We’re at the confluence of a few different currents in our cultures that influence our preaching. We’re in a discipleship crisis, where many Christians don’t know the faith. The knowledge of Christianity in the wider world is diminishing, certainly younger people aren’t reacting against it they simply aren’t familiar with it. At the same time there’s this interesting rise of people, especially men, interested in church through having interacted with a constellation of intellectuals, many of whom aren’t Christians themselves.
The last one of those can be overblown; I’ve seen it called a ‘revival,’ it certainly isn’t. It’s probably quite a small phenomenon, but anecdotally lots of churches I know report one or two men interested in exploring Christianity from these beginnings. They want to take it seriously and they want to read the Bible. They seem to be most likely to turn up in more ‘liturgical’ churches, and especially those that look like churches on the outside.
At the same time, especially in the charismatic world, we’ve been making our preaching simpler and more accessible for decades now. This probably started in an effort to help those from the outside understand, compounded by the lack of training for many preachers, we’ve ended up with what I’m going to call froth. Now, this is a little unfair of me, and I’m trying to capture a few different things in one word, but by froth I mean preaching that is primarily about us rather than God, preaching that turns each passage into ‘God loves you’ (he does!) without looking at the contours of the text, preaching that ignores the difficult or more confrontational things the Bible has to say, and preaching that has little relation to the Bible at all.
It would be unfair to say all charismatic preaching is like this. It clearly isn’t. I’m not even sure I’d be accurate in saying ‘most,’ but I hope we can all agree it exists. It’s also true that other sectors of UK evangelicalism have different challenges. ‘Conservative evangelical’ circles—always a confusing name since you can be theologically conservative and evangelical without fitting in this group, it’s more a vibe than a theology, though they might dispute this—tend to have more serious preaching. Their crime is more likely to be that it’s dull, but I’m not sure I can speak to that with such knowledge.
Here’s my point: those who come into your churches who are exploring faith don’t want froth. They expect it to be weird, they certainly don’t expect to understand it easily, but they are curious. Again, I’m generalising about huge swathes of people, but unbelievers don’t want froth. Some Christians might.
Add to that our increasingly post-Christian context: Andrew Wilson argues that post-Christians have very similar questions to most Christians today. That’s because Christians live in the same cultural milieu as everyone else, and it’s because we haven’t been that well catechised, but almost whyever we find ourselves here and however much we lament it, there is a gift in the middle of it; everyone you’re preaching to has the same questions. Answer them.
Many of the people you’re preaching to want something serious with weight to it, in a world where everything solid has melted into air. Those who don’t want something solid are mostly Christians who need a gentle kick in the behind. Remembering that a preacher’s job is to offer Christ, but in so doing comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. In other words, don’t give anyone froth. It’s a waste of their time and of yours. Give people something real, something weighty, something deep. Give them Jesus.
The Deep Weird
Sometimes this will mean you preach the deep weird. The Bible is unfathomably strange. The Old Testament is full of all sorts of things that arrest the modern mind. We want to explain away things that we find embarrassing. We shouldn’t. We should allow the Bible to speak.
This might mean that sometimes we come across, for example, an Old Testament passage that speaks of the gods of other nations as though they were real. “Obviously they’re not real, only God is real,” we hasten to say. Not so fast, friends. That’s true only in a really technical sense of the word ‘real’ that isn’t what people are hearing; it’s a bit like saying we don’t exist, technically true for a very specific definition of ‘exist’ that is not what anyone is saying or hearing when you say that. Only God is true reality, Being, existence, sure. But the gods of the nations were historical, evil, personalities. We call them demons. The Old Testament is pretty clear on this. It’s embarrassing to believe in the modern age, I agree, but let’s preach the text. They are real and they do hate you. I wonder where the powers and principalities are now? That’s worth exploring in your preaching. More importantly, I wonder if Christ defeated and shamed them at the cross? He did! You should definitely preach that.
This also might mean that we have to wrestle with texts we find difficult. The genocide that the people of Israel committed against the peoples living in Canaan is difficult. There are lots of ways of explaining it away so that we don’t have to say that God commanded this. We should study them hard if preaching on these texts, but don’t sigh in relief at a neat explanation. Is it actually persuasive? Even if you find it so, you need to in public be seen to understand why people find the texts difficult and wrestle with them. This goes for anything that stands against our conception of things. Don’t rush for neat answers—even if they’re true, and some are—wrestle with the texts instead before you wrap it up in a bow.
I think this also means that much of our preaching can be aimed against the heart, because the hearts of our hearers are often remarkably similar to each other whether they’re Christians or not. They’re tempted by the same things. They struggle with similar sins even if in different degrees. They all need Christ. So do I. The deep weird and the wrestling does aim at the heart when done well.
As ever, the one thing we really need to be doing in our preaching is offering Christ, unadulterated. He came to get us. He is the King of the cosmos. He became nothing, stooped low enough to scoop even us up and lift us to the heavens. He gives of himself to all who would come. He is life, he is the feast at the heart of the world, he is hope. He’s the friend of sinners. He makes sinners saints.
We need this every week. If you’re ever tempted to think it could be dull, it is as Glen Scrivener loves to say a technically unimprovable story, remember that temptation is itself our sin speaking. Even saying that though, when we preach the gospel from every text, not pasted on by finding the riches that are there in front of us and offering them to our listeners, it’s endlessly exciting.
Photo by Dan Parlante on Unsplash
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