One of the dirtiest little secrets about preaching is that many preachers are using what we used to call in radio “a service.” There are, or at least there used to be, businesses that sell jokes and one liners and gags and the like to “radio personalities.” We referred to these business as “a service” as in,
“Wow, his show is terrible.”
“Well, I’m not surprised, he uses a service.”
If a “personality” needs a service he isn’t really much of a personality is he?
Kim Riddlebarger is exposing the fraud for what it is: a homiletical crime.
Read Kim’s blog but not just before a meal or you’ll lose your appetite. The tragedy that is American evangelical preaching continues.
Imagine if lawyers used a service:
“Good morning your honor, hey it’s good to be with you this morning. Hey, your bailiff is looking sharp this morning. It’s 22 minutes past the big hour. Hey, did you hear about the precedent in Hooch vs. Turner? Well it seems that….”
Or a physician,
“Well Mrs Jones it seems that you have inoperable cancer but hey, that reminds me of the story about the two viruses…”
If such things are inappropriate in court or in the physician’s office, how are they appropriate for the pulpit?
I’m not calling for artificial solemnity in preaching. Authentic preaching entails reflecting on the whole range of human experience as appropriate to the text of Scripture before the minister. The minister’s job is, as R. B. Kuiper used to say, to preach “the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text.” R. B. also used to say, “Gentleman, in every sermon there are three points: the text, the text, the text.” (HT: Derke Bergsma).
In the comments that follow I am not reflecting on ANY PARTICULAR congregation and certainly not my own. We are blessed to have Pastor Chris Gordon as our preacher and our members are saints for putting up with me for as long as they have. They are evidence for Bob Godfrey’s claim that most Reformed congregations are very patient with (my) mediocre preaching because they value the Word of God so highly. In what follows, I’m reflecting on experience as a preacher and teacher over the last twenty years.
Why do congregations put up with it? I know this is controversial, but I wonder if congregations get what they demand. If congregations demanded to hear the Scriptures preached faithfully that’s probably what they would get or at least they would get more of it. The truth is that American Christians vote with their feet. They swear membership vows before God and man and when something happens that they don’t like, they walk to second church where they are welcomed with open arms, no questions asked. So, American ministers tend to be responsive to parishioners, even if they aren’t always aware of it. Yes, we can discipline “walkabout” members after the fact, and, in most cases, we probably should, but the reality is that they are still “gone.” That fact puts pressure on the minister.
At the same time, there is an unspoken conspiracy between the congregation and the minister. When the minister does what congregations regard as “preaching,” which usually entails giving advice about how to be successful or perhaps a good scolding about how naughty they are and how they ought to be better persons, they tell ministers, “That was a really good sermon pastor.” Preachers are human beings. When they preach a carefully crafted, exegetical sermon (i.e., one that follows the text closely) they probably don’t get a lot of positive reinforcement so, subconsciously, they begin to conform to the implicit message: more advice, more about us and less about, well, you know, that biblical stuff. People have said as much to me directly.
Most parishioners aren’t even aware of it, but it’s what they do and that feedback, over time, is influential. That’s why I call it an unspoken conspiracy. The minister doesn’t tell the congregation how he’s giving them what they want and they don’t tell him explicitly to give it to them but there it is. The sermons become more and more about “how to…” and the like.
In many places it seems that “biblical” preaching simply means quoting a passage and then the airplane taxis down the runway, rotates, and lifts off and away we go into the homiletical ether.
In all this mutual approval, of course, there is a party who has been omitted: Christ, the Lord of the church. He has not ordained his ministers to be “men pleasers.” This is a provocative illustration, but imagine if an ambassador to another country only told that country what they wanted to hear? What kind of ambassador would he be? He would certainly be a liar.
The congregation, on the other hand, is also a wholly owned subsidiary. Inasmuch as they have been baptized the name of God has been placed upon them and they are not free agents. The church of Christ is not a democracy. It is not a free market. The Word of God is not a product to be marketed. The congregation belongs to Christ just as much as the minister belongs to Christ. As baptized members of Christ’s church, they are culpable for not demanding that the minister preach the text (law and gospel) and as the text leads us to Christ, for not preaching Christ.
We are all more like the Northern kingdom than we like to think.
[This post first appeared on the HB in 2008 and has been slightly revised]
In the academic world, students who are caught turning in purchased papers would be charged with plagiarism. Shouldn’t we extend that practice to those preaching sermons in churches as well?
Though I never heard of subscription sermons before, it doesn’t surprise me. That is because for a long tim I have believed that the greatest danger that the person in the pew faces is manipulation.
Pastor Chris Gordon ? – as in Christopher J Gordon? Funny I visited his website a few hours ago (in the evening Malaysian time) because when I typed Jonathan Rainbow “The Will of God and the Cross,” I was led to Pastor Chris’s website. I was thinking about the book in relation to the current post on the FV and Lee Johnson’s comments and Lane’s comments to Lee’s. The late Dr Rainbow’s book was and remains a classic book for me – first read it whilst in the UK in 1998/99. Great debunker of R T Kendal’s thesis and the like (including Dr Alan Clifford – British Amyraldian).
Jason, are you saying Alan Clifford is the like of R T Kendall? I consider Amyraldianism to be confusion (Geoff Thomas put it succinctly many years ago in the first sermon I ever heard him preach: “Your sins are either on you or on Christ” … “Where are your sins?”), but if you’re comparing Clifford to KENDAL, I think we need some quotes from Clifford to demonstrate this. I can’t imagine Kendall getting into hot water with secular authorities for a moral stand the way Clifford seems to be.
By “Kendal’s thesis”, do you mean, literally, his doctoral thesis, subsequently published as, essentially, “Once saved, always saved”? If so, wasn’t that surely debunked years ago in the late Richard Alderson’s “No Holiness, No Heaven”?
Read Clifford. He STARTS by saying that he is BUILDING on Kendall’s work.
““Wow, his show is terrible.”
“Well, I’m not surprised, he uses a service.””
I’ve been preached “storebought” sermons (and sermon series’) before. After spotting one and checking it out, they weren’t hard to spot.
What I learned to watch for was a fairly bland sermon, tied to very polished graphics. If you see them together, hit up “the Google” and see where it came from.
We once had a pastor who started his sermon with “I had such a challenging week that I didn’t have time to prepare a sermon, so I’ll be reading a sermon by Jonathan Edwards.”
At least he was honest about it!
It would have been better if he’d been able to say “Most of what I am about to say is being read direct from a sermon by Jonathan Edwards, but I am taking the liberty of adding or substituting one or two items of my own”. I wouldn’t wish to read his most famous sermon, for instance, without adding something about the final state, which he doesn’t even mention. The same can be said of Brownlow North’s “The Rich Man and Lazarus”.
It is good to be presenting entirely one’s own material, but nobody ever really does that, do they? And with some subjects, why reinvent the wheel?
One of my homiletics professors wrote a short book apprapos to the topic: http://www.christianbook.com/should-someone-sermon-preaching-paste-world/scott-gibson/9780310286738/pd/286738?product_redirect=1&Ntt=286738&item_code=&Ntk=keywords&event=ESRCP
Whenever I make use of someone else’s material in the pulpit, like an insight I got from a commentator, etc. I try to always remember to cite his name as a reference.
I am not a preacher, but I have preached the occasional sermon. When preaching on the Lord’s Prayer, I am afraid I am unashamed to say I used a “service”. It is called “The Westminster Larger Catechism”. To it I added just four points, two of which I had heard or read from others (1. The prayer starts “Our Father”, not “My Father” – I am praying as part of the Church, not as an isolated individual. 2. Give US this day our daily bread can, in this day and age, mean “Give us rich Christians in the West the motivation and skill to share our good with the poor brethren elsewhere”). The other two were 1. “which art in heaven” means that the Father to whom we are praying is one conceptually outside of ourselves. We are not praying to “the ground of our being”, the “inner light”, “zen”, or “In all things thou livest”. Liberals, modernists, crypto Eastern Religionists, Tillich, Chalmers Smith, etc., keep your grubby paws off the Lord’s Prayer, and 2. “Hallowed be thy name” means (amongst other things, of course): “Don’t let us be cheated or cheat others with a cheap kind of forgiveness that costs any less than the infinite sacrifice of the infinite Son of God”. If you use any of these points, I expect $100 per point for the “service”: DONATE!!! (Every time I see this on a website or in an email, the implied assumption that our money is our own leaves a nasty taste in my mouth). (Actually, if you WANT to assign the Lord’s money for any of these points, I recommend TBS, WBT, most of whom do NOT promote “orality”, or, although I know little about them, IBT, and please make sure that your giving is tax-efficient).
To what Kuiper says I would add a rider: If you cannot get Christ and His work out of your text, choose a broader text. As Stuart Olyott agreed, without Christ and His work, what you are doing may be expository, but it is not preaching. This is an issue that is causing real problems my side of the pond.
Thank you, Dr Clark.
Dear John,
As it is, I don’t agree with Rev. Clifford’s Amyraldianism but I wholeheartedly support his THEOLOGICAL stance and campaign against Islam which as we all know has been grossly MISINTERPRETED as POLITICALLY motivated re *hate crime* on the basis of religion and race – when it simply isn’t the case at all vis-à-vis the civil magistrate.
Thank you, both of you. What I know about Kendall is his antinomianism and his embracing of additions to the Word of God (i.e., Charismania/hex-a-costalism). I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that it is one of these which Dr. Rainbow was addressing. If he was attacking the “Free Offer”, on the other hand, this has been defended, and possibly defined in a better way, by far better men than R.T.Kendall, and, on the grounds of God’s mastery of the past from the present, I hold to it myself. What is it in R.T.Kendall that can be called a precursor of Amyraldianism, other than plain Amyraldianism itself?
Criticizing each others denominations emphasis and focus.
Emphasis and focus arent’ sins.
I know that you hold to the Free Offer of the Gospel, John. Good on you. And you would know that I didn’t hold to the Free Offer when I was Reformed (Anglican) and I don’t now as a Bondage of the Will Lutheran.
Thank you, Jason. I’d forgotten that you didn’t hold to the Free Offer – Did I ever cross swords (buttoned of course) with you on anything other than the perpetual virginity of Mary? Are you saying that the Bondage of the Will denies the Free Offer (I don’t deny that it denies the Free Recipient)?
Are you in a position to answer the question I asked about Kendall?
Dear John,
What do you want to know from me about Kendall??
What is it in Kendall that Alan Clifford’s work is actually based on?
Kendall’s thesis is not directly on the Free Offer but on the extent of the atonement in Calvin and Calvinism. Kendal posits that Calvin held to universal atonement and this shapes his (i.e. Calvin’s) view of faith and assurance. Clifford being an Amyraldian of course find solace in such “findings.”
Now, Kendall is right on thing – in that “once saved, always saved.” The problem with today’s preaching in the UK is that it is precisely legalistic – robbing Christians of their ASSURANCE. And therefore, no, Kendall’s thesis on THIS has not debunked at all.
Good works are DETRIMENTAL to salvation unless you want to lend your support to the Federal Vision. This Roger duBarry has done so – exchanging one form of fundamentalism to another.
Good works are then strictly to be left HERE … left BEHIND … for the sake of the NEIGHBOUR alone. Being a Puritan, you’d want to talk about holiness and all that. Holiness and sanctification belong together. But holiness and sanctification does not DEPEND on us; it involves us to be sure … but we are instead dependent on GOD’s holiness and sanctifying WORK to do the job. So no, if we are dependent on God’s holiness, then finally it is CHRIST’S holiness that gets us to heaven, not our own in an ever so indirect, back of the door manner.
So good works is necessary for sanctification only in so far as good works FOLLOW sanctification – otherwise we CONFUSE faith with obedience.
You’d jumped and exclaim: Isn’t this antinomianism? Yes, if the Law doesn’t get us to heaven. The Law in its 3rd use (if I may appeal even though like Luther I only hold to the two uses) PRESUPPOSE that you and I are ALREADY holy and sanctified (definitively) – otherwise we can NEVER ever hope to use the law as a mirror or guide.
So, the conservative evangelical churches would swing to the other extreme in “reaction” (not a wise word but nonetheless does say something about the state of the situation) to Kendall (at the risk of extreme generalisation) but yet all the while, their worship leaves much to be desired AND OR the theological worldview of their congregations is not much different than the antinomian Westminster Chapel. If not, you have the ultra-conservative like the Strict and Particular Baptists and Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland if they are still alive and well are legalistic in every possible way.
So, no, the hope of the church is NOT revival – that common theological outlook which prominently binds Kendall with his conservative evangelical critics in the UK – but REFORM of preaching that anchors faith in the preached Word and spoken Word alone as the HOPE of the Christian. This then is the CENTRE and AXIS of the whole of the Christian (here on earth) – this is holiness is GIVEN so to be received by FAITH. This is where the Christian begins and where the Christian will END. In other realities, this is the Christian REALITY. Only then can the Christian relate to the world in a proper manner – in a realistic manner so give expression to sanctification which is work in and on and through her/him.
I don’t know how the system put the above comment as being from me, it isn’t, it’s Jason’s. This is one of the curiousest bugs I’ve seen in software. And in case the system puts THIS comment as being from Jason or Scott, etc., it isn’t, it’s from ME John Rokos. signed (according to the system):
Kendall’s thesis is not directly on the Free Offer but on the extent of the atonement in Calvin and Calvinism. Kendal posits that Calvin held to universal atonement and this shapes his (i.e. Calvin’s) view of faith and assurance. Clifford being an Amyraldian of course find solace in such “findings.”
Now, Kendall is right on thing – in that “once saved, always saved.” The problem with today’s preaching in the UK is that it is precisely legalistic – robbing Christians of their ASSURANCE. And therefore, no, Kendall’s thesis on THIS has not debunked at all.
Good works are DETRIMENTAL to salvation unless you want to lend your support to the Federal Vision. This Roger duBarry has done so – exchanging one form of fundamentalism to another.
Good works are then strictly to be left HERE … left BEHIND … for the sake of the NEIGHBOUR alone. Being a Puritan, you’d want to talk about holiness and all that. Holiness and sanctification belong together. But holiness and sanctification does not DEPEND on us; it involves us to be sure … but we are instead dependent on GOD’s holiness and sanctifying WORK to do the job. So no, if we are dependent on God’s holiness, then finally it is CHRIST’S holiness that gets us to heaven, not our own in an ever so indirect, back of the door manner.
So good works is necessary for sanctification only in so far as good works FOLLOW sanctification – otherwise we CONFUSE faith with obedience.
You’d jumped and exclaim: Isn’t this antinomianism? Yes, if the Law doesn’t get us to heaven. The Law in its 3rd use (if I may appeal even though like Luther I only hold to the two uses) PRESUPPOSE that you and I are ALREADY holy and sanctified (definitively) – otherwise we can NEVER ever hope to use the law as a mirror or guide.
So, the conservative evangelical churches would swing to the other extreme in “reaction” (not a wise word but nonetheless does say something about the state of the situation) to Kendall (at the risk of extreme generalisation) but yet all the while, their worship leaves much to be desired AND OR the theological worldview of their congregations is not much different than the antinomian Westminster Chapel. If not, you have the ultra-conservative like the Strict and Particular Baptists and Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland if they are still alive and well are legalistic in every possible way.
So, no, the hope of the church is NOT revival – that common theological outlook which prominently binds Kendall with his conservative evangelical critics in the UK – but REFORM of preaching that anchors faith in the preached Word and spoken Word alone as the HOPE of the Christian. This then is the CENTRE and AXIS of the whole of the Christian (here on earth) – this is holiness is GIVEN so to be received by FAITH. This is where the Christian begins and where the Christian will END. In other realities, this is the Christian REALITY. Only then can the Christian relate to the world in a proper manner – in a realistic manner so give expression to sanctification which is work in and on and through her/him.
Excellent observations. I’m not a strict Redemptive-Historical preacher, but I did learn the craft under Bryan Chapell et al, at Covenant Seminary 1996-2000 and consider it an honor. I know Chapell gets slammed by sundry Internet warriors, but I assure you that under his tutelage the text had primacy of position. A particular pericope, mind you. If every–and I mean every–aspect of your sermon wasn’t based on the pericope at hand, then he’d place your homiletical head in pristine silver charger. And he’d do this with grace, humility, logic and aplomb. By placing a strict fence-line around his students, Chapell forced us to deal with the text at hand. I, for one, benefited greatly from his teaching. If his advice was practiced, then the horrors this article delineates would be reduced. And possibly eliminated.
Once saved always saved is absolutely true – of those that are truly saved, i.e. have faith that is shown by works (“Straw” 2:18). These works of faith could be quite strange under the Old Testament, e.g., Rahab, but under the New Testament they are virtually indistinguishable from faithful obedience to the moral law, though the “New Commandment” adds yet another dimension. Jason, your Richard Wurmbrand put it something like this: “There are those that believe, and those that merely believe that they believe”. Some people need to lose their “assurance” – not that it’ll do them any good if they’re not God’s elect.