Yesterday I sat with five pastors around a table, listening to their thoughts about LEADERSHIP.
They told me what they liked (its honesty, the cartoons, its practicality, the cartoons, the sermon illustrations, the cartoons, the interviews with leaders they respect, the cartoons!).
I asked what they wanted to see more of in the journal (“More articles by my favorite writer, Name Withheld,” said one wag) and what they wanted less of (advertising, except “be sure you keep the ads on the back side of ‘To Illustrate,’ so I can tear those pages out without ruining something else”).
But perhaps the most significant discussion took place after I asked, “How has your attitude toward ministry changed over the course of your various pastorates?”
The group was silent for an uncomfortable moment. Then one pastor said, “It’s getting harder and harder to stand up in front of my congregation, doing the best job I can to present the transforming power of the gospel and point them to Christ, and to see them sit with their arms folded and complain afterward, ‘Why don’t we have as nice a nursery or music or youth program or facility or … as the church down the street?’ I’m discouraged at the lack of response to the gospel.”
Another pastor said, “I’d describe myself as more conviction-driven but more battle-weary. I know I’m called to minister, but it’s really draining.”
Together we discussed today’s l consumer society with its high demands on the service sector, which crosses over into the church.
I came away more aware than ever of the need for LEADERSHIP to provide realistic, wise, and grace-tilled stories of those who are continuing to minister amid these pressures.
Preachers often wonder if anyone in an age of MTV is still interested in listening to preaching.
Not long ago I talked to a young minister who is pastoring a church filled with “baby busters,” the generation of 17 to 29-year-olds who will succeed the “baby boomer” generation.
“The busters are the first generation to see entertainment not as a privilege but as a right,” he said. “The basic necessities are food, shelter, clothing, TV, and a CD player.”
But does this cutting-edge pastor rely on media to proclaim his message? Only to a point.
“Drama and video are good for presenting the problem, but they are not good media for presenting the solution,” he said. “When watching them, people tend to detach, to spectate. The emotions can be engaged, but rarely the will.
“I find that when it comes to presenting the gospel, appealing to a person to put trust in God, to get personally involved in building God’s kingdom, there’s nothing more powerful than the spoken word–one person, face to face, talking honestly and authentically about Christ.”
In other words, preaching.
Even in an MTV age, “how shall they hear without a preacher?”
One of the best descriptions of the soul of preaching comes from Danish writer and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard (1813-1855) prepared for ordination in the Danish Lutheran Church but was never ordained. He wrote barbed attacks on the church of his day, which he considered steeped in formalism and spiritually dead.
For much of his life, he wrote under a pseudonym.
But during Holy Week 1848, Kierkegaard underwent “a second conversion,” after which he largely abandoned his pseudonymous writing in favor of direct and personal writing.
In 1850 Kierkegaard wrote “Training in Christianity.” Here’s an excerpt:
It is a venturesome thing to preach; for when I mount to that sacred place–whether the church be crowded or as good as empty–I have, though I may not be aware of it, one hearer in addition to those visible to me, namely, God in heaven, whom I cannot see, but who verily can see me.
This hearer listens attentively to discover whether what I say is true. He looks also to discern whether my life expresses what I say. And although I possess no authority to impose an obligation upon any other person, yet what I have said in the sermon puts me under obligation. God has heard it!
Most people have a notion that it requires courage to step out upon the stage like an actor and to encounter all eyes fixed upon you. And yet this danger is in a sense, like everything else on stage, an illusion.
For personally, the actor is aloof from it all; his part is to deceive, to disguise himself, to represent another. The preacher of Christian truth, on the other hand, steps out in a place where, even if all eyes are not fixed upon him, the eye of omniscience is.
The preacher’s part is to be himself. And he’s in an environment, God’s house, which requires of him only this: that he be himself, and he be true.
Kierkegaard gets to the core of Christian preaching; honesty and accuracy before God and before our listeners.
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
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Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
