Moralistic Preaching is so 80s

A great article by Ed Stetzer and Jason Hayes on preaching to the younger unchurched:

Directly connected to the younger unchurched's aversion to simplistic preaching is their aversion to "tidy" preaching. The Church has somehow forgotten that life is not always about having a neat, pat answer...

This means that the moralizing of our preaching past is out like the 80s. Our preaching should encompass more than do's and don'ts. It should reach to the why and the how behind our proclamation. Great preaching requires mining truth down to its deepest core and assigning it to resonate within the hearts of our listeners. As a result, our preaching must go beyond appeals to behavior modification, beyond pithy platitudes on being happy and living well. Our preaching must wrestle with the meat and marrow of human existence, because this is what young adults are already doing. Otherwise it is like tossing a fortune cookie to a man starving in the desert.