Month: September 2009

Hope Church associate pastor Geoff Henderson attended recently a training and evaluation gathering for men and women interested in church planting. One of the participants, he reports, was counseled to watch more TV, go to more movies, and to listen to more music, if he were to have hopes of being a successful church planter.

That sound you hear is the scoffing of (some) readers of this blog. Such counsel, they would assert, is just what is the matter with the church today. We are more concerned with relevance than we are with biblical or doctrinal fidelity, they will say. Advice like this is what has ruined the pulpit, it is asserted.

Is the scoffing justified. At times, sure. However, less often than we might imagine.

John Stott’s reputation as a faithful expositor of the biblical text is untarnished. His metaphor for the task of preaching is that of a bridge. Preaching is a task which begins in the ancient world of the biblical text and lands in the modern world in which our congregants live and work and think and play. The task of the preacher is to bring the ancient truth of the text across that bridge into the world of the hearer.

No one disputes that the preacher must be as thoroughly equipped to understand the ancient world of the biblical text as he possibly can be. He must be trained and diligent to understand the text before he can ever begin to pass it on to a modern person. That this is a weakness among many preachers has been duly noted.

However, if we make no effort to understand the modern hearer and the unique world in which he lives, we can speak all we want about the message of the text, but we will not be heard. This is Stott’s compelling point, a point which in itself is too often overlooked. We often build bridges which land no where because we do not understand the world into which we are wanting them to land.

After reading Dr. Stott make his plea for relevance, which he does very well, I was listening to several of the talks from the recent TED conference. Each of these speakers – a behavioral economist, an agricultural expert, a biologist – built bridges. Each was bringing insight from their particularly arcane fields and laying it upon the world of those to whom their insights applied. What makes these speakers so effective and captivating was their ability to help the audience see that their seemingly obscure knowledge matters to them.

We certainly have heard ‘experts’ speak about subjects concerning which they feel a great deal of passion. These subjects are often important ones. But if the speaker is unable to make the subject seem relevant, he has not built a successful bridge, we are bored.

I never want to be boring, for boredom means that I have failed to successfully connect my listener with the significance of the topic. I will have built a bridge to nowhere.

Would Stott scoff at the cultural advice given to the aspiring church planter? Certainly not. He would no doubt give such advice.

“We should be praying that God will raise up a new generation of Christian communicators who are determined to bridge the chasm; who struggle to relate God’s unchanging Word to our ever-changing world; who refuse to sacrifice truth to relevance or relevance to truth; who resolve instead in equal measure to be faithful to Scripture and pertinent to today.” (page 144)

Many, many years ago, I attended a special chapel service at a local Christian School at which a presentation was being made by a storyteller from Iowa.

A storyteller. That is not a career choice embraced by many of us. I’m not sure where one goes to get specialized training in it. All I know is that this guy was good.

For a long period of time, he kept all of us captivated with stories. Young and old listened through every dramatic pause and seeming diversion to get to the end of the story.

If at the time I’d ever heard of Garrison Keillor, it didn’t matter. Here before me was a man who with the mere force of his words and presence held us in his web. And I wanted to do that, too.

Like most ambitions for me, that one got sidetracked by life. I did ask the man for a book recommendation which would be of some aid in learning to do what he was doing. Though I bought the book, I was never able to persevere in this. I now see that to do what he did demands a large measure of acting talent of which I have none.

What, however, this experience demonstrates is the stunning power of a good story well told.

And I’m envious of those who are able to marshal such skill in the service of the preached word.

I am not an advocate of the style of preaching parodied as ‘the sky scraper sermon’ (one story upon another). Preaching is to be more than the telling of stories. There is a truth to be extracted from the Biblical text and applied meaningfully to the congregation.

However, that truth once isolated and examined will be more readily embraced when served up through the medium of a powerful story. The prophet Nathan was a wise communicator. Instead of laying out the truth of David’s unfaithfulness in stark propositional terms, he told David a simple story of a poor shepherd, a powerful lord, and a vulnerable sheep. He did not sidestep truth. Rather, he took a story as his arrow, tipped it with the poison of truth, and aimed it at David’s heart. Story carries truth home like nothing else.

They say that our media saturated culture may be immune to preaching. I think we can say that our media saturated culture is resistant to the theological lecture. But a media saturated culture may be even more vulnerable to the truth, if that truth is conveyed on the back of a story.

I still want to learn how to tell a good story. And when I do, perhaps it will be, as in the fun movie Bedtime Stories, that the stories will begin to come true.

Perhaps.