Your pastor is boring. Now what?

Imagine visiting a church for the first time and during the sermon, the pastor clings to his manuscript like a drowning child to a life preserver.

Imagine that when the pastor at last does look up from his papers he stares at the back wall as he drones on in a painful monotony.

Imagine his rigid hands never rising from the papers, no gestures to be seen.

Imagine a pastoral professional assessing this delivery as perhaps the “most mediocre the Church has ever known.”

Would it matter to you that he handled God’s word with care, preached it with accuracy and drew applications relevant to your lot in life, or would you leave never to return?

In a culture nursed on the shaky-cam and bingeing any program at any time in any location, the average Christian will look for a pastor to grab their attention and compel them with stories and anecdotes. The pastor must have a flare for theatrics, for mastering the pregnant pause, and convicting the soul with mere vocal inflection or eyebrow twitch.

And thus, most Christians would have passed on Jonathan Edwards, one of the greatest preachers history has known. All of the above descriptors of the desperately dull pastor are descriptors of Edwards' manner of preaching.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a pastor having compelling oratory and being able to command an audience with gesture and expression, but have these become paramount? If so, we would have passed on the apostle Paul, too.

PAUL

Paul told the Corinthian church that he thought little of his speaking skills (2 Corinthians 11:6), and he thought his preaching to them to be dull of speech, weak, and missing the persuasion and nuance the Greeks had come to expect (1 Corinthians 2:1-5). Paul! His power was not in his manner but his message. The power of the gospel.

Consider how the Berean church received this middling orator. Luke tells us, “They received the word with all eagerness.” Picture a puppy when its master approaches with his dog dish. Tail a-wag, bounding its front paws off of the floor. Why did the Berean’s receive the word in this manner? Luke explained, “They were more noble” than the Thessalonians..

THE NOBLE CHRISTIAN

Someone who is noble is thoughtful and discerning, not rash in their conclusions, and sober and temperate with their emotions and attitudes.

When we are about to hear a sermon on Sunday, are we expectant and eager knowing that we are about to feed upon the good food of God’s word? Or do we sit like a movie critic, pen in hand, waiting to shred the the actor? What we glean from the Berean example is that how God's preached word affects us depends upon us. Jesus said the same thing in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23). The problem lies not with the seed (the word of God) nor with the sowing of the farmer (the delivery of the good word), but the reason the seed does not take root is a problem in the heart of the hearer.

WHAT CAN I DO?

How do I prepare myself to hear the word? Here are a few suggestions.

Repent of a critical heart. Through the internet we can hear great preachers preach great sermons 24/7, and then on Sunday, we expect our pastor to live up to MacArthur, Piper, Chandler, and Evans? That’s like a husband expecting his wife to look like a super model after three children and thirty years of marriage. Such expectations are unfair. God will use the weakest vessels to most exalt his word and himself. Such a critical heart has no place in the Christian.

Rejoice in the pastor God’s provided. If your pastor strives to teach what God’s word says with accuracy and to apply that truth to the situations of our day, and if God is glorified and Christ is manifest within the preaching, you have much for which to be thankful. Praise God for such a man.

Pray for your pastor. Preparing for a sermon is a rigorous endeavor. God suggests that many ought not desire to do it because of the great responsibility to not dishonor God and his word (James 3:1). 

• Pray for him throughout the week during his time of preparation that such times would be fruitful for him and that he would be free from distraction. 
• Pray for him on the morning of the sermon that he might honor God with the delivery of his word.

Be expectant. If a pastor does nothing more than read God’s word, what a great feast you will find therein. If he goes on to explain and apply that word, he has set for you a rich table indeed. The Christian who listens to God’s word proclaimed with a Berean eagerness and expectation will find much for which to glorify God and much to apply to their lives.

Be biblical. The Bereans scoured Scripture. Liking or not liking a sermon can be equally shallow if you have no idea if it corresponded to God’s word. Open your Bible. Follow along. Take notes. Go back later in the day or during the next week to rethink on the teaching and track down some of the cross references or things that came to mind to compare and contrast within God’s word. This is part of discernment and spiritual nobility.

Provide feedback. “Great sermon, pastor,” will bounce off of him on Sunday morning like the buzz of the fluorescent lights. It’s expected. A note during the week on how God used his preaching in your life will be like a cup of cold water after toiling in the yard on an August afternoon. There may even be a time to bring up something you did not understand or that you felt was unclear in the message. Most pastors worth their salt would like to know if they erred or were hazy on a particular point. Please, be gracious here. Consistently critical feedback from you will wear upon him like the blows of a boxer.

Perhaps if we do these things, we will be considered “noble” Christians as well, the kind of church member to which any pastor would love to preach.

Church: It's not an amusement park

A few months ago, I came across this blog by a local pastor. As he stood at the pulpit (or in his case, sat on a stool) and preached the word of God, he looked out over the congregation with which God had blessed him, and he noted some things that troubled his soul, things that made him wonder if those who called upon the name of Christ understood the gravity of joining with the body to worship Almighty God. 


I appreciate his courage in writing these things to his church. I include some of them below with a few comments in blue as a challenge to you and a challenge to me that, as you enter into worship in 2012, we might take a few of these to heart:

1. Put your clock and calendar on hold on Sunday. Don't hold God to the clock. Unless there's an emergency, you should never leave a service early. We rush around all week long, let's rest in the Lord on Sunday. (Might I add, go to Sunday school, too? The church is for the strengthening and building up of the body. Set your alarm and take advantage. As a Christian, don't use Sunday as your sleep-in day.)

2. GIve yourself time. Before you go to bed on Saturday night, plan to leave on time on Sunday morning. Don't start a day meant to be focused on Him, by a mad rush of berating your children and breaking the speed limit. (Yep. What he said.)

3. Unless you're a doctor or pilot, leave your cell phone in the car. Nobody is that stinking important. Take a break and bring in a paper Bible; actually turn the pages. (We are going more and more to Nooks, Kindles, and iPhones, so the paper Bible is a preference. The cell phone, though--turn it off, or at least to silent. Can you think of a text you must get during the service that trumps the word of God?)

4. Be on time. Being punctual is just being considerate of someone else's schedule. At Colonial, we start on time and when people drag in for the next 10 minutes, it creates a distraction. Worship involves learning but it also involves all of the life of the body of Christ. The emotional experience of singing and worship is as vital to us as the intellectual experience of learning and the volitional experience of obeying. Be in your seat when the service begins. (The time thing again. Is time important? You bet. Does your boss expect you to be on time? If you have an appointment with a doctor or plumber, do you expect them to be on time? Does it frustrate you when they're not? Time is a valuable commodity and how you use it shows what you believe is important. That's just the way it is.)

5. Be respectful of others if you have a crying child. A continual whining child becomes a constant distraction for others and frustration for the teacher who is grasping to keep everyone's attention. We have tons of dedicated spaces with TV's and live feed of the service. (Not all churches do, but most do have nurseries. Just a question of courtesy. Very thankful for the moms in our church who care for their kids and for the body in this manner.)

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10. Don't, don't, don't CLIP YOUR FINGERNAILS. (Wow. Really? People do this during worship?)

11. If you insist in bringing a child to the adult service, they must behave. The purpose of bringing children into an adult environment, is to train them in adult ways. Playing a computer game defeats the purpose as well as being disrespectful. It also teaches a child to be irreverent. Our children's environments are the greatest in the city if not the entire region.Use them. (It's all part of training up your child (Proverbs 22:6), something fewer and fewer parents do in our country. In an MTV generation, rare is the child who is taught to sit and pay attention for longer than three minutes at a pop. Train your child to be such a person.)

12. Respect the building. Would you spit your partially chewed mints on the carpets of the White House? If you see a piece of trash, pick it up. When you use the restrooms, wipe down the counters and mirrors. Habits build character. (The church facilities are your facilities. It breaks my heart when we find graffiti in bathrooms or worse. Church is not the building, but the building has been given us by God for the ministry of the church. The church is the people. How we steward that which God has given us (the building) says a lot about us and what we think of God's provision for us).

(Taken from "Church Etiquette," by Terry Chapman)

Would you endure a few of my own?


13. Hold it. No doubt a few folks have bladder problems and require trips to the commode at thirty minute intervals. That's not most of us. That's not most kids either.  How do I know this? Because they can sit through a movie and they can sit through a couple of hours of school and they can play outside for a couple of hours and never think of it. Try this: go before the service and endure the hour or hour and a half. Your getting up and going out is a distraction to others. Most kids don't need to go. They just want to get up and move. That's normal. Discipline them to sit for a few more minutes. Please.


14. Nursery ≠ Infirmary. If your child has the sniffles or a cough, one parent should stay home with that child rather than starting a round of Flu Tag among the entire church. Really, that goes for sick parents and teens, too. It's not an excuse to ditch church but a loving act to not subject others to the misery you are enduring.


Some may think those cold and unfeeling. I would argue the opposite. They might be cold and unfeeling to you because you feel your toes being crunched, but they really exhibit a love and concern for your brothers and sisters in Christ. It's not about us. It's not about me. It's about preparing our hearts to gather together and worship the living God.


See you Sunday!