but this European can’t get away from Nutella. Except for when I see it in American shops, that is.

In recent years I have seen it appearing in the grocery store during my visits to the US, and have bought a jar or two. Same jar, same wrapping, same colour, but not same taste. One ingredient is different – just the oil. One ingredient on a long list, but it makes a difference.

The same is true with preaching. One ingredient modified slightly and the whole product can taste wrong. Here are some examples of tweaks that might ruin preaching:

1. Tweaking the tone from good news. Same passage, same illustrations, same length of sermon, but if you replace the good news aspect of the message with pressure to conform, guilt for failure or legalistic righteousness, I guarantee the message won’t taste the same!

2. Tweaking “of” to “from.” This is a common one. Instead of passionately pursuing the preaching of the message of the text, many preachers choose instead to preach their message from the text. That is, they use the biblical text as a starting point, but at the end the listeners don’t feel they know the text any better than at the beginning. Don’t preach from a text, preach the text. (I think this is the hardest one to spot in a mirror – every preacher thinks they are explaining the text. Perhaps you should ask someone who knows the Bible well and be ready to listen to what they tell you!)

3. Tweaking the text to fit an outline. Some preachers don’t go near this neighbourhood, but some seem to live there. Its where the text is twisted slightly to help it fit in a certain outline. Perhaps a three-point alliterated outline. Is that really what the writer was doing in the text? Was that his intended outline? If not, you may leave a sour taste for listeners who sense that you’ve done a bit of a number on the text!

These feel like relatively small adjustments, but they leave a very different impression.