Today’s post matters to preachers. We want to influence, but do we take an inappropriate shortcut? That is, a shortcut to the wrong end of a one-way street. A shortcut that takes us into a dangerous neighbourhood where our influence may prove to be counter productive? To go to the post, click here.
Christianity
Two Ways to Feed 3
Just one more post for this week. I’ve been (over)working the analogy of preaching as culinary work on behalf of others, suggesting that there are better and worse ways to “cook the meal” of a sermon. Just one more thought:
There are those cooks who bring out the best in ingredients, and there are those that try to use ingredients to do what the cook wants.
Perhaps you’ve tasted cooking that really makes the most of what is in it. Each vegetable prepared to flourish in its own way, the sauce offering the subtle richness and blend of each ingredient, and so on. It takes a good cook to “honour” the ingredients in this way. And then there is the bland cooking that tries to force every ingredient into the same mould. Meat is meat, so turn it into parched tree bark. If vegetables are boiled long enough, even the colour can join the flavour in the evaporated exit. And perhaps a really bad cook will have the ingredients for one meal, but try to make another meal anyway, just because they want to.
So it is with preaching. We are working with the absolute finest material – the inspired record of divine revelation. There is a wonderful variety of genres, sub-genres, plots, themes, grand sweeps and tiny details. Each writer’s personality subtly coming through, along with the Author’s thumbprint throughout.
Some preachers seek to honour the “ingredients” they are working with. They observe and analyse and consider the text carefully and prayerfully. They seek to reflect the text and they make it their goal to say the text’s something, not just their own anything. They seek to say what the text says and do what the text does. And in the process they both nourish and delight their congregations.
Others treat the Bible as a bland set of staple ingredients. Mix freely, swirl it all together, bake for an inadequate time, and slop it up. Essentially the goal is not to say the text’s something, or even the Bible’s something (although that will be the claim). Rather, the goal is to say the chef’s something. I wanted to make a chicken curry. Didn’t have the right ingredients, but I made one anyway.
What a privilege to help people not only enjoy the richness of the Bible, but to introduce them to the wonderful God who gave it, and himself, to us.
Two Ways to Feed 2
Yesterday I suggested that offering a meal is more loving than throwing a shower of vitamin pills at someone. I’m not sure I want to overwork the analogy, but there is infinite variety even in the category of meal. Here are some thoughts on pulpit cooking options. I’ll let you evaluate each one:
1. Fast Food Preaching. It is prepared quickly, in a very standardized process, with standard content, high on application, but almost bereft of nutrition. Some people get addicted to it. Some people grow sick of it.
2. Home Delivered Fast Food. It is the same as number 1, but you didn’t even have to go and get it. It was delivered by the internet delivery moped and saved you a whole load of time.
3. Home Delivered Fast Food Stolen. Once you get it delivered, you hide the box and pretend that you cooked it. There is a sensed lack of integrity, but you think everyone’s nice comments are genuine.
4. Thrown Together Left-Overs. Again, short on time, you pull together scraps from here and there. They don’t necessarily go together, but what you heard from him and what you read over there and what is on your mind once you pause to think about it . . . all served on one sermon plate.
5. Good Food Disconnected. This is better, you have done some cooking. But you haven’t grasped that while all food may be good food, not all good food goes together on the same plate.
6. One Favourite Recipe. You have learned to do a mean chili con carne, so that’s what you cook. Every time. Guests coming? Chili con carne. Sorted. Unless, of course, they come twice. Works better if you are a traveling chef, unless people swap venues and then things get complicated 🙂
7. Good Ingredients Cooked the Wrong Way. You take your chili con carne recipe and just replace the ingredients. Problem is that it doesn’t work with a lamb joint, cooking chocolate or a fruit selection. Forcing every Bible text into the same sermon shape may not be such a great solution!
8. Good Ingredients Cooked the Right Way. Please cook salmon differently to beef. Deal with each text and congregation and situation according to what and who they are.
9. The Fast Feast. Seven good but random courses back to back in half an hour, without either break in delivery or connection in content. Not ideal.
10. Non-gourmet home cooked healthy meal. It isn’t exciting. It won’t win a prize. But it may win hearts as you give of yourself to those you love. And over time, it will generate health like nothing else.
Two Ways to Feed
There are essentially two ways to feed someone. I may decide to chase further possible analogies tomorrow, but for now, just two ways:
1. The pill shower. Next to our stove we have a funny shaped little dish. It usually contains some real treasures. It is where my wife puts her supplements for the day. There will be vitamin C for the immune system and various B vitamins for energy levels, and perhaps some fish oils for joint and heart health. Every one of those pills has real value for health.
Let’s say I come home from work and join my family at the dinner table. We pray and then my wife unveils the meal for the day – a randomly shuffled assortment of vitamin pills from the funny little dish!
Healthy? Technically it is.
Satisfying? Nope.
Sustainable for long-term health and growth? Hardly.
But is this not the way some of us preach the Bible to people in the church? An assortment of truth nuggets randomly assorted and presented in some manner as a “healthy diet”?
There is an alternative:
2. The meal. A meal tends to consist of a restricted number of elements carefully prepared and served in an appropriate order and combination. A meal can be healthy, or unhealthy. It can be gourmet or a highly processed “ready meal.” Oh the potential points of connection are multiplying!
Preaching a meal means preaching a passage or a small combination of passages, rather than assorted truth nuggets from all over the place. It means thinking about who you are preaching to and what they might need, rather than a standardized packaging of recommended daily allowance supplements. It means building long-term health and growth and even taking issues of satisfaction into account (although not exclusively, of course, or they may get a case of itchy-ear-itis).
Meals tend to be different each time, whereas a diet of supplements would always feel the same.
Let’s preach meals, seems like a proven and healthy approach to feeding folks. I’ll let you ponder the multiplying analogies. . . do you preach fast food, pre-packaged or home-cooked, etc.?
Point 3
Finishing off the list of potential dangers that come from pouring our efforts into generating memorable outlines, rather than seeing the sermon outline as our strategic plan (which is for us, rather than primarily for them). The strategy and the weapon should not be confused in warfare, and the strategy / arrow confusion in preaching can undermine the process. So continuing on:
4. The potential for present impact can be dissipated by energy poured into future recall. Let the present message mark deeply now, rather than relying on recollection later when impact may be diminished. In fact, preach in such a way that present impact is as profound as possible, combined with motivation to get listeners back into the Bible on an ongoing basis. (What if people don’t feel capable of finding the three brilliantly stated points when they look at the passage again?)
5. The arrow of the main idea can be lost in the listing of lower level sub-points. Deliver one idea effectively and you will see lives transformed. Overwhelm people with numerous sub-points and impact won’t be the description being used of the preaching.
6. The listener can develop the notion that preaching is about poor education. You know the type of education I mean, listening for the points that will be on the test, then forgetting everything two days later. Preaching can imply life is like that, but it isn’t. We need to know someone, much more than we need to know lots of things. Spirituality is not defined by taking notes or filling in the blanks. As I’ve written before, “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.”
I could add more thoughts, but will leave it there. Feel free to add more, or disagree, of course (after all, taking away the transfer of outlines from our view of preaching is not a small move).
Point 2
Periodically I like to come back to this issue of outlines and whom they serve. The sermon outline is the preacher’s strategy, but it is not the actual “weapon.” If we think of the message purpose as the target, and the message idea as the arrow, then the outline is the strategy. Strategy is important, but the goal is for those on the receiving end to leave with the arrow firmly implanted in their hearts and lives. The strategy gets it there, but if they go away with greater awareness of strategy than arrow, then something has not quite worked.
Am I suggesting that making an outline memorable is not the main goal for the preacher? Yes. Am I saying that a memorable outline is wrong and should not be offered? Not at all. If the outline happens to be memorable, that is fine. But the preacher’s energy is better spent getting the listener into the passage and getting the main point of that passage into the listener’s heart with a clear sense of its relevance to their lives and the encouragement to respond appropriately to the God whose heart is revealed in the text.
Allow me to offer some of the potential dangers of focusing on creating a memorable outline:
1. The focus can easily be shifted from the passage to the preacher’s craft. This is where the listener is listening for the preacher’s message based on a text, rather than looking for the message of the text.
2. The biblical passage may not be preached honestly. This is what happens when a text is squeezed into an outline form, rather than having the message shaped and controlled by the text.
3. The listener can be drawn toward the clever preacher, rather than the wonderful God. This doesn’t mean that we preach dull and plain so that all focus can go to Christ. Rather, we need to beware that our cleverness doesn’t become a distraction from the God speaking in the Bible.
I’ll finish off the list tomorrow…
Point 1
Some quick-fire suggestions to strengthen the points part of sermons:
1. Actually say something. Don’t settle for titles, instead write full points. Make a statement. Declare something. It is better to have a full sentence than a label. Labels and titles are written communication, but spoken communication doesn’t use titles. When we tell a story from our day, we don’t use titles:
“So while I was filling the car at the petrol station I noticed that the tyre had a bulge in the side. I checked it, and sure enough, a hernia in the tyre wall. Tyre Replacement. So I took the car into town and ended up having two tyres replaced at the place next to the car dealer. It was not cheap, I can tell you, but safer than . . .”
We don’t speak like that, so let’s not preach like that.
2. Try to make the point contemporary rather than historical. Why talk for several minutes about the ancient near eastern historical background to a point made by a letter writer back in the day…and then make an application before moving on. Listeners could well have moved on long before you get to the application. Why not make the point itself relevant to us and then support that from the text?
3. If you want to write a commentary, write it, don’t preach it. The last two points really mean that we are not called to preach a commentary (with its historically rooted titles for sections). So while commentaries may be useful in our preparation, they can never do the work for us.
Lots more to say, what would you add?
Jesus vs Religion – Honouring God cont.
This week I have used Edlredge’s Beautiful Outlaw as the springboard for a series of posts. While I can’t affirm everything in the book, his chapter on the dangers of religion really did stir my thinking and for that I am thankful. So let’s finish the list, three more points that effectively continue the thought of honouring God.
8. A trivial morality prevails.
“Trivial morality takes the severe beauty of holiness and makes it ridiculous.” (176) Churches can easily fall into straining gnats and swallowing camels. Eldredge points to a church that won’t say the word “hell” out loud. Another that rejected a pastoral candidate because he occasionally drinks wine with a meal (an elder hit him with a Bible and said, “you better read this, son!” . . . get out of there, Mr Candidate, find a Christian church to pastor!) You can fill in the equivalents in your context. Trivial morality undermines the gospel. We must not fall into it ourselves, or preach in such a way as to reinforce it in others.
9. The system operates on the fear of man.
“’What good people might think rules this world.’ Members toe the line not because they are captured by God, but because they’re afraid of what the gossip mill will say if they don’t.” (176)
Is it possible for a church to be controlled by the fear of man? There is no doubt about that. Is it possible for a preacher to bring about change? That is not easy. No single sermon solutions here. But drip feeding through consistent preaching and personal example, combined with a bit of Jesus-like radical challenge when appropriate (pray for wisdom and courage!) . . . it must be possible to win such a church to the gospel.
10. False humility is honoured.
“A woman told me that when she comes into her morning prayer time it is with the posture of, ‘Who am I, a sinner, to come before you, a holy God?’ (She was holding her hands above her head as if to shield herself from a deserved wrath.) Sounds holy. It’s disgusting. You don’t see a whiff of this in those who knew they were the lowest—the woman who anoints Jesus, the leper, Peter after renouncing him three times. They come running to Jesus. False humility is religious.” (177)
That is quite the list. I hope it has been a helpful prompt to prayerful Bible reading and reflection. Being “anti-religious” can be a quasi-religion, so we do need wisdom here. There is much that has been helpful in the traditional forms of Christianity across the world. But if we are honest, a good tradition is always one person away from being a deadening influence for Christ. The problem ultimately is not with Christianity in its many local expressions. The problem is with our flesh that will still push intimacy with God away and replace it with personally driven performance.
Jesus vs Religion – Honouring God
So I am halfway through Eldredge’s list of ten indicators of religious distraction from true Christ-centred Christianity. Let’s see if I can finish the list in a single post, actually I won’t bother trying. I’ll finish the list tomorrow. All to do with honouring God:
6. The holiness of God is taught by making him “unknowable” or unapproachable.
“God is spoken of as a mystery so high and lifted up we cannot possibly be friends. The talk may be very intellectual and philosophical; it may be hyperspiritual talk of the heavens; it might be existential “dark night of the soul” stuff. Do you ever hear Jesus talk like this? Of course there are mysteries to God, but Jesus came to make God known.”
The incarnation is about the unseen God being seen, and touched, and met, and talked to, and heard, and known. The New Testament critiques the proto-gnostic notions of an un-incarnate Christ because that tendency was in the churches. In modified forms it still is. While it may get us kudos as we stand at the church door and shake hands with the impressed, let us instead offer them the only begotten God who has made the Father fully known.
7. Holiness is substituted with rule-keeping.
The church seems to propagate technical righteousness and the minding of evangelical manners. Is this what holiness is all about? If we can’t make the connection between holiness and the fellowship of the Trinity, but only speak of separation from sinful acts, then perhaps our view of holiness is too superficial. If the preacher doesn’t get it, the congregation have little chance.
Tomorrow I’ll finish the list . . .
Jesus vs Religion – Serving God
Beautiful Outlaw by John Eldredge offers a colourful portrait of the personality of Jesus, and warns of the deadening effects of religious mutations of Christianity. While we may not embrace all of Eldredge’s theology, let’s not miss the accuracy of his diagnosis when it comes to the dangers of religiosity. We all fall into such mutations of Christianity, so this week I am probing a little from the perspective of a preacher. We’ve thought about loving and knowing God. How about serving Him?
4. Religious activity is confused with commitment to Christ.
“To draw near to God requires a church function of some kind. Church activities are considered more important than any other type of activity. Those who do not engage regularly in religious gatherings are suspect. To question the centrality of church functions immediately places the questioner outside the faithful. Leaders get very defensive about church—but to suggest this fact is to incur something along the lines of malice.” (173-4)
The most committed to Christ must be the people who attend the most meetings. Really? It only takes you missing one meeting to learn one thing: people don’t know your circumstances or your motives. Perhaps you were caught in a conversation of eternal significance, perhaps you were serving God in a private way that should not be broadcast to the church, perhaps your family needed you there. If you ever chose to stay home and didn’t feel guilt before God (although in some churches you certainly would feel guilt before others) . . . then you know one thing. You cannot assume and judge negatively when others miss meetings. I know of preachers preaching pressure to attend faithfully. If that is you, cut it out. Preach Christ.
5. Christian service substitutes for friendship with Jesus.
“Fighting for a cause becomes the expression of devotion to Jesus. . . . Exhausted Christians working for noble causes, but they do not report a daily personal encounter with Jesus. Over time the work itself substitutes for Jesus, and seeking him seems harder than doing more for him. Martha, Martha. Loving Jesus comes first; out of this will flow whatever work in the world he has for us to do.” (174)
There is a reason that many pastors and preachers suffer burnout and depression – they lose their grip on being lead worshippers and lead responders and lead delighters in God. And they become lead activists in the church. Busy, busy. Exhaustion. But loving God always comes before loving people in the presentation of the Great Commandment. We cannot, we must not, fall for the lie that we are loving God by loving people. Love God first. Let him minister to you before you minister to others!
Live that, and then preach that. It might rescue your church.
Biblical Preaching 