I really do not like criticizing preachers. The task of preaching is foundational to a pastor's calling; thus, Christians frequently refer to their pastors as "preachers." Some denominations highlight the importance of preaching in the terminology that they use for ordinands, emphasizing that they are being ordained, for example, to "the ministry of the word and sacrament." Besides this, it is the most visible aspect of a senior pastor's responsibilities. Some people so associate pastoral ministry with preaching that they jokingly -- one hopes -- will say that the pastor only works one day a week.
Joking aside, it is not possible to overstate the importance of preaching to Christian worship and to worshiping Christians. "Faith comes by hearing," Paul writes in Romans 10, "and hearing by the word of Christ." He has already asked how someone can hear without a preacher. Thus, preaching is a means of grace by which God creates faith in the hearts of his people. That is important.
Yet, preaching is a difficult task. Most pastors will address their congregations more than 40 times per year, and those in churches with a second weekly service might double that. Ministers frequently have additional teaching responsibilities. Speaking so frequently to the same group of people requires great effort. Congregants don't expect to hear the same sermon portions over and over, meaning that a sound minister must each time do sound exegesis of his text, illustrate it to make it more understandable and apply it to the lives of the people. A pastor who has been at his church for 10 years will have presented over 400 sermons heard by at least some of the same people.
All pastors must be capable at each of those areas of preaching -- exegesis, illustration, and application -- though each minister will find his particular gifts more oriented toward some of these than others. A minister who is a master of illustration may struggle to come up with meaningful applications. Another may be good at applying the text, but he struggles to lay the groundwork of what is to be applied. Some pastors -- even those with seminary training -- may struggle with their skills at biblical exposition. Yet, it is a grave error not to work on that area. One can't really be said to be preaching the Word of God if the person is not doing some basic study that allows him to ground his sermon in the text. As the Romans passage quoted earlier indicates, it is the preaching of the Word that God has pledged to use to create faith in His people. He may use other things, but he has not promised to do so.
So, it is a bit painful to have to say that many (not all) of the pastors I heard preach during this project were in a very fundamental way incompetent at their most basic task. They did not display a basic ability to preach the Word; nor did they have the ability to do the most rudimentary analysis of the biblical text.
It would not seem that their members are aware of the utter incompetence. Who would want to say that they go to a big church where the pastor lacks basic competence at preaching?
Because it may seem to readers that this judgment is harsh, perhaps it is necessary to clarify what is meant. I am not suggesting that these ministers were poor orators. All were charismatic personalities with the capacity to hold the attention of large audiences Nor do I mean that I had doctrinal disagreements with their sermons -- I frequently did, but their incompetence went well beyond the idea that there are different interpretations of a text in the Bible. Rather, they used the Bible in a way that was not credible to one holding to any doctrinal position.
While I could cite numerous examples, two will suffice to convey what I am driving at. The pastor of Fellowship Church Grapevine used the Bible as a sort of Bartlett's Book of Familiar Quotations, mining the biblical text for verses that had a word or phrase that he wanted to incorporate into his sermon, even if the context of the text showed that the text could not be appropriately used in that way. Thus, he used Acts 1:8, in which Jesus said that the disciples would receive power from the Holy Spirit for world wide witness, as analogous to a power cord he used with his blender and ultimately as a proof text for God's help for blended families. This is, of course, nonsense.
In the same way, the pastor at Covenant Church read a passage that concerned the diminutive size of David and talked about it as though it concerned the large size of Goliath. It was an impossible reading to justify.
There are other examples I could cite. To be fair, some of the ministers used the Bible responsibly. However the fact of the matter is that a significant percentage of the pastors of the largest churches in the metroplex are incompetent practitioners of their most basic responsibility. And, their listeners dont seem to know it.
How can that be? I will have more to come.
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