Leadership Journal

Sometimes God calls us to preach to our people a timely and important word—a word that is challenging and perhaps difficult to receive. In seminary we called this "prophetic preaching." We looked to the Old Testament prophets as our example—courageous and willing to speak the hard words of criticism as they preached against the sins of injustice, unfaithfulness, and idolatry that had infiltrated God's people in their day.

More recently I have watched pastors, who were quite proud of their "prophetic ministry," drive churches right into the ground. Or, if they did not drive the church into the ground, they succeeded in driving away everyone who disagreed with them, attracting only the like-minded to their church. What they did not manage to do, unfortunately, was to actually influence anyone to change.

Having sought to deliver those kinds of messages with some regularity at Church of the Resurrection, I would like to offer some insights gained through both my successes and failures. Maybe these will help as you seek, in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, not only to "comfort the afflicted" but to "afflict the comfortable."

When preaching unpopular or controversial issues, we have to ask: Is our aim to proudly shout out our position, or is it to actually influence people to consider making this position their own?

Obviously, by the way I've phrased the question, I believe that our aim is to influence others to change when their views are in conflict with what Scripture teaches.

If we agree about this, then the next question is, "What is the most effective way to influence people to reconsider their own views and to adopt a more biblical view?"

On Christmas Eve of 1999 we announced to worshipers that beginning the second week of January we would launch a series of sermons on the most difficult and controversial issues of our time. A postcard in the bulletin outlined what those topics would be:

Separation of Church and State

Evolution in the Public Schools

The Death Penalty

Euthanasia

Prayer in Public Schools

Abortion

Homosexuality. 1

We invited worshipers to join us as we wrestled with hard issues. The second Sunday of January our worship attendance increased by one thousand over what it had been running in the last quarter of 1999!

These sermons were an opportunity not only for evangelism, but also pastoral care. Our longtime church members were presented the opportunity to do social ethics—to apply their faith to complex moral issues. We probably lost a handful of members during the series—but we kept most of those new people who began attending. I received hundreds of e-mails during the series. People were talking about these sermons at work, sharing them with their congresspersons—the response was amazing.

We saved the most controversial issues for the end. We set a new record for worship attendance on the day we preached on homosexuality—we had 2,500 more in worship than we had averaged just two months earlier.

The basic premise of this series of ...