Something to Say the World Didn't Already Know

Karl Barth reflects on his approach to preaching after the Titanic sank:

During my time as a pastor... I often succumbed to the danger of attempting to get alongside the congregation in the wrong way. Thus in 1912, when the sinking of the Titanic shook the whole world, I felt that I had to make this disaster my main theme the following Sunday, which led to a monstrous sermon on the same scale.

Fred Sanders reflects on this sermon:

Barth's seminary trained him in classically liberal Christianity. He entered the pulpit with a set of beliefs that were brittle, insufficiently biblical, and ultimately irrelevant to real people. In the Titanic sermon, you can see him trying to make his liberalism stretch to cover currrent catastrophes. It stretched enough to cover the Titanic, but just barely. This sermon was a real stinker, a real sinker, and it went under pretty fast. But Barth's preaching career kept going until a few years later when the outbreak of World War I would be an even more titanic challenge to the weak Christianity of his seminary training. When that happened, Barth couldn't stretch the thin commitments of liberalism to fit the real world.

That's when he stopped preaching headlines, stopped trying to declare which economic system God hates or what God was up to in the latest disaster, and started preaching from what he called "the strange, new world of the Bible." And that's when he found that he had something to say which the world didn't already know.

more (found via Trevin Wax)

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.

Two Ways to Preach

I've really been enjoying Iain Murray's two-volume biography of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. In the second volume, Murray contrasts the preaching of the Doctor with some of the other preaching taking place in London.

Many talked about "the apparent failure of the church." In response, preachers focused their message on "the supposed well-being and happiness of the hearers. Preachers were aware of what kind of sermon the people wanted and commonly they attempted to supply it." Many proposed innovations that would lead to a new day for the church. Some fell strangely silent in the first days of the war.

In contrast, the Doctor's message did not change. He felt that the problem with his fellows preachers is that "it did not start with the Bible; it only made use of Scripture to present a philosophy of religion which was not the Christian gospel at all."

Lloyd-Jones preached a different message, as seen in this address:

First and foremost we are face to face with the fact of the wrath of God...God has decided and ordered and arranged that a life of forgetfulness of Him, and antagonism to Him, shall not be successful and happy. Cursing falls upon such a way of life. The facts of life, the story of history, proclaim the wrath of God against all ungodliness and unrighteousness. We have sinned against God...

It is as the idea of judgment and the wrath of God have fallen into the background that our churches have become increasingly empty. The idea has gained currency that the love of God somehow covers everything, and that it matters very little what we may do, because the love of God puts everything right at the end. The more the Church has accommodated her message to suit the palate of the people the greater has been the decline in attendance at places of worship.

This is a very good example of God-centered versus human-centered preaching.

Rediscovering the importance of passages we ignore

I'm sitting in a room with with other preachers who get together every year to work through a biblical book. We bring in a commentator to help us exegete the text, and then discuss together how we could preach it. It's always a good week.

This year the commentator is Daniel Block, who is currently finishing a commentary on Deuteronomy that should be out in another year. We've just been discussing Deuteronomy 7:1-11, which is certainly a challenging passage to preach today. It's the sort of text that preachers like to avoid because it raises troubling questions about the complete destruction of the Canaanite people as part of the conquest. Yet Block has presented it in such a way that most of us can't wait to get home and preach it.

It's a good reminder again that some of the most neglected passages of Scripture are highly relevant to us today, and that our job is not to make them relevance, but to discover and demonstrate their relevance. This is the challenge and the joy of preaching.

The message of Easter

I used to subscribe to the tape ministry - remember the days before digital downloads? - of a large church. I remember getting the Easter Sunday message one particular year. The main idea of the sermon was something like, "You're good, but you could be better." The preacher used the illustration of Tiger Woods' golf swing. It was good, but Tiger went back and and learned a new swing to be even better. We can do the same with our lives when we come to Christ, he said.

I remember being shocked. The message of Easter isn't that we're good but Christ came to make us a little bit better. Earl Creps has said that Jesus didn't come to make bad people good, or good people better. He came to make dead people live. I agree. Dead people need the message of Easter, and nothing else will do.

At Easter we get to proclaim the timeless story of God in Christ taking the place of sinners so that we who were dead could live. There are so many riches within this story, so many angles, so much depth, that we don't have to drift from the meaning of Easter to be relevant.

Let's stick with the message of Easter. It's far better than any other message we could offer, and it's one that people desperately need to hear.