Know your audience

Know your audience. It is rule number one in public speaking. The astrophysicist can lay completely different lingo on his brothers down at the astrolab than he can on the parents of his son's Little League team.

Knowing your audience is one thing. Altering your message to satisfy your audience is something completely different. Such would be something we would expect of a comedian, not a doctor. This is wholly unacceptable to pastors and Christians responsible for handling the word of God rightly.

A friend dropped this Time Magazine article in my lap. The gist: many Christians have come to believe that avenues exist to heaven apart from Christ. The Pew Foundation which does a great deal of polling to determine our nation's religious temperature came to that conclusion. 57% of Evangelical Christian respondents were willing to concede that their might be other paths to heaven.

Time's closing paragraph dumps the load right in the lap of pastors:

The (Pew Foundation) survey's biggest challenge is to the theologians and pastors who will have to reconcile their flocks' acceptance of a new, polyglot heaven with the strict admission criteria to the gated community that preceded it.

If pastors are reconciling the survey, they care too much about audience opinion. They become no better than clowns or motivational speakers when the Audience they need to impress will be neither motivated or amused.

(This, too, is why I believe it is imperative for Christians to reason through the issues with other Christians from the perspective of God's word. In a world that rejects any moral authority, it is the only authority to which we can appeal, especially with others who identify themselves as Christians. If they will not hear the appeal of God's word, that is a grievous thing, but we have done what God has asked of us.)