Virtuous Preaching
In today’s culture, how can we speak about integrity?
No doubt our people need more virtue, but how do we address the issue without our sermons becoming modern Aesop’s fables?
Stephen L. Carter’s (integrity) (Basic Books, 1996, $24) can help us understand some nuances of integrity, but the book raised for me a larger, more critical issue: Why is there such an integrity shortage?
In the opening section, Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, outlines integrity’s steps:
1. Discernment. People of integrity act rather than react. They do not understand “the right thing to do” through mere tradition or trends, but through strenuous moral reflection.
2. Consistency. Carter relates the word integrity to integer and concludes, “a person of integrity, like a whole number, is . . . a person somehow undivided,” a seamless weaving together of understanding and action.
3. Forthrightness. “A person of integrity,” he writes, “is unashamed of doing the right.” We must be willing to say openly we are acting on principle.
Carter ends his opening analysis by demonstrating that integrity is much more than mere honesty or forthrightness. One can be honest about one’s lack of integrity!
What good?
In the next section, Carter provides case studies of integrity in the areas of academ-ics, journalism, marriage, law, and sports. Although I found a dozen relevant, useful illustrations in these pages, I was somewhat disappointed. First, Carter never applies his definition of integrity to the world of business—a rather large omission. Second, most of the examples cited are obvious. So the book raises a burning question that it never answers: If integrity is so important for a strong society, and if the path of integrity is fairly clear,why is there such an integrity shortage?
For answers, I suggest Cornelius Plantinga’s Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be (Eerdmans, 1995). He shows that sin by its nature creates delusional fields of self-justification.
The trouble with (integrity) is that Carter cannot tell us how to find the “good” with which we must live consistently. He is a Christian, but he insists we can recognize moral absolutes without religion: “Some beliefs and acts are morally better than others—and . . . it is possible to tell which are which.”
How? He appeals to the Enlightenment tradition, saying we can know moral absolutes through the voices of reason and conscience. At one point he calls the responsibility of parents to children a “moral absolute” and at another he calls racial hatred an “absolute evil.”
How do we know these things? Carter says we just do.
No warrant to know it
It would be a great mistake for preachers to argue this way. Not only have Christians questioned this Enlightenment ethic for centuries, but currently the educated classes are widely abandoning it.
The Bible says, of course, that people with no personal faith can clearly recognize the good, for our consciences know God’s law in some way (Rom. 2:15). But when people assert and use moral absolutes, they are living as if there is a God, even if intellectually they deny him (Rom. 1:18-20). People who don’t believe in God say, “I just know this is wrong.” But, if there is no God, they have no warrant to know it. The conclusion: There is no non-religious, rational basis for moral absolutes.
If we are just the product of time and chance, what’s wrong or unreasonable about racism? It’s the natural evolutionary dynamic—the strong eating the weak. And is conscience a better compass than reason? Jiminy Cricket said, “Always let your conscience be your guide,” but that’s what serial killers do all the time.
In The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, Andrew Delbanco, a professed secular liberal, cites John Wesley’s “no Satan—no God,” and candidly admits that, without the religious convictions of God and sin, American society no longer has the vocabulary or the basis to do moral reasoning.
So as preachers, we must show how our virtue shortage, our indelible sense of and longing for virtue, are all powerful evidences for the reality of God and of our need for his supernatural grace.
Tim Keller Redeemer Presbyterian Church New York, New York
Training through Personality
John Maxwell’s leadership tapes teach how to create successors.
When I want to hone my fly-tying skills, I spend a few hours with one of the best. My mentor, Bob Granger, has tied Advil-tablet-sized flies commercially for over 25 years. After I watched him tie a size 14 royal trude—a tempting morsel for rainbow trout—I found my own efforts more productive.
Likewise, when I want to hone my skills in leadership training, I spend a few hours with one of the best: John C. Maxwell, former pastor and now head of INJOY. I listened to an audio cassette series, Developing Leaders to Make a Difference (INJOY, ten cassettes, $139.99), that Maxwell held with his leaders at Skyline Wesleyan Church near San Diego, California.
His seminar aims to develop leaders who are models to the people, mainstays to the pastor, and mentors to potential leaders.
Planned succession
Developing Leaders to Make a Difference is designed for pastors to listen to the tapes and use fill-in-the-blank outlines for note-taking. The tapes do not appear to be edited, so what you hear is exactly what Maxwell’s leaders got. Unfortunately, the comments or questions that class members contribute are difficult to hear.
Included with each tape are lesson plans, which cover the same material (with the blanks filled in!) and some suggestions for teachers. A few strategically placed blank boxes allow the pastor to incorporate personal illustrations and material. There are also outlines pastors can photocopy.
Maxwell has packed the tapes and notes with useful quotes, principles, and lists that challenged me in my quest to mentor leaders. But I suspect that Maxwell’s gifts and passion have more to do with his success in producing successors than does his material. The series is definitely worth the price but probably as good as any. If leadership development is as important as Maxwell suggests (he pours more time into a leadership lesson than a Sunday-morning sermon), then I shouldn’t heat and serve his material any more than I might one of his sermons.
I’ll definitely cull much material from this series, but I sense the need to put it in my voice. To recall a Phillips Brooks line, preaching (and teaching) is truth through personality.
The greatest takeaway for me was Maxwell’s idea for pastors to talk frankly about their weakness. I need to ask my leaders what Maxwell asked his: “What are my weaknesses? How can you walk into my life and make up for my weak areas?”
Used rightly, Maxwell’s material will help you succeed by developing successors—a new generation of leaders.
Steven D. Mathewson Dry Creek Bible Church Belgrade, Montana
Beyond the Seeker Service
Making worship authentic yet attractive.
I have a feeling Sally Morgenthaler—Bible student, worship leader, and pastor’s wife—wouldn’t like your church service next Sunday.
In Worship Evangelism (Zondervan, 320 pages, $12.99), her convictions are distinctive. Most church services, she says, fall into three categories—all deficient:
Traditional:
sickening emptiness, hollow ritual, autopilot responses, perfunctory hymns.
Cutting Edge:
market-driven, stylistic-ally impotent, superficial, an infomercial in a seeker-system.
Comfortably Contemporary:
combines the worst of the above, an “unpleasant experience.”
Morgenthaler, a Lutheran (Missouri Synod), lays blame for declining church attendance on these models. Her remedy: Worship Evangelism—a spiritual experience with the living God. She advocates fusing the words worship and evangelism, for “seekers can be profoundly touched by God during heartfelt, corporate worship.”
Evangelism happens during worship, she says, as unbelievers hear the truth, and as they observe real worship between believers and God. Morgenthaler supports her view with scriptures such as 1 Corinthians 14:24—”But if an unbeliever or someone who does not understand comes in while everybody is prophesying, he will be convinced by all that he is a sinner and will be judged by all.”
Morgenthaler suggests asking six questions before planning your next service. Here are three:
—What one thing can people do for themselves this week that we as a worship staff typically do for them?
—What combination of the arts will involve as many of the senses as possible?
—What kind of interactive “twist” can we put on standard worship activities like Scripture reading and prayer?
Many of Morgenthaler’s ideas are compelling, but I have a nagging concern: Is worship the most important aspect of Christian living? “Number One!” Morgenthaler says. She writes of “prioritizing worship above all else . . . clearly the most important thing God’s people should do . . . above all else.” But when Jesus was asked about the most important thing, he replied: Love the Lord your God with heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Arelove andworship synonyms? They’re closely related, but not indistinguishable. I left this book a better worshiper and worship leader than before, but I hope Morgenthaler will wait awhile before visiting.
Robert J. Morgan Donelson Free Will Baptist Fellowship Nashville, Tennessee
Integrity Vs. Honesty
Integrity . . . is not the same as honesty, although honesty obviously is a desirable element of good character as well. [I]t is clear that one cannot have integrity without also displaying a measure of honesty. But one can be honest without being integral, for integrity . . . demands a difficult process of discerning one’s deepest understanding of right and wrong, and then further requires action consistent with what one has learned.
It is possible to be honest without ever taking a hard look inside one’s soul, to say nothing of taking any action based on what one finds. For example, a woman who believes abortion is murder may state honestly that this is what she thinks, but she does not fulfill the integrity criteria unless she also works to change abortion law.
Stephen L. Carter in (integrity)
1996 by Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP journal
Last Updated: September 18, 1996
