For a generation now, the air has been thick with the talk of “changing the world,” but who is changing whom? There is no question that the world would like to change the church. In area after area only the church stands between the world and its success over issues such as sexuality. Unquestionably the world would like to change the church, but does the church still want to change the world, or is its only concern to change the church in the light of the world? Something is rotten in the state of Evangelicalism, and all too often it is impossible to tell who is changing whom.
Os Guiness in Impossible People
Preaching Christ
Recently I posted on some of the difficulties I have with the modern evangelical church scene. Today I will focus on another difficulty I see, that of the modern evangelical sermon. What do I mean?
Typically, the sermon will be aimed at what a friend of mine calls “Level One”. The sermon is aimed at getting people to ‘Trust in Jesus.’ A big thing in the evangelical movement is being ‘missional’, and one of the things this seems to mean is ensuring the church service is relatable to the unbeliever in the midst. In practice, this seems to mean that each sermon is a 30-40 minute gospel presentation based on Scripture. This brings new meaning to preaching to the choir. Why are we doing this? Why are we preaching to people every week that they need to come to Christ when most of them have already done so? Many good Christians are sitting there thinking, “Ok, yes done that, check…so what’s next?”
Now after a certain time in the church and being fed this, one of two things are likely to happen. The believer either assumes this is the way things are meant to be and taking this as given, deals with it. The sermon is not for me, except perhaps to remind me to keep holding on to Christ, which is a good thing, but mainly I need to get my friends along to hear this so they too can join the church and then repeat the process. Alternatively, they will switch off, bored with the constant formulaic repetition and then feel guilty that they are somehow a second-rate Christian for having these feelings.
Some at this point will object. But evangelicals do apply the gospel to the believer! It’s just that they want there to be a word to the unbelievers in their midst too. Firstly, I do not believe our application of Scripture to the believer is anything to celebrate. Most applications are sufficiently vague to cause no real challenge to any particular believer, unless they are on the topic of money, and then things can get fairly specific! Nevertheless, for the most part, applications tend to be fairly broad: let Christ impact all of your life, trust Him with your difficult period, make sure you are not deluded about whether you are a true follower of Christ. We don’t tend to hear sermons that help us apply truth to life more specifically. Who has heard a sermon about women, work and the family? What about the mandate for parents to train up their children and what this means for secular education? What about “How should I participate as a Christian in the political process?”
Others will object saying, “Of course the sermon should essentially be a gospel presentation. That’s how people get saved!” That’s the core mission of the church! Is it? Christ’s commission to his apostles was to go into all the world and make disciples, teaching them to obey all that he taught them. Isn’t that a little bit more than getting ‘souls saved’? Doesn’t that require more than a ‘gospel sermon’ every week?
Where does this thinking come from? Why do we consider this normal practice? Perhaps it comes from our evangelical history. We take things like altar calls for granted, but we are perhaps unaware of the history of the great awakenings and the impact they have had on church life. Nancy Pearcey has some thoughtful commentary on this in her book Total Truth which I may outline in a future post.
Secondly, we may have become confused about what Paul himself means in I Corinthians where he says that when he came to them he, “decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Some may see in this an explicit reason to have every sermon aimed at bringing an unbeliever to conversion, but I am not sure this is the case. To begin with, Paul was speaking about his time setting up a new church. Of course he would have been talking about Christ and his atoning death and resurrection. Furthermore, the phrase itself does not just mean ‘talking to the church about Jesus death’. It seems likely to me that since Paul sees the crucifixion resurrection and ascension event as the key event in history, he is saying that he focused his message on the implications of this key event to his hearers. Clearly, the letter of I Corinthians lends credence to this idea, because he deals with quite a few issues, that while they wouldn’t be part of a simple gospel presentation, are certainly implications for Christian living if Christ is indeed the resurrected king.
Again, don’t get me wrong. I love the enthusiasm that evangelical churches tend to have for seeing the lost come to faith in Christ. What I would love to see, is some of that enthusiasm channelled into creating disciples: men and women who are developing a Christian worldview and actively applying it to every aspect of their lives. Educated pastors who were able to do this would multiply the impact of the gospel in our culture significantly. This would be an example of long term thinking.
Pop Culture and the Church
Over time, I have become more and more dissatisfied with what I see in the modern evangelical church scene. One of the issues I struggle with is its desire to be relevant. It has embraced a sort of evangelical pop culture. This has led to some tragic developments.
We all know there’s something incongruous about an older woman trying to dress like she’s still a ‘hot young thing’. We find it troubling when an older man has not developed gravitas but acts like a clown. I wonder if the same applies to the Church of God.
As a child, I grew up going to church with my parents. Things were formal. People wore their Sunday best. The minister wore a suit. There were periods of silence and reflection. We sang hymns – songs that were sometimes hundreds of years old. The old organ had a few bad notes, and the organists were often no virtuosos, but my heart soared as all around me sung with gusto lyrics millions around the world for centuries had sung. Communion felt like a very solemn and reverent occasion. The period of quiet while it took place seemed to last forever. I felt a sense of awe. This time and place was special, and I was a part of something that stretched millennia. There were jarring moments in the service. A responsive reading for instance, where I, even as a small boy participated with children through to octagenarians. I sat with my parents and felt part of the great body of Christ.
Now, when I attend my church the atmosphere is completely different. The preachers are attired in semi-casual. The vibe is friendly. The language is simple, and the service leaders remind me of over-enthusiastic energiser bunnies trying to drum up enthusiasm in the congregation. Everything is apparently ‘super exciting’. There is no time for reflection, for any moments when there is no speaking from the front are filled in with music. The Lord’s Supper is conducted at break-neck speed. We sing a constantly changing repertoire of modern evangelopop, mostly with banal lyrics set to mind-numbingly boring music. The musicians are more gifted than the ones in my childhood, but I feel unmoved. Nor it seems are many of the people around me, for the singing seems half-hearted aside from the odd young woman raising her hands. I feel like a spectator of a slick performance. My children are taken out mid-way through service so that they can be taught in an ‘age-appropriate’ manner, which by the sounds of it involves low expectations, ill-disciplined children and fun. I feel vaguely uneasy about this and wonder how this is connecting my children culturally to our forefathers in the faith.
Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot my church is doing right. They love God’s Word. They care for the lost. And in the trends I mentioned above, they are far better than many other evangelical churches. I’ve been in one evangelical church where we sang a song with exceptionally trite lyrics while we were encouraged by the song leaders to jump around with our finger-pointing in the air until we (actually I point-blank refused) had done a complete 360. This was repeated. Multiple times. On the opposite extreme, we have other more formal and traditional churches. Often the gospel is absent in the sermons (thank goodness for the liturgy of the Anglican church in these cases), and the youngest members are in their 50s. They are dying churches. So yes, better a church that is living, preaching the gospel and growing.
True, relevance is important. We want people to understand the good news of Christ. However, have we overbalanced? I am not sure that we have understood the importance of difference and tradition. The Church is meant to be a light in a dark world. Darkness and light are polar opposites. Shouldn’t it be a slightly jarring exercise coming into the light? We all know the experience of being blinded when coming out into the sunshine after being in a dark room. Church ought to be that light. It ought to be different.
The Church has seen popular culture and attempted to model it in a ‘sanctified’ way. But this is a mistake. In his book Future Men, Douglas Wilson comments on Pop Culture. “Pop culture is a disposable culture for those who agree to consume it. But because cultures are meant to be handed down to subsequent generations, because cultures are meant to be preserved, a consumable culture is really an anti-culture.” Why on earth would the Church want to copy this anti-culture? We have a rich and vast heritage. One that has been bought with blood. Why would we want to toss this out the window for what is cheap and tacky for the sake of relevance?
Christianity should change and shape culture, not be moulded by it. From my experience, it all seems to be going the other way in evangelical churches. We are shaped by our informal culture into informal services of worship. We are shaped by a culture that cannot bear silence and reflection, so we eject any silence and reflection from our meetings. We are shaped by a culture that separates families, so we eject our young from worshipping with us. We are shaped by a culture that embraces egalitarianism, so we want our leaders to be on our level regular guys, and we despise anything that would make us feel awe because that would remind us that we are dust. We are shaped by a culture that despises the old and embraces novelty, so we throw out tradition and the treasures of the past. And we will have nothing to pass on to our children because we have taught them to do the same. One only prays they don’t toss out the gospel when they toss out our ‘anti-culture’ pop evangelicalism.