I was listening to an interview with D.A. Carson, N.T. professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (if you haven't read his book "The Cross and Christian Ministry," go get it now and devour it, it will benefit you immensely), this weekend and he was asked if he had any advice for the S.B.C. This is his response:
"Learn again to go back to the Bible to expound the Bible as the whole counsel of God, check things according to the Bible again and again and again. I know there are some really excellent Bible teachers among SBC pastors…but I do get the impression that there is still a shockingly high number of people who still do not handle the Bible well…there is an awful lot of preaching that is cliche driven, cutesy, eviscerated of the Bible that is profoundly discouraging….there are rising movements for which we should thank God but there are other movements which are drawing significant numbers but which are of a more sociologically driven agenda."
Unfortunately, church planters seem to be among the worst offenders in this arena. By nature, we are entrepreneural and it seems to me that we are often so focused on building a congregation that we are apt to play loosey goosey with the text to justify any means we can concieve of to meet that end. If you would ask me, I would have to say that planters are often times more pragmatists than they are biblicists.
Lets be honest. When is the last time you heard a planter grapple with the Jurassic Park question (paraphrased): "Instead of asking 'can we do it,' the right question is 'should we do it.'" My answer is "almost never." It is often assumed that the ends justify the means. But on what do we base that assumption?
And if you challenge anyone on something they are doing they pull, what I'll call, the "1 Corinthians 9 card" : "Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone to win as many as possible...I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some" (1 Corinthians 9:19,23).
Apparently, according to the Church Planter's Exegetical Guide, this verse frees church planters up to do virtually anything to grow their churches. A plant in my town offered people $10 to visit their church. I've heard of others raffling away free cars and even promising free beer to visitors (which turned out to be rootbeer).
But is that what Paul had in mind?
What do you think?
What is Paul saying here? How far is too far- or is there such a thing?
-Doug
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3 comments:
I appreciate this post.
After several conversations with planters, established pastors and lay people that have been or are members of church plants i am coming closer to the conclusion that there is a huge problem with the modern, Western church planting model.
It seems (at least in SBC life) that i keep hearing: "God is sovereign and He will build His church......BUT this is how you do it" I am not saying don't share about your church, but i am more concerned about people hearing about Jesus than my vision.
We as planters(evangelists) / pastors(shepherds) now also have to be businessmen, entrepreneurs, masters of fund-raising, dreamers, builders, entertainers, artists, cultural architects (ha!), salesmen, motivational speakers, CEO's and the list goes on.
God help me be the best preacher/pastor/planter that i can be.
There seems to be a flawed view of expositional teaching in certain circles today. Expository preaching is seen as dry, didactic, boring preaching whereas topical / storytelling is seen as more relevant to "real" people with "real" problems. I think that it is humorous to label the way that you study and prepare a message as boring when the boring part actually comes down to delivery. I know plenty of pastors that can take a topical / "relevant" message and preach it in such a way that half of the congregation is asleep by the time he gets to "the second stone of David is a picture of....."
Why is it such a foreign concept that someone would have the ability to take an expositional outline of a biblical text and preach it in such a way that it is relevant and highly applicational? Expository teaching and relevancy can coexist!
I believe that they should coexist and our task as teachers is to be approved workman and correctly divide the word of truth in order to help people "get it". Isn't that why we are here? If I wax eloquent for 45 minutes and lay out every Greek word and have a acronym for an outline but the hearers walk away without a greater understanding of the text and of Jesus then what has been accomplished?
At the end of the day it is the Word of God that changes lives not my words. I need to get more of His words in my sermons and less of mine and I truly believe that can be done in fresh, creative, and relevant ways.
I appreciate this comment from Chris:
"I need to get more of His words in my sermons and less of mine."
I was listening to Mark Dever interview Phillip Jensen and they were talking about expositional preaching and Jensen made the comment that he thought new ministers ought not preach verse by verse but ought to choose larger sections of text to preach on- such as an entire chapter. His reasoning? So that there would be more text and less preacher in the message. Dever said that was the exact same advice he gave to new ministers as well.
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