For Your Benefit...

• The Mindels have a new address.
• There is a "Thank You" note on the bulletin board from Betty Coomes.
• The elders have made copies of several preacher support letters. They are on the table in the foyer. The elders have requested that you take a copy of each and read them to be more aware of the work we support.

Calendar

• July 28 (Saturday) — Practice Singing (working on songs in the supplemental hymnal).
• July 27-28 — Charlestown Rd (IN), Young People's Lectures.
• July 29-August 1 — North Madison (IN).

(Editor's Note: This is a lengthy, but thought-provoking article from a denominational preacher in Michigan. Aside from the denominational concepts and terminology, there is much here that is worthy of our attention. cls)

My cartoon-a-day calendar from The New Yorker magazine provides me with a lot of chuckles as well as, now and then, some thoughtful moments. A recent cartoon was an example of the latter. In the cartoon, a man is standing in the middle of an elevator that still has its doors open. An elevator operator is standing near the control panel and is looking questioningly at the man. But the man says only, "Neither up nor down. I'm good here."

The humor of the cartoon is obvious enough: why get on an elevator if you don't want to go anywhere?! But since I am one of those people whose mind always runs to preaching-related thoughts, I could not help seeing this go-nowhere man as emblematic of how at least some people approach also worship and, in particular, the sermon presented in the context of public worship services.
All things being equal, one could presume that people come to church for the same reason they step onto an elevator; namely, they want to go someplace. Spiritually speaking, people come to the house of the Lord on a Sunday for lots of reasons but surely one reason — and surely a main reason why most Christian traditions continue to value the sermon as a key component to every worship service — is because they want to grow, want to be challenged, convicted, enlightened. In short, they want to travel somewhere as part of their larger spiritual pilgrimage in this life.

But in my experience, there are those people who come to worship and as much as say to the pastor, "Neither up nor down. Neither sideways nor forward. We're good here." This blasι attitude toward preaching explains (partially) why some people and some whole congregations are willing to put up with mediocre, or even downright bad, preaching. Some people have never been exposed to the life-changing nature of outstanding and thoughtful preaching. They don't expect anything out of preaching in the first place and hence cannot be let down by sermons that are pedantic, predictable, and pedestrian. (Some even think that that is what preaching just IS!)

Others, however, have different reasons for preferring very staid sermons. Some folks in the church are flat out resistant to change. Most preachers know that sometimes even the most faithful worship attendees will immediately blame the pastor in case there is ever a sermon that challenges certain political agendas or other presuppositions. So long as sermons confirm what certain people believed in the first place — or at least so long as sermons push only gently against the margins of those firmly held beliefs — people go home satisfied. But let a sermon explode a certain idea — or question it in sharp ways — and suddenly the preacher encounters a red-faced tirade the bottom line of which is typically along the lines of, "Keep your own opinions to yourself, pastor. They don't belong in the pulpit!"

Now, to be fair, it is of course fully possible for pastors to grind various axes in the pulpit in ways that constitute homiletical malpractice and hence in ways that conscientious church members are correct to challenge. But not always. Sometimes it really is the Word of God itself that challenges our long-held notions of right and wrong. But altogether too many people in the church today long ago gave up the belief that the Bible, of all things, could ever possibly surprise them. Without knowing it, these people really do come into the sanctuary each Sunday morning with an underlying attitude of "We're good here."

What is a pastor to do? A brief article like this cannot even scratch the surface of possibilities — nor can we ignore the fact that there will always be some people in every congregation are who quite simply troublesome folks. But in general it seems to me that there are two very basic things a preacher can do to help the folks who climb into the ecclesiastical elevator each week to remember that the purpose for getting on board is to go someplace.

First, the preacher him- or herself needs to regard the sermon as an event. If the preacher does not approach the composition of a sermon with the expectation that something will happen as a result, how will the congregation ever catch fire with that same idea? Preachers need to enter the preaching moment each week with fires of enthusiasm burning in their eyes, with an almost child-like eagerness, with the overriding idea that you have discovered something exciting and you've been impatiently waiting al1 week to share it with the congregation. When the preacher approaches the sermon week after week with a leaden sense of duty, with a behind-the-scenes attitude that conveys the message, "OK, hang on for 25 or so minutes here, people, and we will somehow get through this," then the message week after week cannot but help but confirm for people the idea that this is one homiletical elevator that not only will not go anywhere, it was not even designed to go anywhere.

Second, short of turning a sermon into an exercise in personal and psychological striptease, the preacher needs to be willing — on a semi-regular basis at least — to convey his or her own astonishment over the Word of God and how that same Word changed the preacher first and foremost. If we preachers cannot model for the congregation that kind of astonishment, challenge, and divine change in our lives, we cannot hope to help others nurture just such expectations for the sermon within their own hearts.

A couple of colleagues and I recently conducted a week-long workshop for preachers. We told them that as much as anything, what we wanted to happen for them as a result of their participation in the seminar was the rekindling of homiletical gladness. Every preacher should enter the pulpit with enthusiasm, with palpable eagerness, so that the congregation knows that before the sermon is finished — and by the grace of the Holy Spirit active all throughout the preaching event — everyone will have the sense that we have moved someplace, Maybe it's up, maybe it's down; maybe it's sidewise, maybe it's forward; maybe it's even something of a hard turn to the left or to the right from the direction we all have been walking. Whatever the movement, we preachers want people to expect that they will leave church more often than not with the firm sense that they are not in exactly the same place they started out. What's more, we want them to look at that new place and say, "It's good here. Very good."

(Found on the Internet at: http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/onPreaching/indcx.php. Posted On July 19, 2007. Accessed on July 21, 2007.)