There comes a time in every Christian’s life when they get bored with listening to sermons on Sundays. Can we all admit it? Preaching is the central focus of a Sunday service in just about every evangelical church, but inevitably many of the attendants are going to get bored.
Many churches come up with new ways to circumvent this problem. They might update with some nice power point. They could even euphemize “sermon” with “conversation.” Maybe the preacher needs to dress down a bit and put more clever stories in his sermons –err conversations. We can even remove pulpits. We can shorten their length. There are so many things we can do –even sermon notes!- in order to keep the congregation engaged in what the Holy Spirit has to say to them.
But what if none these are really solutions? What if the problem is not with the manner of preaching, but the fact that preaching is central to the sunday worship to begin with? What if the expectation that you go to church, sing songs, and then “tune in” to “the man of God who gives you the word of God” is the problem? None of these the adjustments above would seem to offer a solution.
I realize that many people reading this can’t imagine going to “church” and not expecting the pastor’s sermon to take up most of their time. Sitting reverently during a “conversation” is part of Sunday worship. To do otherwise might seem to fail to make God’s Word important.
It is for all those out there that I write this blog. Please bear with me a bit. Sure, what I’m writing is not going to be popular, but I think if you read it you’ll see that I am not completely mad.
Making preaching the center of the service can create problems. Not all the problems I list are inevitable, but I believe that they pop-up more often than is easily seen. With an iconoclast’s hammer in hand, here I go:
Making preaching central can reduce the communication of God’s truth to verbal mediums only. Of all the reasons I could list, this is probably the most abstract so let’s get it out of the way. Not all communication is verbal. Not all communication uses words. Preaching reduces our worship and learning to what we do with our ears and one person’s voice. The other senses of touch, sight, and smell are ignored.
In older high church traditions, the senses of hearing, sight, smell, and touch are used in concert with each other. In a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church I attended the central visual focus of the church was stained glass image of Christ the King. The pastor stood off to the side when he preached a short homily, not a grandiose sermon. The senses of touch took place through the partaking of the Eucharist, which was preceded by prayer and singing, not an explanatory sermon.
Thus the worship and learning was not through words alone, but through other senses and experiences.
Making preaching central can give an inordinate amount of authority to the pastor. Ignoring other mediums of communication doesn’t mean that something is not communicated through them. Consider what is visually center. Often the pastor stands on an elevated platform above a crowd that is sitting. All eyes are on him. He might have a pulpit or not, but that makes no difference –especially when the pulpit is replaced with a spotlight. The most reverent Christians are the ones passionately taking notes. This lasts, in many cases, for the majority of the Sunday service. It goes on week after week, year after year.
All this communicates that this man talking, is not only a special, specific, role, but that he is to be followed and to be obeyed. This is a bit autocratic, no matter how benign the leader maybe. It is also incredibly ironic that a single person becomes the center of attention for the greater glory of God. Are we not able to look to God directly? Do we follow Apollos?
There is also a problem with a commitment to have the Bible as the authority. Most people in the pews do not have the time, the resources, or sometimes even the will to learn how to study scripture (and I can add that neither do many ministers!), thus the job of interpretation falls to one person. Eventually, what the pastor says gets conflated with what the Bible says. (Admittedly, there is always an interpretation of some kind going on when we read the Bible.) Still, when the pastor’s sermon and the Bible get conflated, it produces a kind of dogmatism. Questioning the pastor becomes the equivalent of questioning the Bible. This is too much influence in one guys hands.
Making preaching central can create a “cult-of-personality” or outright sacredotalism. It should go without saying that there is a problem when a well-known minister receives celebrity treatment when he walks into a room or attends a conference. Again, this pastor becomes the center of attention for the Glory of God. What is even worse is when it turns into sacredotalism.
Sacradotalism is a ten dollar word that is lost in evangelical vocabulary, but it is alive and well in practice. It means that there are two types of Christians; the lay Christians and the really spiritual ones. Sacradotalism means that there is a “man of God who delivers the Word of God” to the lay people. That one person has the role of being extra holy and has an almost exclusive access to the Holy Spirit. He delivers it to the congregation through his presence and speaking –with the appropriate humility of course. In some circles, the pastor may even declare himself the anointed man of God who is accountable only to God. (I recommend running from such people.)
People sometimes shrug and ask what the problem is. There are two. First, this creates problem with the congregation. Now, not only is authority of the pastor conflated with scripture, but pastor can become proverbial prophets who can be no more questioned than the Apostles. As bad as this is, it is only a small problem compared to what it can do to a pastor.
Exactly how holy is holy enough for the “man of God who delivers the word of God”? I think very few people can appreciate the kind of pressure it takes to be “extra holy.” Pastors often talk about how they need to watch their own moral and spiritual lives for sake of their congregation. The problem is you can never be holy enough. The external pressure of a spiritual perfectionism can be crushing. A pastor cannot pray enough, fast enough, avoid sin enough and such if his condition so dramatically determines how much of the Holy Spirit gets to his flock. One has to wonder if pressure like this paves the way for downfall through hidden escapisms. Ted Haggard anyone?
It is not that I don’t like a good message and a good sermon, and I don't think they should be abolished. In fact, my wonderful iPod has kept me busy as I have downloaded various messages from ministers all over the country. Neither am I saying that I think that all these problems will happen every time, in every church, on every Sunday. I am saying that the problems are there, and I think for the most part unadressed because they are unknown. As long as preaching central to sunday worship, problems like these will eventually come up somehow.
And I can never get over the subtle irony that worshiping god Sundays means (in part) sitting down, passively, while focusing on someone other than God for forty-five minutes.
