beware recycled sermons

I stopped by The Wartburg Watch to have a look around today; I have been so busy with one thing and another I haven’t read more than a handful of blog posts in the last couple of months, but it seems like the folks at TWW occasionally comment on topics I’m interested in that I don’t see much elsewhere.

In particular there was a link to Bruce Gerencser’s blog; he’s a former Baptist preacher and current atheist. Let’s just take it as read that I mentioned that it disturbs me somewhat how many people who start out devout, lose their faith in a particular group within Christianity, and end up losing their faith altogether. Not all who wander are lost, I suppose, but some are.

Gerencser offers an article on sermon craft [link] that starts out headed in the direction of sharing secrets of sermon craft but ends up being mostly a collection of anonymous anecdotes about poor preaching. Here are a couple of pull quotes:

Many pastors recycle their sermons. The average Baptist pastor changes churches every 2-3 years. No need to craft new sermons. Just reuse the sermons you preached before. If they worked well in Ohio surely they will work well in Texas.

I remember one well known, Bob Jones associated, evangelist who kept long silver cases filled with recordings of his previous sermons. After doing this for many, many years he would just pick a recording to re-familiarize himself with the sermon and then preach it that night. Rarely did he preach “new” material.

I don’t know how to make sense of the “2-3 years” point here; most of the preachers I knew who were gone in two or three years were either failed preachers or were transitional figures in failing churches. The churches I attended were dominated by career men who lasted ten years or more. Gerencser’s comment about preachers with no new material is apt, though; I have yet to figure out why someone would continue to attend a church where the preacher mostly recycles a handful of his own “goodies.” I’d be inclined to start looking for a new church the first time I heard a preacher’s candidate sermon recycled.

Years ago I was acquainted with a pastor who had horrible preaching skills. I mean horrible. He was a Bible college graduate and didn’t even know how to make a sermon outline. I tried to show him how to do so but he had a hard time understanding the whole process. His approach was simple: read the text, chase the rabbits, bring it back to Jesus. pray, and give an altar call.

Yes, I’ve sat through some of these, and so have you.

Many pastors would have you believe that their sermons come directly from God. I know I believed this for many years. I was certain God was leading and directing me to preach on a particular text. I believed that God was guiding me through the delivery of the sermon all the way to the altar call. I was simply a mouthpiece for God.

As I look back over the thousands of God inspired sermons I preached I can now see who it was that was guiding me. It wasn’t God. It wasn’t the Holy Spirit. It was me. Through my own thought process I decided what the church needed to hear. Sometimes I had an agenda that I wanted to advance and what better way to do so than to couch my agenda in “thus saith the Lord.”

This is a tough topic, and one I rarely hear discussed. Gerencser, now an atheist, is mostly obliged to say he was never lead by the Holy Spirit, but I would be inclined to agree that it’s fair to ask where a sermon comes from, and in particular what’s inspiration, what’s revelation, and what’s something other, lesser, or baser. We might hope for some sort of interleaving between what the Scriptures have to say and what’s just the preacher’s opinion, but I don’t know that we think much about how to distinguish them.

It wasn’t news to me that preachers sometimes borrowed or recycled content in sermons; I’d seen books of sermon illustrations and basic sermon outlines for sale in Christian book stores back in the early Seventies, and couldn’t imagine they went away in the meantime. But I have to admit I was surprised to discover that some preachers sometimes reuse other peoples’ entire sermon series. See e.g. the feedback section at Creative Pastors [e.g. link]; here are a couple of comments, one from the static page, one from the feedback pool:

“I’ve been teaching the In the Zone message series at our church and God has really been blessing us with supernatural results. The last several weeks our budget giving is up approximately 40%!” -John Cross, Senior Pastor of South Biscayne Baptist Church, North Port, Florida

…

We are a brand new church plant that has reached young couples. A church our size (200) should be able to receive a good offering; but we didn’t. This series got such great feedback from new church attenders and those who have been in church for years. After the second week, about bringing the tithe, we received more than half our monthly budget! I thank God that there are creative ways to present His Word to people who don’t understand God’s principles. Jamie Noel, The Journey Church, Springfield OH.

I’m at a loss here; one the one hand I wonder what Mr Cross and Mr Noel are thinking when they decide to preach Ed Young’s sermons, and on the other I wonder if the people who attend their churches have any idea they could have skipped church and just used Ed Young’s “downloadable mind map” instead.

If I had to offer you a single simple takeaway here, I’d encourage you to be a careful consumer of messages, as much if not moreso than you would be watching television or reading a mainstream publication.

We are a brand new church plant that has reached young couples. A church our size (200) should be able to receive a good offering; but we didn’t. This series got such great feedback from new church attenders and those who have been in church for years. After the second week, about bringing the tithe, we received more than half our monthly budget! I thank God that there are creative ways to present His Word to people who don’t understand God’s principles.

Jamie Noel
The Journey CHurch
Springfield, OH

“It’s hard to find God in a megachurch” and other stories

Intelligence Squared sponsored a dial-in debate between journalist Mollie Ziegler Hemingway and “megachurch and leadership expert” Dave Travis [blog] on the premise “It’s hard to find God in a megachurch” [link, free registration required]. The introduction for the debate doesn’t look promising; apart from some soundbites (Robert Schuller, Eddie Long, George W. Bush, Ted Haggard) there’s this definition:

The evangelical movement has a globally influential role, and the megachurches are an important element of it. They have huge congregations with inspirational, charismatic pastors. They are run like businesses and, it might seem, often with rather business-like objectives of raising funds and satisfying customers.

Hemingway gets off on the wrong foot from the start:

Most notably, the size and charisma aspects affect the relationship of the pastor to his congregation. These features require for lowest common denominator preaching; it becomes based on ‘You’, rather than Christ.. Equally, sacramental worship is not feasible with a congregation of 2,000 people. In small congregation churches, members are active. In megachurches, the audience is passive, consuming rather than engaging with gospel entertainment.

Yes, there are problems when the relationship between the preacher and church is out of whack, but she trots out the “big/passive, small/active” red herring: neither of these is necessarily true. And while her point about “gospel entertainment,” whatever that is, is probably apt, she’s made the mistake of making the conservative Lutheran method of worship standard so everything else is deviant.

The problem of America’s churches is that they’re market driven, but megachurches are market driven on steroids.

I have no idea what “market driven on steroids” means; this sounds like a fancy way of saying “very market driven” or “very very market driven.” And of course it begs the question “market driven as opposed to what?”

Hemingway is offering the usual talking points here, as if the alternatives in the megachurch debate were the LCMS standard on one side and Joel Osteen on the other. Briefly: not everyone outside a megachurch is looking to “receive sacraments for the forgiveness of sins” and not everyone in a megachurch is looking for “your best life now.” I’m disappointed in her presentation and don’t think it was effective, especially once she conceded that church size isn’t the problem.

Dave Travis on the other hand offers a fairly standard set of church growth arguments: “we took a survey, here are some results, lo and behold they support our model of church.”

Here’s part of his opening argument:

People are moving from small to big institutions in every sector of America’s society. In the church, this is not necessarily an obstacle to a healthy relationship with Christ; it just creates a different one. Yes, in megachurches, preaching is simpler in approach than smaller churches, but accessibility to doctrine does not make it un-challenging. In fact, megachurches preach what is relevant to the congregation.

I’m not sure how the first two sentences are related to one another; if there’s a causal connection between other institutions getting bigger and churches getting bigger I don’t see it. He concedes that megachurch preaching is simple and includes mention of the relevance of the text to the believer, but doesn’t point out any differences between sermons that are relevant to the believer and sermons that are consumer-centered. It’s a weak presentation, but Travis is mostly stuck responding to the moderators’ opening comments and Hemingway’s opening comments.

Travis doesn’t handle a question about pastoral accountability well; he answers a poorly-presented question about congregants in a small church engaging in question and answers with the pastor by saying megachurch pastors take feedback via websites and response cards. He also interacts poorly with a question about authoritarian preachers.

Hemingway responds to the same question by presenting the same lousy argument “churches should be defined by creeds and sacraments, not market research” and equivocates between creeds and sacraments on the one hand and Scripture on the other. I don’t know what if anything Hemingway can say about churches that are neither focused on creeds and sacraments nor driven by market research.

I think Travis misses an obvious knock-out punch that goes like this: The Hartford Institute, which provides definitions and lists for American megachurches, lists 1408 churches that meet its criteria. Of these seven are part of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod [link]; does Hemingway’s analysis apply to these? If so then all her bluster about creeds and sacraments is nonsense; if not then her distinction she’s making above is invalid.

I hate to say it, but I don’t see a winner here; neither party actually interacts with the premise. Hemingway’s argument is just special pleading, and she grows increasingly shrill as the discussion progresses. Travis comes closer to interacting with the premise by relating survey results about church attenders’ impressions of their relationship with God, but never suggests that there’s any way to close the gap between those results and an actual God. Hemingway can’t seem to see past her tradition. It’s a mess.

On the whole I’m left wondering if there is any common ground between the two sides, and whether this is an issue a debate can resolve. I would recommend listening to this debate anyway; 25 minutes isn’t very long to sort out issues like this, but it’s helpful to hear where the discussion is now (nowhere, mostly). As I said several months ago, this still sounds like a dialog between a dead church and a dying church to me.

In other news, Dee at The Wartburg Watch offered a take on Cruise With A Cause 2011 a couple of weeks ago [link]; her comments cover some of the same ground I covered [link], from a different angle and somewhat more pointedly. She also points out that the online biography for Ergun Caner appears to mix in elements of his brother Emir’s biography.

And finally: I found myself awake between 1:30AM and 2:30AM and ended up taking a peek at the KAZQ [link] overnight offerings. They offer GOD TV [link] as a second OTA digital signal (Digital channel 32.2) and on their primary signal in the wee hours. I got to sample the late Barry Smith’s program Mystery Babylon [link, link]; it caught my interest when I saw the word “Weishaupt” on the whiteboard behind Smith and heard his Kiwi accent. His presentation was a fairly typical fast-and-loose “Freemasons are apostate; Freemasons run the English-speaking world” presentation. Highlights included

• Smith’s claim that floor tiles in contrasting colors, especially in black and white, in public buildings, are a secret Freemason symbol
• Smith’s claim that certain hand gestures require Masonic judges to free Masonic criminals
• A dissection of the symbols on the back of a one-dollar bill that sounded even stranger with a Kiwi accent

GOD TV currently offers two or three episodes of Barry Smith programming a night and another in the afternoon; Joe Bob says check it out.

William P. Farley: Gospel-Powered Parenting

I worked out yesterday’s post on Trinitarianism without looking at the section of Farley’s book I want to cover today, and it turned out without knowing it I’ve bumped into a discussion of authority within the Trinity that has been going on elsewhere without knowing it.

Farley spends almost no time in this book talking about love, but lots of time talking about discipline and authority; in Chapter 8 (Foundations of Discipline) he talks about how parents’ responsibility for discipline flows from the authority God has given them, and he lapses into a common mistake made by conservative Christians with an authoritarian bent: he talks about the authority parents have over their children in terms of the authority God has over His Creation. It’s important to distinguish between these two and remember that God does not delegate His authority; instead, He delegates responsibility; God establishes authority relationships among people, but we obey the various authorities over us out of obedience to God and out of respect for Him, not because He has delegated His authority to the person in temporal authority.

Anyway, here’s the pull quote from page 158, with emphasis in the original:

The Trinity is the original community. It has always been and always will be. God created humanity to glorify the moral beauty of this primal Society. Here is the point: The Trinity is inherently authoritative and hierarchical. Therefore, if Christian culture, including families, is to imitate God, it must be also.

He goes on to quote Bruce Ware (emphasis mine):

We live in a culture that despises authority at every level… We find it hard to think about authority for one simple reason: We are sinners who want to be in charge of our own lives… One of the lessons of the Trinity is that God loves what we despise; namely, God loves, exercises, and embraces rightful authority-submission relationships. God loves this authority-submission structure because God embodies this very structure in his Trinitarian relations of Persons.

And then Farley goes on to work out what Ware means by authority-submission relationships within the Trinity and cites Philippians 2 (“did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,” etc.).

First of all, let me say this is a reading of that proof text I’d never seen before. I had always understood it to be a proof text for Jesus’s equality with God, not His submission under God, that what Paul was talking about was how Jesus could be human and still God.

Second, this is an example of what I referred to yesterday: the Trinity isn’t an example of anything. It’s a theological concept we use to make sense of how Jesus can be God and there not be multiple Gods. I might humbly suggest that anyone who sets about to explain all of society in terms of the Trinity runs the risk of getting his theology ahead of his Christianity.

Third, this is not historical Trinitarianism as described by the Athanasian Creed:

And in this Trinity none is before, or after another; none is greater, or less than another. But the whole three Persons are coeternal, and coequal. (Et in hac Trinitate nihil prius aut posterius, nihil maius aut minus: Sed totae tres personae coaeternae sibi sunt et coaequales.)[link]

It wasn’t until today that I realized that this is a hot topic in some circles: see e.g. this fairly recent post from The Wartburg Watch [link]:

They propose a new doctrine, The Eternal Subordination of the Son (ESS). This is a convenient new doctrine cooked up by Bruce Ware which states that, “ The eternal subordination of the Son means that Jesus Christ is eternally the Son of God, equal in essence and in eternal divine nature with the Father, that the Father exercises eternal authority over the Son in function, and the Son eternally submits to the authority of the father”.

While I can’t recommend everything at that post (I don’t know enough about Al Mohler to agree or disagree), and I’m not always on board even with the tone taken at TWW, I’m surprised to see this justification being presented as orthodox within the SBC.

My understanding of the historical definition of the relationship between the husband/father and his wife and the rest of the family is defined by Paul the Apostle in terms of Christ’s love for the Church, so I’m surprised to see someone defining this relationship in terms of the Trinity. It doesn’t make any sense to me; it’s certainly heretical in the old sense of the word, and probably an actual theological error.

Which strikes me as odd given that when I saw Bruce Ware at Calvary Santa Fe (last year, I think) he didn’t look like a heretic, etc.