Church leadership by generation

A friend of mine has a pet theory about church leadership—in this case, leadership within southern/Bible Belt low-church or evangelical settings. Nothing ground-breaking, but useful as a rule of thumb, especially for folks in ministry, I think.

It depends on generational markers, so let’s say these are roughly the four main groups that make up the church today, whether pastors or laity:

• Baby Boomers (60+)

• Gen X (mid-4os to late 50s)

• Millennial (late 20s to early 40s)

• Gen Z (under 25yo)

Southern Christian Boomers are different than the popular image of American Boomers in general. They weren’t at Woodstock. They weren’t hippies. They weren’t even disenchanted by Nixon and Watergate and public institutions of authority the way “the culture” was.

Instead, they were upstanding family men with jobs, wives, and kids. They went to church, and the churches they attended were theologically conservative, doctrinally firm, and morally rigorous. They knew what they believed, and what they believed was the truth. That’s the sort of household and spiritual environment their children, belonging to Gen X, were raised in.

Something happened to both these Boomers and their adult children. What happened was a sort of delayed social and spiritual shock. The Gen X kids found themselves beset by doubts that called into question the certainty of their fathers. Their fathers, in turn, unlearned their once certain confidence. Both, together, began to undertake the journey of faith less as a roadmap with all the landmarks known in advance and more as an open-ended wandering. Doubt became a virtue, not a vice. Wrestling with the unknown was an invitation and a compliment. Living with unanswered questions named the reality of Christian faith for everyone, whether or not they wanted to admit it. “We don’t know” was the pastoral watchword: an admission of humility before the great mystery of God.

There was good reason for this. The unquestioned certainties of the 1970s and ’80s turned out to be all too questionable, and an environment in which everything was known in advance and nothing was open to discussion was stifling, cramped, suffocating. A lot of people got hurt. Those Gen X–ers who remained in the church needed to avoid the mistakes of their fathers, lest their own children fall away from the faith. Crippling conformity was not the way.

So once Gen X began to assumed leadership in the church, around two decades ago, the two generations have largely worked in tandem: Boomers unlearning their hard-edged sectarian self-assurance, Gen X helping them toward a kinder, gentler pastoral presence. Both leading the church toward “accompaniment,” self-critique, theological modesty, and a well-developed allergy toward dogmatism and legalism both.

So far, so descriptive. I’m thinking of folks from about 45 years old to about 75 years old. I hope my portrait sounds sympathetic. It’s meant to be! There’s a reason why these folks are where they are.

Here’s the catch. Where the church is today is not where the church was in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s. Neither Millennials nor (especially) Gen Z grew up in sweltering swamps of dogmatic certitude. They certainly don’t—for the most part; I’m generalizing—inhabit those spaces at the moment. On the contrary. Granted, some older Millennials may be caught up in deconstruction. But most are treading water. They’re not firmly planted in gospel soil, however arid. They’re floating, tossed to and fro by the slightest of waves, the smallest of breezes.

And what do they see in their Gen X and Boomer leaders? What they see is people—men, mostly—fighting the last generation’s battle. They see church leaders who still spy fundamentalists around every corner. But that’s not what’s threatening young believers today. It’s an absolute lack of anything solid or firm to hold onto. It’s shifting sand beneath their feet. It’s nothing at all worth living for, much less dying for.

Gen Z and Millennial Christians aren’t leaving church because there’s too much. They’re leaving because there’s too little. Too little doctrine, too little dogma, too little firm and unbending teaching about the essential matters of God and faith, Christ and gospel, Spirit and Scripture, word and sacrament. What then shall we do? and How now shall we live? are the driving questions. “We don’t know” doesn’t cut it. “We don’t know” means they’re headed for the exits.

At any rate, that’s my friend’s theory. Boomer and Gen X church leaders are stuck in the past. The problems they battled and conquered in their younger days drive how they approach the problems facing believers today. But the problems are different. Millennial and especially Gen Z pastors understand this. They know young Christians are drowning. They know they need to throw them a lifeline. That lifeline must be sturdy enough to save; must be built to float, no matter how choppy the seas.

My latest: no to AI in the pulpit

I’m in Christianity Today this morning with a piece called “AI Has No Place in the Pulpit.” It’s in partial response to a CT piece from a few weeks ago about the benefits of using AI in pastoral work. A couple sample paragraphs from the middle of the article:

Pastors are students of God’s Word. They are learners in the school of Christ. He teaches them by the mouths of his servants, the prophets and apostles, who speak through Holy Scripture. There is no shortcut to sitting at their feet. The point—the entire business—of pastoral ministry is this calm, still, patient sitting, waiting, and listening. Every pastor lives according to the model of Mary of Bethany. Strictly speaking, only one thing is necessary for the work of ministry: reclining at the feet Jesus and hanging on his every word (Luke 10:38–42).

In this sense, no one can do your studying for you. I’ll say more below about appropriate forms of learning from professional scholars and commentaries, but that’s not what I have in mind here. What I mean is that studying God’s Word is part of what God has called you to do; it’s more than a means to an end. After all, one of its ends is your own transformation, your own awesome encounter with the living God. That’s why no one can listen to Jesus in your stead. You must listen to Jesus. You must search the Scriptures. This is what it means to serve the church.

Read the whole thing! And thanks to Bonnie Kristian, among others, for commissioning and sharpening the piece in editing.

My latest: on holy orders

I’ve got an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Christian Studies. The theme of the issue is “Ministry and Ordination.” The editor, Keith Stanglin (a mensch, if you don’t know him), commissioned pieces from scholars that represent or argue for a position not found in, or at least exemplified by, their own tradition. So, for example, the article after mine is by a Roman Catholic on the priesthood of all believers. Whereas mine is called “The Fittingness of Holy Orders.” It presents just that.

The article was a pleasure to write. It scratched an itch I didn’t know I had. Its guiding lights are Robert Jenson and Michael Ramsey. And it opens with twenty theses—I call them “escalating propositions”— on the sacrament of holy orders that ramp up from the basic notion of some formal leadership in the church all the way to full episcopal-dogmatic-eucharistic-apostolic succession.

Subscribe to the journal (or ask your library to). If you want a PDF of my article, email me and I’ll send you a copy.

Reasons people stay, or leave, their church

• The preaching

• The music

• The leadership

• The politics

• The children’s ministry

• The youth ministry

• The college ministry

• The young marrieds ministry

• The singles ministry

• The senior ministry

• The education programming

• The weekday programming

• The small groups

• The community

• The sacraments

• The production quality

• The liturgy

• The location

• Family ties

• Family history

• Friends

• Children’s friends

• Denominational membership

• Lethargy

• Loyalty

• Class

• Education

• Money

• Feuds

• Ambition

• Employment

• Relative quality of other local churches

• Whimsy

• Personal history

• Hurt

• Social standing

• Peer pressure

• Theology

• Tribal affiliation

• Regional culture

• Looking for a mate

• A single memorable experience

• Inertia

• Childhood memories

• Muscle memory

• Need for God

• Love for God

• Spiritual paralysis

• Spiritual despair

• Spousal pressure

• Parental pressure

• Boredom

• No reason at all

The tech-church show

A week or two ago a clip went viral of a prominent pastor lecturing his listeners, during his sermon, about treating Sunday morning worship like a show. I didn’t watch it, and I’m not going to comment about the pastor in question, whom I know nothing about. Here’s one write-up about it. The clip launched a thousand online Christian thinkpieces. A lot of hand-wringing about churches that put on worship as a show simultaneously wanting congregants not to see worship as a show.

Any reader of my work knows I couldn’t agree more. But I don’t want to pile on. I want to use the occasion to think more deeply about two issues it raises for the larger landscape of churches, public worship, and digital technology.

First: Should churches understand themselves to be sites of resistance against the digital status quo? That is, given their context, are churches in America called by God to be a “force for good” in relation to digital technology? And thus are they called to be a “force opposed” to the dominance of our lives—which means the lives of congregants as well as their nonbelieving neighbors—by digital devices, screens, and social media?

It seems to me that churches and church leaders are not clear about their answer to this question. In practice, their answer appears to be No. The digital status quo obtains outside the walls of the church and inside them. There is no “digital difference” when you walk inside a church—at least a standard, run-of-the-mill low-church, evangelical, or Protestant congregation. (The Orthodox have not yet been colonized by Digital, so far as I can tell. For Catholics it depends on the parish.)

In and of itself, this isn’t a problem, certainly not of consistency. If a church doesn’t think Digital’s dominion is a problem, then it’s only natural for Digital to reign within the church and not only without. You’d never expect such a church to be different on this score.

The problem arises when churches say they want to oppose believers’ digital habits, dysfunctions, and addictions while reproducing those very habits within the life of the church, above all in the liturgy. That’s a case of extreme cognitive dissonance. How could church leaders ever expect ordinary believers to learn from the church how to amend their digital lives when church leaders themselves, and the church’s public worship itself, merely model for believers their own bad habits? When, in other words, church members’ digital lives, disordered as they are, are simply mirrored back to them by the church and her pastors?

To be clear, I know more than a few Christians, including ministers, who don’t share my alarm at the reign of Digital in our common life. They wouldn’t exactly endorse spending four to eight hours (or more) per day staring at screens; they don’t deny the ills and errors of pornography and loss of attention span via social media and other platforms. But they see bigger fish to fry. And besides (as they are wont to say), “It’s here to stay. It’s a part of life. We can live in denial or incorporate its conveniences into church life. It’s inevitable either way.”

Personally, I think that’s a steaming pile of you-know-what. But at least it’s consistent. For anyone, however, who shares my alarm at the role of Digital in our common life—our own, our neighbors’, our children’s, our students’—then the inconsistency of the church on this topic is not only ludicrous but dangerous. It’s actively aiding and abetting the most significant problem facing us today while pretending otherwise. And you can’t have it both ways. Either it’s a problem and you face it head on; or it’s not, and you don’t.

Second: Here’s an exercise that’s useful in the classroom. It helps to get students thinking about the role of technology in the liturgy.

Ask yourself this question: Which forms and types of technology, and how much of them, could I remove from Sunday morning worship before it would become unworkable?

Another way to think about it would be to ask: What makes my church’s liturgy different, technologically speaking, than an instance of the church’s liturgy five hundred years ago?

Certain kinds of technology become evident immediately: electricity and HVAC, for starters. In my area, many church buildings would be impossible to worship in during a west Texas summer: no air and no light. They’d be little more than pitch-black ovens on the inside.

Start on the other end, though. Compare Sunday morning worship in your church today to just a few decades ago. Here are some concrete questions.

• Could you go (could it “work”) without the use of smartphones?

• What about video cameras?

• What about spotlights and/or dimmers?

• What about the internet?

• What about screens?

• What about computers?

• What about a sound board?

• What about electric amplification for musical instruments?

• What about wireless mics?

• What about microphones as such?

This list isn’t meant to prejudge whether any or all of these are “bad” or to be avoided in the liturgy. I’m happy to worship inside a building (technology) with A/C (technology) and electricity (technology)—not to mention with indoor plumbing available (also technology). Microphones make preaching audible to everyone, including those hard of hearing. And I’ve not even mentioned the most consequential technological invention for the church’s practice of worship: the automobile! Over the last century cars revolutionized the who and where and how and why of church membership and attendance. (In this Luddite’s opinion, clearly for the worse. Come at me.)

In any case, whatever one makes of these and similar developments, the foregoing exercise is meant to force us to reckon with technology’s presence in worship as both contingent and chosen. It is contingent because worship is possible without any/all of them. I’ve worshiped on a Sunday morning beneath a tree in rural east Africa. The people walked to get there. No A/C. No mics. No screens. No internet. Certainly no plumbing. Not that long ago in this very country, most of the technology taken for granted today in many churches did not even exist. So contingency is crucial to recognize here.

And because it is contingent, it is also chosen. No one imposed digital technology, or any other kind, on American churches. Their leaders implemented it. It does not matter whether they understood themselves to be making a decision or exercising authority. They were, whether they knew it or not and whether they liked it or not. It does not matter whether they even had a conversation about it. The choice was theirs, and they made it. The choice remains theirs. What has been done can be undone. No church has to stream, for example. Some never started. Others have stopped. It’s a choice, as I’ve written elsewhere. Church leaders should own it and take responsibility for it rather than assume it’s “out of their hands.”

Because the use and presence of digital technology in the church’s liturgy is neither necessary nor imposed—it is contingent and chosen—then the logical upshot is this: Church leaders who believe that digital technology is a clear and present danger to the well-being and faithfulness of disciples of Christ should act like it. They should identify, recognize, and articulate the threats and temptations of digital dysfunction in their lives and ours; they should formulate a vision for how the church can oppose this dysfunction, forcefully and explicitly; and they should find ways to enact this opposition, both negatively (by removing said dysfunction from within the church) and positively (by proposing and modeling alternative forms of life available to believers who want relief from their digital addictions).

What they should not do is say it’s a problem while avoiding dealing with it. What they should not do is leave the status quo as it is. What they should not do is accept Digital’s domination as inevitable—as somehow lying outside the sphere of the reign and power of Christ.

What they should not do is look the other way.

Local church bans smartphones

Just kidding. But why not? The headline of the latest Atlantic piece by Jonathan Haidt reads: “Ban Phones From All Schools.” The updated version now says: “Get Phones Out of School Now.” (Another one, from earlier: “Phones at School Are a Disaster.” Indeed they are. But why all these different titles for the same piece?)

My question: If smartphones are so bad for school-aged kids, K–12, isn’t it likely they’re just as bad, if not worse, for kids in churches? And not only for 18-year-olds and younger, but for everyone?

What if churches took the lead here, instead of serving once again as a lagging indicator for the wider culture? What if the one place in America where screens and devices, smartphones and social media were not ubiquitous—were not even present at all—was your neighborhood congregation? Humble and out of fashion and perhaps deplorable, that congregation, but not, adamantly and openly and unapologetically not, part of the technological crisis afflicting our society?

Granted, no church is going to ask for your phone at the door. No church is going to frisk you for an iPhone. No church is going to require handing over your Android as a condition of entering the building.

Short of that, churches could do a lot to discourage parishioners from using phones in their buildings or even bringing them inside.

They could begin by not making it a requirement. For parents of young children, having a phone has become a nonnegotiable; you’re expected to be reachable at any moment, given your child’s behavior or needs during worship or Sunday school.

They could begin by not making smartphones an assumption. For example, by placing physical Bibles in (ahem) Bible classes as well as the sanctuary. By not using QR codes. By not inviting people to “get your phones and open your Bible app” in order to read along with the passage from Scripture.

They could begin by not featuring smartphones within worship. For example, by reading from physical books or programs or print-outs rather than from one’s personal device. By not texting during worship—ever, at all, for any reason. (If you’re someone who is on call, a physician or police officer or what have you, you’re an exception here; at the same time, if you get a call, then step out and take it!) By not, God help me, letting your child play games on your phone during the liturgy. By not, God grant me strength, playing them yourself.

They could begin by communicating, clearly, gently, but directly, that the church has a vision for the role of digital technology within the life of Christian discipleship and that it is the job of the church to form and educate the faithful in accordance with that vision. Not in the service of scrupulosity or works righteousness. In the service, rather, of equipping followers of Jesus to be strong and resilient believers in the face of the greatest challenge facing this generation—especially its young people. And given that vision and formation, it follows that within this community digital technology in general, and screens and smartphones in particular, are not “anything goes.” Not “no holds barred” or “live and let live.” That would be irresponsible. Instead, the church is to be on the vanguard of resisting billion- and trillion-dollar corporations’ bald-faced attempts to suck our souls, our wallets, and our attentions dry. How, after all, can we disciples be wise and patient and alert and unanxious women and men of prayer, who dwell in the word of God, who know how to be still, who listen for the voice of Christ’s Spirit—how can we be any of these things if every second of our lives is fixated on our screens, eyes scrolling indefinitely and infinitely for the latest image, the latest scandal, the latest outrage? How can we be different from anybody else if here, in the midst of God’s people, on the Lord’s Day, gathered to worship in the Spirit, we can’t let go of our digital addictions for even one hour?

Ban devices, I say, from all churches. Beat the schools to it. Show the world we see the problem. Show the world we want to fix it in ourselves before fixing it in others. Show the world we mean business. Get smartphones out of churches now. Show Prof. Haidt proof of concept. Leave Apple and Google and Meta in the car. Be blessedly free for ninety minutes (or more!). Give God your all. Model it for your kids. Demonstrate that it’s possible.

Is it? Could it happen? In your church and mine?

All I can say is, the Lord has done stranger things before…

Who are young Christians reading today?

The question above was posed to me recently. What the speaker meant was: What living authors are brainy/serious/mature 15-25-year olds reading today?

I’m not sure I have an answer.

My first answer: They aren’t reading. At least, most Christians in this age range aren’t reading anything at all, much less thoughtful theology or rich spiritual writing.

My second answer: They aren’t reading, because if they are “consuming content” along these lines, it’s via YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify. They’re listening, watching, and scrolling, no doubt. The question then becomes: To whom? To what? Is any of it good? Or is it all drivel? But that’s a question for another day.

My third answer: A few of them—the ones actually reading real books, good books, cover to cover—are just reading the old classics many of us were fed at the same age: Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Barth. Maybe Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas or Saint Athanasius or Julian of Norwich. Maybe, at the outer limits, Simone Weil or Saint John Henry Newman or Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Maybe Ratzinger! Or John Stott or J. I. Packer. Not sure, to be honest. But those of my students who do walk in the door having read something have usually read Lewis or one of the other usual suspects.

Having said all this, the original question remains unanswered. Are there living authors that have genuine influence on this crowd, minute and dwindling as the crowd may be?

The only name that came to mind as a surefire answer was John Mark Comer. Beyond him, I’m simply not sure. It seems to me there is not a John Piper of this generation (granting that Piper is still with us, and still exerting some measure of influence)—someone who is read widely, loved and hated, discussed constantly, an ever-present “voice” mediating a determine set of doctrines or ideas or practices or what have you.

Maybe Tim Keller. But the pastors and laity I know who read Keller are all my age or (typically) older. I don’t know if his name makes waves among the youth; maybe, but I doubt it.

So who else? Note that I’m not asking about which “names” make waves—there are plenty of popular influencers and pastors and speakers and YouTubers and podcasters. I’m talking about authors whose books are read by 15-25-year old American Christians with a head on their shoulders, who are serious about their faith in an intellectually curious way.

Other names: Tish Harrison Warren? Esau McCaulley? Dane Ortlund? Robert Barron? Jemar Tisby? Nadia Bolz-Weber? Carl Trueman? Peter Leithart?

I don’t know, y’all. I should add, I suppose, that I don’t mean which books have sold the most from the “Christian inspirational” genre. I’m talking about heady, demanding, theologically rigorous works addressed to a popular audience but not silly, superficial, or dumbed down.

I’m open to the answer being that what I have in mind—namely, books written by bona fide authors possessed of expertise, style, and substance—is not how Christian high schoolers and college students today are being reached or even growing in their faith. Though I will admit to my skepticism that it is possible for us to raise a generation of intellectually, spiritually, and theologically mature Christians who do not, at some point, deepen their faith and understanding in this way.

Time will tell, I suppose. But I do invite additional suggestions. I teach college students, after all, but the sample size is small; I only have one classroom for anecdotal observation, and the students who walk in don’t represent everyone. What are others seeing?

Well-adjusted

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960):

Medicine labors to restore “natural” structure or “normal” function. But greed, egoism, self-deception, and self-pity are not abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal any man from whom these failings were wholly absent? “Natural,” if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have only seen one such Man. And he was not at all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be “well adjusted” to your world if it says “you have a devil” and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.

Stanley Hauerwas, “Being with the Wounded: Pastoral Care Within the Life of the Church” (2019):

I have little sympathy for clergy who think their ministry of pastoral care to be the expression of a more general stance identified as a helping profession. Admittedly those who so understand their ministry may often manifest pious pretensions necessary to justify their self-proclaimed identity as someone who responds to a crisis “pastorally,” but I do not think such piety is sufficient to justify describing what they do as a church practice.

There is the problem, moreover, when the ministry becomes just another helping profession, and those who occupy that office discover they have no protection from those they are supposed to help. People think they can ask those who identify as “helpers” to do anything because those committed to be a “helper” do not work for a living. As a result, it does not take long before those in the ministry who identify as “helpers” soon discover they feel like they have been nibbled to death by ducks. A little bite here and a little bite there, and before they know it they have lost an arm. Hence, those that started out wanting to be “of help” often end up violently disliking those they are allegedly helping.

Insofar as the ministry is understood as a helping profession, it is difficult to avoid an alienation between those who help and those that need help. One of the great gifts of being in the ministry is the permission it gives to be present to people in crisis when they are often at their most vulnerable point in their life. They are often appreciative that you are present during the crisis, but after the crisis is over they prefer that you be kept at a distance. They excommunicate those who have been present during the crisis because they fear those that have seen them when they were so vulnerable. That they do so makes the up building of the community difficult, to say the least. . . .

I think we get some idea of the character of contemporary understandings of pastoral care by attending to the account that Alasdair MacIntyre provides in After Virtue of the main characters that have authority in modernity ― that is, the rich aesthete, the manager and the therapist. Each, in their own way, is an expression of a culture of emotivism which is based on the presumption that, insofar as our lives makes sense, they do so only by the imposition of our arbitrary wilfulness. Such wilfulness is required because it is assumed that our lives have no end other than what we can create and impose by the sheer force of our arbitrary desires. As a consequence, it becomes impossible to avoid the reality that all our interactions are manipulative.

In such a context, the task of the therapist, as MacIntyre puts it, is to “transform neurotic symptoms into directed energy, maladjusted individuals into well-adjusted ones.” The therapist must do so, moreover, assuming that there is no normative framework other than respect for their clients' autonomy that can shape their interactions.

To be a moral agent in such a culture entails that we can never be fully present in our actions because if we are to be free we must always be able to stand back from our actions, as if someone other than ourselves did what was done. Such a perspective is the only way to avoid being determined by particularistic narratives that would constrain our choices. The therapist cannot avoid reflecting these conditions because the therapist cannot assume a narrative that can help us make sense of the moral incoherence of our lives. Thus MacIntyre's claim, in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, that any challenge to these modern habits of thought faces the difficulty of only being able to think about our lives in terms that exclude those concepts needed for any radical critique.

What MacIntyre helps us see is how the eclectic character of the various psychological theories that so often inform pastoral care reflects liberal political theory and practice. That many people in advanced industrial societies suffer from a sense that they are alone because no one — including themselves — understand who they are is expected result of living in a time when freedom is assumed to be found in having a unimpeded choice. . . .

The account of the development of pastoral care I have just given does not do justice to the complexity of much of the work done under the headings of “pastoral care” and “pastoral theology.” I am not apologizing because I think, as Stephen Pattison has argued, that the pastoral care movement, particularly in America, has ignored the theological tradition that makes the care given through the church Christian. It is not at all clear that Christians are called to be mature or well-adjusted, but it is surely the case that the care Christians give one another ― and particularly the care that is thought to be the province of those that occupy the pastoral office ― will and should depend on being an expression of the fundamental convictions that make Christians Christian.

Sermon length

A friend mentioned that there was recently (is currently?) a vigorous conversation on Twitter about the ideal, or proper, or fitting, sermon length. Since I’m off Twitter I barely have access to people’s most recent two or three tweets; I definitely can’t go perusing anyone’s account for extended back-and-forth replies and RTs. But the mention piqued my interest.

I could have sworn I’d written about this—and I have, briefly, in this long essay on preaching—but it turns out what I was thinking of was the webinar I did back in April for pastors and preachers. Starting around the 28-minute mark I share a personal anecdote and then some remarks on the question of how long a sermon should be.

But since it’s not in print, let me say something here. To start, consider what I wrote in that 2019 essay:

Method [as in, homiletical method] is a matter of prudence, native talent, gifts of the Spirit, audience, context, training, and many more largely uncontrollable variables. A faithful sermon can be 20, 40, or 60 minutes long (or more); it can be done from memory, with a basic outline, or with a manuscript; it can involve gestures and movements and animation or minimal intonation and emotion; it can encompass the whole spectrum of human passions and virtues; there is no platonic ideal of Faithful Proclamation. (Nor, by the way, is there The Biblical Model of it.) Method depends; don’t be a slave to method; don’t be a disciple of methodologists.

This remains right. Sermon length is entirely a prudential question. And the factors involved have everything to do with the preacher in question, the congregation, the occasion, and the larger social, cultural, and ecclesial context. It’s true that a sermon is not a “lesson” (as I also say in the essay). Worship is a setting not for doctrina but for kerygma. But who says kerygma should be brief? That expectation, in my experience, is rooted in presuppositions about brief attention spans, poor listening skills, and logistical convenience. The implication is not that a sermon shouldn’t be on the shorter side. A “longer” (but it’s hard to use comparative language here, since we have no “average” sermon length by which to measure) sermon has to justify its length by the very same criteria. The point is that there is no platonic ideal. The length of a sermon is not one of the substantive features by which we may judge it. A 10-minute sermon could be faithful; a 2-hour sermon could be equally faithful. And both could be unfaithful. I’ve been in rural African contexts where sermons and “words from the Lord” lasted, in themselves and in sequence, hours on end. American frontier revival preaching was similar. Were/are they too long? It depends! We’d have to hear the sermons in question.

For these reasons I’m skeptical of generic advice on this front, that is, generic at the national or even denominational level. There are certainly principles that should inform a sermon’s length: clarity, substance, exegesis, saturation in the rhetoric of the scriptures, a commitment to announce the gospel (and not some personal advice or cultural commentary), a prayerful intention to be an instrument of the living Christ to his people, etc.

But here’s one anecdote that makes me wary of any broad push to keep sermons “shorter” (not just “standard” 18-22 minutes but even less than that). There’s a church here in town that draws many college students to it whose sermons are 45-60 minutes each week. Some peers wonder how that can be possible. I outline a theory in the webinar linked above. The theory is this.

Twentysomethings who make the decision to come to church today, even in west Texas, are doing something they simply do not have to do. No one’s making them. They’re coming because they believe it’s important or, at least, because they imagine it might be important. They’re already committed or open to becoming committed. At the same time, as I’ve written elsewhere, they’re illiterate—biblically and literally. They don’t read, and they certainly don’t read the Bible. How then are they supposed to be inducted, invited, drawn into the life and story and protagonists and plots and subplots and diction and style and majesty of the holy scriptures? This local congregation’s answer, one I’m inclined to endorse, is: through preaching. Note that the preaching is still proclamation; it hasn’t yet become teaching. But it’s doing what itinerant and revival preaching did centuries ago in a similarly illiterate age: namely, providing a means of access to and a rhetorical formation in both the letter and the spirit of the Bible. Precisely in the middle of the liturgy, as it should be.

Yes, don’t use long sermons as an excuse for poor preaching. Yes, don’t make sermons load-bearing for all the church’s pastoral work. Yes, don’t so hog the liturgical attention that the Eucharist—the climax of worship!—is sidelined, minimized, or forgotten. Yes, avoid the TED Talk–ification of preaching. Yes, yes, yes and amen to all this and more.

The upshot, though, is not that sermons ought to be shorter. The upshot is that the question of sermon length is downstream of the genuinely important questions. The length will follow from answering these. Once they’re answered, and answered well, the length will take care of itself.

On pastors embarrassed to say the great word “God”

Inside the immanent frame, there is a sneaky temptation for the pastor. She is often tempted, and somehow invisibly formed, to take God less seriously than her people do. The pastor can feel embarrassed to say the great word “God” or to even see the word “God” as a great word. Inside the invisible immanent frame, the word “God” feels meaningless, even immature. The pastor feels the temptation to run the congregation as a small business, even a little self-conscious of all the enchantment and dogma. But her people, who more directly bear the contradictions of modernity, and at times spit out the dry sawdust of the immanent frame, yearn to know that God has a purpose for their lives. They yearn to know that God can still speak. Secretly, and maybe with a little shame, the pastor finds herself doubting this, wanting at least one foot to rest squarely inside modernity, fearing she’ll be overtaken by superstition. The moral vision of immanence becomes more tempting for her than for her people.

—Andrew Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age (2022), 31. Preach, brother.

Lifelong ministry

People today are leaving ministry in droves. Churches, likewise, are shockingly under-staffed. As a colleague of mine recently wrote, “ministers are in short supply.” The pandemic is a major factor, but it exacerbated existing trends; it did not create the problem. The ministers I know—and for the purposes of this post I’m thinking exclusively of “low-church” traditions, not mainline or catholic—get calls on the regular from churches offering generous salaries and appealing jobs, and the churches in question are reasonably sized, in cities anyone would be happy to live in, and often have gone without a lead pastor for months, if not years. Whereas, on the flip side, many churches that once (pre-pandemic) had a budget for X number of ministers are now having to cut their staff down to size.

A few reflections on the dynamics at work, past and present.

Of the teenagers and college students I meet who (a) are believers, (b) go to church, and (c) are interested in pursuing formal ministry, none of them, with only the rarest exceptions, plans on becoming a “head” or “lead” pastor/preacher. What they want instead is a job with one of four modifiers affixed to the title of “minister”: children’s, youth, college/young adult, or worship.* There are many reasons for this shift. One is that the person who most influenced them in their faith was such a minister. Another is that the churches in which they were raised aren’t organized by and around a single visible head pastor, along the lines of the traditional parish or rural/neighborhood church model. Instead, these churches have ministry staffs, filled with specialties and sub-specialties (including evangelism, outreach, missions, poverty, rehab, media, sports, etc.). Naturally, young people being raised in such communities see modeled for them a specialized ministerial role, not the single (if capacious) traditional “office” of ordained pastor, whose principal task is the proclamation of the word and the administration of the sacraments in the context of public worship. To the extent that these young people’s churches do have a single visible “head” person, he is usually conceived (in their minds and in their experience) as a Public Speaker, whose primary job is, naturally enough, public speaking. Indeed, he is paid the highest salary to be the best possible weekly speaker he can be. Such a person is not necessarily (or uniquely) involved with pastoral tasks, the sacraments, and/or worship more generally. And because young people, like all people, fear public speaking as a fate worse than death, only rarely do any of them see in this Head Role a vocation to which they might aspire.

Thus, whatever the reasons—and there are surely others, not least the decline of seminary and of churches’ expectation that ministers have an MDiv—more and more young people who enter ministry today are doing so much differently than those who did so in the past. In my anecdotal observation, a majority of people who enter one of the “big four” ministry staff roles I mentioned above—children’s, youth, college/young adult, worship—exit full-time, formal ministry at some point between ages 30 and 45. I’m tempted to speculate that the percentage is far higher than a bare 51%, perhaps even as high as 75-85%. Such ministers serve, often ably, in the churches for (on average) a dozen years before returning to civilian life. Half of those remaining stick with their original titles; the other half climb the staff ladder (for there is unquestionably an internal hierarchy at work, even if it is never spoken outright) to administrative, pastoral, or preaching roles.

As I trust is obvious, there is a problem here. Not only are fewer and fewer young people seeking and entering lifelong pastoral (homiletical and sacramental) ministry. Those who do become ministers aren’t remaining ministers for long. Worse still, the process is compounded, thereby creating a negative feedback loop. I suppose the crisis isn’t more pronounced than it already is because churches are themselves declining in numbers and closing their doors at high rates. Which itself raises a chicken-and-egg problem for figuring out what’s going on here.

In any case, here’s one last thought prompted by these trend lines. It seems to me that there are two necessary conditions for a person to enter into, to undertake, and actually to accomplish a lifetime of formal ministry as a pastor in the local church:

1. Belief in and commitment to a concrete ecclesial tradition.

2. The socially embodied and transmitted principle and concept of being called to be a “ministry lifer”—whether explicitly, through the sacrament of holy orders, or implicitly, through a tacit but passionate understanding of and dedication to the pastoral vocation as divinely given, normatively irrevocable, and necessarily enacted at the parish or congregational level.

This, I think, is the deeper problem at issue. The young people I have in mind are “non-denominational,” down to the marrow, even when they belong to a specific denomination. The Baptists attend the local “community church,” the Reformed attend the local Church of Christ, the CoC-ers attend the local Baptist church. In other words, they’re all members of that ever-embattled, ever-thriving American family called evangelicalism. And because they have little to no deep-set, self-conscious membership in, much less identity as, this or that particular denomination or tradition, they swap churches without a second thought. It’s the gig economy applied to the church: a more or less comprehensive collapse in institutional durability and reliable ecclesial identity. So that, if and when a thoughtful, committed young Christian considers ministry, s/he does not do so with a mind toward serving this particular tradition but only “the church” in generic, non-denom terms.

Furthermore, such a person lacks any reason to believe that s/he is making a lifelong commitment, or that the church expects—much less that God commands!—ministerial service to be for life. That lifer status still applies by default to catholic traditions and, in an attenuated but real way, to mainline and confessional Protestant traditions that maintain official procedures and gatekeeping bodies for equipping, credentialing, and ordaining priests and pastors. Not so here. I’ve come to realize, though, that something like a wholly untheorized analogue to sacramental orders existed for quite a long time in the evangelical (and adjacent) communities I have in mind. That is the only explanation (along with the existence of sectarian and/or denominational identity) for why nineteenth- and twentieth-century ministers would spend their whole working lives slaving away in financially painful, psychologically grueling, and emotionally punishing congregations, sacrificing all that they had, moving twice a decade, and rarely considering the simplest option: namely, heading for the EXIT sign. Truth be told, there was no such sign, at least most of the time, since the two conditions I’ve named were met. Given, that is, thick ecclesial identity and thick pastoral vocation, to be a minister just was to be a minister for life, since that is what the call of God through the church entailed as a matter of course. Remove either or both of those conditions, however, and the EXIT sign lights up in bold, bright neon. Its flashing letters begin on the periphery then drift toward the center of one’s vision. At some point, ministry involves too much sacrifice for any but the most heroic to stay. Lacking the necessary conditions to hold them in place, to endure through the suffering that ministry invariably brings in its train, ministers head for the door. They may come back, but not as clergy. That door is closed for good.

Can you blame them?

*In case it’s necessary, allow me to add that my comments here in no way imply denigration of what I’m calling “specialized” forms of ministry. My first book is dedicated to my youth minister, who is the reason I earned a PhD in theology and am now a professor, and my second book is dedicated to my children’s minister, who is the reason why literally thousands of children who came through the doors of my home church first heard the name of Jesus. Nothing I’ve written here should be taken to mean that such ministers are either “less than” or an unwelcome development. It does mean, however, that their development raises new questions and challenges for modeling, communicating, and training young persons for lives of full-time, formal ministry. And that we ought to be identifying and addressing those questions and challenges now, for they are as urgent as any problem facing the church today.

Misdiagnosis

A running theme has emerged on this blog over the last few years, but especially the last 18 months or so. That theme is the sorry state of the church in the U.S., in particular “low church” traditions: non-denominational, baptist, evangelical, and other similar communions (like my own, churches of Christ). The focus is on those traditions because those are the ones that compose my world: the Christians I know, the neighbors I live among, the students I teach. I stay abreast of analogous problems in Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline churches, but they’re farther afield in terms of my lived daily circles.

Lately I have found myself struck by a commonality that unites so many of the objects of my critique and frustration within this lagging, sagging, tattered sub-world of American Christendom, such as it is. That commonality I will call a fundamental misdiagnosis of the situation, that is, of the root problems besetting the churches today. So far I can tell—granted that this is an untrustworthy mix of anecdote, hearsay, reading, and guesswork—a certain framework and diagnosis is shared among an enormous unofficial and unconnected network of pastors, church leaders, writers, and academics. When these folks look at the churches today, what they see is a surfeit of errant but otherwise strong, and strongly held, beliefs. This surplus of conviction is a problem for one of two reasons. Either the content of the conviction is wrong or the confidence in its truth is overweening. In both cases it is the pastor’s, the church’s, or the seminary’s job to exercise discipline—that is, to transform the content or to undermine the confidence. Sometimes the act of discipline is self-directed; sometimes the passion of directing it outward stems from autobiography. In any case, frustration results when laypersons do not take kindly to the attempt at discipline. Mutual distrust lingers like an aura, even in the absence of such an attempt. Each side wonders when the other will make a move.

I do not doubt that there are communities in which this description obtains. I do not doubt, in other words, that there are churches in this country filled to the brim with self-assured, belief-suffused Christians who sniff and snarl at the faintest whiff of a notion that they are not one hundred percent right in their every opinion—and, what is important to add, that many of those opinions have next to nothing to do with the gospel.

As I say, I do not doubt this. Nevertheless, as a diagnosis of what ails the churches in the aggregate, I think it is mistaken.

The problem, at the macro level, is not a surfeit of strong belief. The problem is the social, moral, and theological acids corroding every belief in sight. These acids are everywhere, affecting everyone. Marx’s description of the effects of capitalism on the wider society apply equally well here:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…

Fast forward to the present and it is the selfsame phenomenon. In a word, it is liquid modernity that is sucking believers down into the depths. It is not some mass illusion of stability. The ground is breaking up beneath our feet as we speak. Or rather, it’s been broken up for some time, and only now are some of us peering down to see what little remains. Individual by individual, community by community, believers are falling through the cracks.

And what do they hear from their ostensible leaders? From the books and blogs, pulpits and classrooms, profiles and influencers? They see a finger pointing in accusation; they are told that the problem is too much belief held too tightly. Nein! I don’t know a soul in the churches under 45 years old for whom such a label fits. To a man, to a woman, they’re barely keeping their heads above the waters. And all they see is tidal waves coming for their children.

What we need, accordingly, is a shoring up of the foundations, not a tearing down of the walls. What we need, as I have written elsewhere, is not deconstruction. It’s reconstruction—or just plain construction, starting with what we have. From the raw soil and the still-smoking ruins, a shelter can be built. But we have to see what’s in front of us if are going to build at all, much less wisely, and we’ll never get around to the job if we project onto the smoldering wreckage the image of an impregnable fortress. Perhaps that’s what once was there. No longer.

No fads, please

Writing about angels last week, I had in mind not just garden-variety demythologizers but specifically the sort of MDiv-in-hand pastor who reports having “matured” or “evolved” beyond the simple pieties of his upbringing, his denomination, or his own flock. In my experience, nine times out of ten this maturation or evolution, falsely so called, is not the result of actual wide reading in the church’s tradition but rather a function of moving up in the world, as a matter of education, class, or status. That is to say, it’s the product of peer pressure. “Believing in angels” comes to be seen as the sort of thing unenlightened persons do, and so you, the two-semesters-in seminarian, drop it like a bad habit. That’s not the sort of thing “we” go in for around here, you know. At most, the banished belief comes after a rough skim of half an assigned textbook—not exactly drinking broadly and deeply from the wellspring of the church’s wisdom down the ages.

This phenomenon reminded me of a pet peeve of mine. The sort of pastors I have in mind—and I want to be clear that they are far from all, perhaps not even a majority of, church leaders—fall hard for theological fads. They’re all in for the latest thing, whatever that thing may be. Sometimes it’s a thinker: Barth, Bultmann, Moltmann, Spong, Brueggemann, Hauerwas, Jenson, Milbank, Tanner, Wright, Coakley, Boyd, Zahnd, Sonderegger, whoever. Sometimes it’s a buzzword: story, Christus Victor, virtue, passibility, “being missional,” “being incarnational,” intentional community, new creation, postcolonialism, sacramentalism, natural law, classical theism, and the like. Whatever or whoever it is, it’s where the action is. And if you hear the name or catchphrase once you hear it a thousand times: it’s the lodestar, the church’s true north, the siren song of the contemporary minister.

Don’t get me wrong: some of these ideas, many of these thinkers, are well worth the attention. Fads are rarely fads for no reason. And like everyone else, I’ve been susceptible myself to the temptation to thinking that she or he or it is the Big New Thing, the Solution to All Our Problems.

Here’s where things get off track.

First, theological fads are a puff of smoke. To say they are ephemeral would be a slight to ephemerality. Blink and you miss them. Marry one of them (as the saying goes) and you’ll be a widow before you make it back down the aisle.

Second, it’s difficult to over-emphasize the belated character of theological fads. Such fads usually originate overseas, in Germany or France or Great Britain, sometimes here in the States at an elite R1 university. Often enough their true paternity lies in another discipline: philosophy, critical theory, sociology, anthropology. In any case, once it’s been disseminated to second- and third-tier universities and thence to seminaries, it’s already passé. But it hasn’t even reached pastors at this point. Whether they hear about it in school or from a trade book or via a blog (these days, I suppose, replace “blog” with “Twitter”), the hip new thing that’s blowing their minds is likely decades old. It’s so far downstream from its true origin that the traces of its parentage are minimal at best. But the way the plebeian pastors talk about it, it was born yesterday.

Now, is this their fault? No, at least not for the most part. How are they supposed to know better? Presumably they imbibed the now-defunct fad from a professor or a mentor or a conference or a trusted writer. This is the way new ideas and perspectives get distributed in society ordinarily, as a matter of course. There’s no way around that.

No, the problem isn’t the pastors themselves. The problem is the cult of the new. In particular, the problem is the cult of the new in the realm of faith, ministry, and theology.

Whatever the cause—be it capitalism, the nature of the research university, mass culture, all of the above—ministers are trained to suppose that the answers to their questions, the reservoir of resources to support their lives of service to the church, are sure to be found in living writers and thinkers who are producing “original” and “cutting-edge” work. If a pastoral or theological author pens an idea, the extent to which it is innovative is the extent to which it is likely to be good, true, or (most of all) relevant. Put differently, the degree to which it presents itself as a departure from, or in contrast to, what came before is just the degree to which it can be trusted.

Needless to say, this is a bad way to think about either ministry or the gospel.

There are many reasons why this is the case. For one, it invariably implies, or actively encourages, what Ratzinger famously termed “a hermeneutic of rupture.” What we believe now is by definition not what they believed then. But this is trapdoor thinking. To set up Our Truth Today as the arbiter of what we may be received from the past and (thus) as a far-reaching dissent from forebears in the faith is both short-sighted and self-defeating. It’s a fool’s game. After a while believers will begin asking themselves what, after all, they have in common with the church that came between Jesus and themselves. As the answer approaches “little to nothing,” people will naturally start to wonder why they’re a part of this thing in the first place. If that’s the problem looking toward the past, there’s another problem looking toward the future. For “innovative rupture” (à la creative destruction) thinking simultaneously sets you, the vanguard of enlightened opinion, up for obsolescence and replacement. For there is no reason in principle to suppose that either you or your views are the end of theological history. A successor awaits. There’s always one just out of sight, lurking in the shadows. You and your big ideas have nowhere to go but the proverbial dustbin of history.

Beyond the merits, considered at a purely social level, there’s a sort of embarrassment involved in making “not being behind the times” a measure of theological or pastoral wisdom. Think back to angels. It’s true that in the 19th and 20th centuries it was a sign of liberal learning and upper-class status to roll one’s eyes at “mythological” belief in “literal” spiritual beings. (We’ve gotten past all that, haven’t we?) But guess what? That’s no longer the case. At least in elite theological circles, it’s perfectly typical to affirm a populated celestial reality; in some circles, the weirder the better. The same goes for miracles. The air one breathes in Anglophone theological writing circa 2000–2020 is strikingly different than, say, the years 1965–1985. But that shift at the elite level takes a while to trickle down to normal folks. Which means that you’ve got pastors going about their daily lives whose deepest desire is for others to know that they know how silly it is to believe, for example, in angels or miracles, when the ultimate “others” they want to impress—in this case, by proxy—are in fact no longer impressed by such posturing. It’s pure fashion, and pastors are never in style.

The lesson should be clear: avoid theological fads like the plague. That doesn’t mean avoid contemporary writing. Nor does it mean new ideas are always bad. Rather, it means, on the one hand, that pastors (and Christians in general) should not treat faith as a matter of “up-to-date-ness.” Doctrine is not set by the clock. Theology is not fashion. The church is indeed meant to grow in knowledge across time, and the church’s mission means that it will always and of necessity encounter and engage and respond to new questions, challenges, and ideas. The church did not have standing teaching on nuclear weapons or IVF or cloning or CRISPR or extraterrestrial life or climate change until those technologies and eventualities appeared on the (social, conceptual, political) scene. Nevertheless, the terms of the church’s teaching are set by the gospel, and the gospel is itself one and the same as the announcement made by the apostles in the first generation. It is that gospel—the faith once for all delivered to the saints—that at once norms and generates whatever the church has to say anew in the present day.

On the other hand, what resistance to fads entails, positively speaking, is a certain emphasis or approach to learning and rooting oneself in the meaning of the faith. The best antidote to the cult of the new is devotion to the old. If you want to be inoculated against theological fads that appear today and vanish tomorrow, then dedicate yourself to the lifelong task of mastering (not that you can master) sacred tradition in all its breadth and depth. Read Christian texts from every century of the church’s existence. Read Christian texts from every region and locale and culture where the church has been planted. Read multiple texts by every one of the doctores ecclesiae (to which venerable list St. Irenaeus will be added soon!). Read church fathers and medievals, reformers and moderns and postmoderns. Read mystics and missionaries, monks and ministers, bishops and beggars, evangelists and academics. Read Catholics and Orthodox, Anglicans and Anabaptists, Methodists and Moravians, Calvinists and Campbellites. Read them on every doctrinal locus under the sun. Read three of them for every newly written book you open. If you’re lucky, you won’t only be immunized against the pathogen of whatever happens to be trending at the moment. You might just fall in love.

The truth is, the things a newfangled fad might lead you to doubt—Jesus died on the cross as a sacrifice for my sins; angels and demons are real; when I die my soul will go to heaven to be with the Lord; the Holy Spirit works miracles; the Bible tells us about things that really happened—are beliefs so basic that in any given church you might not be able to find a child or a grandparent who ever thought to question them. It usually takes a Master’s degree to do that. But pastors don’t go to seminary to learn why the simple beliefs of ordinary Christians are wrong. They go to learn, among other things, how and why they’re right. It’s a privilege to go beneath the surface, to see more than the tip of the iceberg. But that privilege comes with responsibilities. One of them is to repel every inclination to snobbery and condescension. Another is to report on the glories of what you’ve glimpsed in your deep-sea exploring (which is to say, your theological education). Above all it is your responsibility to use your knowledge to serve the people of God. One of the best ways to do that is to learn the people of God: first by loving them, then by listening to them. Listen to them as they speak today, but most of all listen to them as they speak from the past. Their voices, inscribed in countless texts, are a beacon in the darkness, if only you’ll look for the light.

(In)defectibility, local and regional

Churches die. Christian traditions die. Denominations die. Whole regions and epochs of once flourishing ecclesial and liturgical life die.

Does that sound harsh? It’s certainly cause for lament. But it’s a plain truth of history, and the church’s faith has no grounds for disputing it.

Nevertheless I have often found myself within earshot of Christians, especially pastors and church leaders, who casually suggest otherwise. They take the possibility, not to mention the assertion, that individual or local or regional churches and their concomitant institutions and organs of self-propagation and tradition might die—might even, in terms of statistical or demographic probability, be bound for death sooner rather than later—to be contrary to confidence in the gospel, and/or a denial of the faith, and/or sign of a lack of trust in God, and/or cause for despair. How could you get up in the morning, as a Christian or a pastor, believing that?

Well. The first thing to say to that is that Christians don’t get out of bed because they have reason to believe things will go well for them. On balance, the likelihood of a Christian’s suffering is directly, not inversely, proportional to her faithfulness in discipleship. At the very least, faithfulness is not a guard against bad things happening. We should expect to be Jobs, every one of us, and cry out in thanks when we are not. We follow the Lord to Golgotha. Eternal life comes after crucifixion: it does not precede it, much less avoid it.

Be that as it may. The simpler point concerns the doctrine of indefectibility. This doctrine teaches that, follows the promise of Jesus to St. Peter, the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. And that is true. The church will not blink out of existence, no matter how weak or frail or corrupt or small it becomes. The church will be here when the Lord returns. The saying is sure. Every Christian bets her life on it.

But “the church” doesn’t mean your church. It means the church catholic. Leave aside whether that honorific applies to one institutional form or ecclesial tradition in particular. What it doesn’t include is the local parish or congregation to which you belong. It doesn’t include all the churches in your city put together. It even doesn’t include all the churches on your continent put together. Nor, finally, does it include your denomination or stream of ecclesial tradition. There may come a day when there are no more Moravians or Wesleyans or Baptists or Stone-Campbellites or Calvinists or Lutherans around. There may come a time when North America is a burnt-over district for faith (to use a phrase from the late Robert Jenson)—when not one community of Jesus’s gospel remains in these ancient lands. That is a possibility. Perhaps they will lie fallow, the people left behind growing weary, eventually panting after Christ. We may trust that such a thing would be superintended by divine providence. Perhaps it would lead, decades or centuries hence, to a great revival. But for the time being, and indeed into the indefinite future, we aren’t promised one single thing about survival: that is, the survival of our communities, our institutions, or our regional and national denominations, however strong or weak they may appear at any one time.

That may be a hard pill to swallow. Better to accept the truth, though, than to live by a lie. More to the point, it reminds us that our trust, finally, is in God alone. The only history with a side worth being on is his. Vindication won’t come short of glory. But it will come soon enough.

Angels

A few years back I had one of those serendipitous reading moments when all at once an unexpected theme or subject emerges from disparate and seemingly unrelated texts. The first was the Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis; the second, the Catholic Catechism; the third, On the Orthodox Faith by St. John Damascene. The topic? Angels.

Space Trilogy

Lewis’s work is saturated with the angelic, and the adventures of Ransom in space (and on earth) are no different. Among Lewis’s many gifts, as both a novelist and a theological thinker, is his ability to depict supra-cosmic creaturely life in its necessary ineffable grandeur without becoming either saccharine or anthropomorphic. The angels aren’t like us only somewhat not. They exist on a wholly other level. The image that sticks with me, from one of the first two novels in the Space Trilogy, is Ransom’s impression that, though an angel manifesting to him inside a house is somehow or other present to his senses, the angel nevertheless appears aslant—as though the axis on which he stands were unrelated to the earth’s axis, or any other in this universe.

Angels are also present in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, among other works. My sense is that angels serve two functions in Lewis’s spiritual imagination. First, they represent and embody a rebuttal to a disenchanted, depopulated cosmos. From one angle, it’s a simple assertion: If God exists, then there’s nothing spookier, metaphysically speaking, for there to be other spiritual beings; it’s only natural. From another angle, it’s a powerful rebuttal: If angels exist, then the very notion of a mechanistic cosmos devoid of God and the soul and the moral law is bunk.

Second, Lewis rightly portrays the angelic in its double dimension: not only the good, but also the bad. He writes of demons, in other words. No reader of the Bible could plausibly imagine that whatever created life transcends us is only beautiful and glorious; it also includes the horrific and the wicked. It includes Satan and all his pomp. Lewis thinks that is morally and metaphysically interesting, which it is, and therefore worth writing about in an age like his (and ours), which it was (and is).

Catechism

Around the time I was making my way through the Space Trilogy, I read the following section in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It comes from Part I, Paragraph 5, titled “Heaven and Earth.” It’s part of an exposition of what Christians believe, following the Rule of Faith codified in the creedal narration of biblical teaching. Here’s what it says:

The Scriptural expression “heaven and earth” means all that exists, creation in its entirety. It also indicates the bond, deep within creation, that both unites heaven and earth and distinguishes the one from the other: “the earth” is the world of men, while “heaven” or “the heavens” can designate both the firmament and God’s own “place”—”our Father in heaven” and consequently the “heaven” too which is eschatological glory. Finally, “heaven” refers to the saints and the “place” of the spiritual creatures, the angels, who surround God.

The profession of faith of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) affirms that God “from the beginning of time made at once (simul) out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly, and then (deinde) the human creature, who as it were shares in both orders, being composed of spirit and body.”

I. THE ANGELS

The existence of angels—a truth of faith

The existence of the spiritual, non-corporeal beings that Sacred Scripture usually calls “angels” is a truth of faith. the witness of Scripture is as clear as the unanimity of Tradition.

Who are they?

St. Augustine says: “‘Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit’, from what they do, ‘angel.’“ With their whole beings the angels are servants and messengers of God. Because they “always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven” they are the “mighty ones who do his word, hearkening to the voice of his word.”

As purely spiritual creatures angels have intelligence and will: they are personal and immortal creatures, surpassing in perfection all visible creatures, as the splendor of their glory bears witness.

Christ “with all his angels”

Christ is the center of the angelic world. They are his angels: “When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him. . . .” They belong to him because they were created through and for him: “for in him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities - all things were created through him and for him.” They belong to him still more because he has made them messengers of his saving plan: “Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to serve, for the sake of those who are to obtain salvation?”

Angels have been present since creation and throughout the history of salvation, announcing this salvation from afar or near and serving the accomplishment of the divine plan: they closed the earthly paradise; protected Lot; saved Hagar and her child; stayed Abraham’s hand; communicated the law by their ministry; led the People of God; announced births and callings; and assisted the prophets, just to cite a few examples. Finally, the angel Gabriel announced the birth of the Precursor and that of Jesus himself.

From the Incarnation to the Ascension, the life of the Word incarnate is surrounded by the adoration and service of angels. When God “brings the firstborn into the world, he says: ‘Let all God’s angels worship him.’” Their song of praise at the birth of Christ has not ceased resounding in the Church’s praise: “Glory to God in the highest!” They protect Jesus in his infancy, serve him in the desert, strengthen him in his agony in the garden, when he could have been saved by them from the hands of his enemies as Israel had been. Again, it is the angels who “evangelize” by proclaiming the Good News of Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection. They will be present at Christ’s return, which they will announce, to serve at his judgement.

The angels in the life of the Church

In the meantime, the whole life of the Church benefits from the mysterious and powerful help of angels.

In her liturgy, the Church joins with the angels to adore the thrice-holy God. She invokes their assistance (in the Roman Canon’s Supplices te rogamus. . . [“Almighty God, we pray that your angel . . .”]; in the funeral liturgy’s In Paradisum deducant te angeli . . . [“May the angels lead you into Paradise . . .”]). Moreover, in the “Cherubic Hymn” of the Byzantine Liturgy, she celebrates the memory of certain angels more particularly (St. Michael, St. Gabriel, St. Raphael, and the guardian angels).

From its beginning to death human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession. “Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life.” Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and men united in God.

The claim that the existence of angels is de fide—a revealed truth of the faith incumbent on all Christians to believe—struck me like a thunderbolt. And yet the rehearsal of the witness of Scripture and sacred tradition makes clear the warrant for the assertion. Angels are everywhere in the biblical story. And as St. Luke knew well, they show up at the biggest moments. They are, as the Catechism teaches, Christ’s own angels, the heavenly messengers and soldiers of Israel’s Messiah. And they aid the church on earth in various ways, largely invisible and mysterious, but nevertheless as our guardians and helpers and, ultimately, our fellow servants of the Lord. They join us in worship. Or rather, we join them.

The Damascene

The very same week, perhaps even the same day, that I read that section of the Catechism I read the following from St. John of Damascus; it’s found in Book II, chapter 3 of An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, which was written in the early to mid eighth century:

[God] is Himself the Maker and Creator of the angels: for He brought them out of nothing into being and created them after His own image, an incorporeal race, a sort of spirit or immaterial fire: in the words of the divine David, He makes His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire: and He has described their lightness and the ardor, and heat, and keenness and sharpness with which they hunger for God and serve Him, and how they are borne to the regions above and are quite delivered from all material thought.

An angel, then, is an intelligent essence, in perpetual motion, with free-will, incorporeal, ministering to God, having obtained by grace an immortal nature: and the Creator alone knows the form and limitation of its essence. But all that we can understand is, that it is incorporeal and immaterial. For all that is compared with God Who alone is incomparable, we find to be dense and material. For in reality only the Deity is immaterial and incorporeal.

The angel's nature then is rational, and intelligent, and endowed with free-will, changeable in will, or fickle. For all that is created is changeable, and only that which is uncreated is unchangeable. Also all that is rational is endowed with free-will. As it is, then, rational and intelligent, it is endowed with free-will: and as it is created, it is changeable, having power either to abide or progress in goodness, or to turn towards evil.

It is not susceptible of repentance because it is incorporeal. For it is owing to the weakness of his body that man comes to have repentance.

It is immortal, not by nature but by grace. For all that has had beginning comes also to its natural end. But God alone is eternal, or rather, He is above the Eternal: for He, the Creator of times, is not under the dominion of time, but above time.

They are secondary intelligent lights derived from that first light which is without beginning, for they have the power of illumination; they have no need of tongue or hearing, but without uttering words they communicate to each other their own thoughts and counsels.

Through the Word, therefore, all the angels were created, and through the sanctification by the Holy Spirit were they brought to perfection, sharing each in proportion to his worth and rank in brightness and grace.

They are circumscribed: for when they are in the Heaven they are not on the earth: and when they are sent by God down to the earth they do not remain in the Heaven. They are not hemmed in by walls and doors, and bars and seals, for they are quite unlimited. Unlimited, I repeat, for it is not as they really are that they reveal themselves to the worthy men to whom God wishes them to appear, but in a changed form which the beholders are capable of seeing. For that alone is naturally and strictly unlimited which is uncreated. For every created thing is limited by God Who created it.

Further, apart from their essence they receive the sanctification from the Spirit: through the divine grace they prophesy : they have no need of marriage for they are immortal.

Seeing that they are minds they are in mental places , and are not circumscribed after the fashion of a body. For they have not a bodily form by nature, nor are they extended in three dimensions. But to whatever post they may be assigned, there they are present after the manner of a mind and energize, and cannot be present and energize in various places at the same time.

Whether they are equals in essence or differ from one another we know not. God, their Creator, Who knows all things, alone knows. But they differ from each other in brightness and position, whether it is that their position is dependent on their brightness, or their brightness on their position: and they impart brightness to one another, because they excel one another in rank and nature. And clearly the higher share their brightness and knowledge with the lower.

They are mighty and prompt to fulfill the will of the Deity, and their nature is endowed with such celerity that wherever the Divine glance bids them there they are straightway found. They are the guardians of the divisions of the earth: they are set over nations and regions, allotted to them by their Creator: they govern all our affairs and bring us succor. And the reason surely is because they are set over us by the divine will and command and are ever in the vicinity of God.

With difficulty they are moved to evil, yet they are not absolutely immovable: but now they are altogether immovable, not by nature but by grace and by their nearness to the Only Good.

They behold God according to their capacity, and this is their food.

They are above us for they are incorporeal, and are free of all bodily passion, yet are not passionless: for the Deity alone is passionless.

They take different forms at the bidding of their Master, God, and thus reveal themselves to men and unveil the divine mysteries to them.

They have Heaven for their dwelling-place, and have one duty, to sing God's praise and carry out His divine will.

Moreover, as that most holy, and sacred, and gifted theologian, Dionysius the Areopagite , says, All theology, that is to say, the holy Scripture, has nine different names for the heavenly essences. These essences that divine master in sacred things divides into three groups, each containing three. And the first group, he says, consists of those who are in God's presence and are said to be directly and immediately one with Him, viz., the Seraphim with their six wings, the many-eyed Cherubim and those that sit in the holiest thrones. The second group is that of the Dominions, and the Powers, and the Authorities; and the third, and last, is that of the Rulers and Archangels and Angels.

Some, indeed, like Gregory the Theologian, say that these were before the creation of other things. He thinks that the angelic and heavenly powers were first and that thought was their function. Others, again, hold that they were created after the first heaven was made. But all are agreed that it was before the foundation of man. For myself, I am in harmony with the theologian. For it was fitting that the mental essence should be the first created, and then that which can be perceived, and finally man himself, in whose being both parts are united.

But those who say that the angels are creators of any kind of essence whatever are the mouth of their father, the devil. For since they are created things they are not creators. But He Who creates and provides for and maintains all things is God, Who alone is uncreated and is praised and glorified in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Doesn’t that fill you with awe and delight? St. John’s quotes and references could lead us down further paths: to the Pseudo-Denys and St. Gregory Nazianzen, backward to St. Augustine and forward to St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas, even on to Karl Barth, who has a hefty angelology for a modern theologian.

The point I drew from this exegetical serendipity at the time, and draw now, is rather plain. Prior to reading these texts I had the theoretical knowledge of angels: I could have told you what the theological tradition says about them. But to read these two estimable authorities devote such loving attention to them, in tandem with Lewis’s novelistic rendering, brought home to me at a deeper level—in my heart, in my soul—just how wonderful as well as important the angelic is to the life of the church and the testimony of the gospel. And ever since I’ve noticed my hackles are raised, my antennae buzz, when the over-educated but under-informed among my fellow believers, but primarily among pastors, roll their eyes at ostensibly silly and outdated things like “angels and demons.” (Usually prefaced by that absurd and meaningless modifier, “literal.”) I do my best not to be That Academic who flies in to correct and rebuke. But it gets under my skin. For the condescension is wholly unearned. It’s not as though an archeologist or astronomer discovered the nonexistence of angels in 1927. They are no more subject to empirical investigation than God. Yet true-blue believers in God in the year of our Lord 2021 look down their noses on every other Christian, past and present, themselves excepted as if it were everyone else, and not themselves, who are the naive, the unenlightened. But, again, such haughty know-it-alls didn’t arrive at a considered conclusion about angelic superstition by a process of reasoning. They did so as a function of their class and education; possibly through half-skimming a now-forgotten but once-faddish academic in grad school.

To which I say: Get over yourself. There’s nothing culturally hip about being a Christian who believes all the spooky stuff—God, resurrection, incarnation, miracles, et al—minus angels. You don’t get any societal cache for it, even if it makes you feel set apart from the losers and boobs who read the Bible “literally.” Face it: You’re one of us. You’re among the shabby and disreputable, at whom the well-to-do look down their noses. Embrace it! It’s okay. It’s part of the deal.

You have our blessing. Permission granted. Believe in angels. One day you might even find that you need one.

The Book of Strange New Things, 3

So I don’t think Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things works. Its lead is unbelievable; the prose is unmemorable to a fault; the payoffs meant to explain the eerie human and mental atmosphere on the alien planet are unsatisfactory, and call in turn for further explanations that are never forthcoming.

What works, if anything? A few things.

1. The aliens. Or as Peter calls them, the Oasans. Faber succeeds in creating and depicting—with considerable restraint—a plausible and heretofore unimagined style of intelligent life beyond Earth. We get to know them, but at some distance. They are hungry for Jesus, and believably so. They are stubborn, and stubbornly non-human, yet intelligible. They are both like us (bipedal, five-fingered, linguistic) and unlike us (misshapen, hideous faces; radically communitarian; lacking something like an Ego, though individuated nonetheless). Faber is at his best when he’s describing the Oasan community or narrating a conversation between one of them and Peter.

2. The most theologically pregnant feature of the book is the suggestion that the Oasans are mortal, profoundly vulnerable to suffering, illness, and death, but may not be sinful. This is half a virtue for the novel, because Faber is clever enough to imagine this state of affairs (and, by extension, the effects it might have for pastor-missionaries who think of Sin as the one great problem addressed by Christianity), but not committed or interested enough to follow through on its many pastoral and theological implications. C. S. Lewis did so in the first two books of his Space Trilogy, but that is a work of fantasy as much as it is science fiction. Faber here could have offered a more realistic or at least less of a #FullChristian take. But he just leaves it untouched, beyond the crisis it creates for Peter’s faith, since what the Oasans want is healing of their infirmities, and he doesn’t know if he truly believes he can offer that. Then he decides to leave them. The end.

3. That’s a tad glib. The final two pages, the final paragraph, and the final line are all utterly fitting to the book, and quite apt to the biblical verse on which they are a riff. Speaking of which…

4. The relationship between Peter and Beatrice (hello there, Meaningful Names; may I take your baggage?) that is, or is meant to be, the emotional heart of the novel largely works, I think, though I am undecided on what Faber himself thinks of it. Due to the distance between them, Peter’s poor communication skills, and the roiling catastrophes on Earth, Bea more or less lets go of Peter within two or three months of the six-month mission. Seems abrupt, no? She doesn’t stop loving him, but she in effect hands him over to the Oasans, thinking him dispassionate and uncaring, even as she is carrying their first and only child in her womb. It would not be an unjust reading to say that what the novel reveals is that Peter and Bea’s relationship was fragile from the start, built on codependency (she rescued him from addiction and led him to Christ; marrying him brought her out of shame for her upbringing and past sexual experiences) and persisting mutual neediness (they have no friends to speak of; they have no activities other than evangelizing and caring, together, for their little flock). Each of them has nothing but the other, plus Jesus. When all is right with the world, that’s more than enough. When the world—their world—starts to crumble, it proves not nearly enough. What I want to know is: Does Faber want us to see this? Or does he think their relationship a beautiful, healthy, antifragile thing that is only called into question by the stress shocks, so to speak, of unprecedented distance and trial? In any case, it’s emotionally credible, and while I wasn’t devastated by their increasing detachment and loss, I felt it.

4. Speaking of which, Faber also succeeds in his depiction of Peter’s relationship with Grainger, his main “handler” and only real friend on Oasis. Their budding no-yes-maybe-no relationship—little more than seeking some kind of basic human connection in an emotional wasteland—is worn and lived-in and all too recognizable.

* * *

I cannot conclude these reflections, however, without instancing a few quotations to show how off, finally, Peter is as a character, that is, as a Christian convert, pastor, and missionary (recall: not because his theology is wrong, but because it doesn’t hold together; the parts don’t add up to a whole that makes sense of his character, or that echoes anything one would find in the world of Christian faith and ministry). First:

“So what’s your role?”

“My role?”

“Yeah. A minister is there to connect people to God, right? Or to Christ, Jesus, whatever. Because people commit sins and they need to be forgiven, right? So . . . what sins are these guys committing?”

“None that I can see.”

“So . . . don’t get me wrong, Peter, but . . . what exactly is the deal here?”

Peter wiped his brow again. “Christianity isn’t just about being forgiven. It’s about living a fulfilled and joyous life. The thing is, being a Christian is an enormous buzz; that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. It’s deep satisfaction. It’s waking up in the morning filled with excitement about every minute that’s ahead of you.”

Mmm. Okay. An enormous buzz. Filled with excitement. Did I mention that this guy left behind his wife and all he knew to share the gospel with aliens? That he and his wife, back on Earth, would hand-stitch tracts of Bible stories to be mailed and delivered to foreign, “unreached” people groups? For what? Buzz and excitement? (NB: He’s not a charismatic, and his faith is rocked to the core when an Oasan asks him to pray for her to be healed from a physical injury.)

Second:

He only wished he’d had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn’t a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one’s energy—insignificant in itself—to the vastly greater energy that was God’s love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body. A miracle similar, in principle, to the one that had given human form to Jesus.

Ah. Gotcha. So this dude’s a “we’re all incarnations of God/Jesus is just the highest version” sort of Christian. Excellent. No further comment necessary, none whatsoever.

Third and last:

“You one of those decaffeinated Christians, padre? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last Judgment, 100 percent less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?” Tartaglione’s voice dripped with contempt. “Marty Kurtzburg—now he was a man of faith. Grace before meals, ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,’ none of this Krishna-has-wisdom-too crapola, always wore a jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes. And if you scratched him deep enough, he’d tell you: These are the last days.”

Peter swallowed hard on what tasted like bile. Even if he was dying himself, he didn’t think these were the world’s last days. God wouldn’t let go of the planet he loved so easily. He’d given His only son to save it, after all. “I’m just trying . . . just trying to treat people the way Jesus might have treated them. That’s Christianity for me.”

Faber almost grasps the nettle here. Almost. The problem is that he supposes there are only two options: either fundamentalist (the Lutheran Kurtzburg) or non-fundamentalist (the (Abelardian?) evangelical Peter). Faber’s imagination can conceive a traditionalist Christian believer exclusively as a fundamentalist who travels to an alien world in “jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes.” Equation: true believer = traditionalist = confesses an actual bodily resurrection = fundamentalist = culturally parochial and anthropologically naive stereotypical Western missionary. And since Peter is not that, that is to say the last item, he cannot be any of the others. But Faber also wants—or rather, his narrative requires—Peter to be a Bible-believing, hyper-evangelistic, tract-mailing, low-church Pietist type. One who thinks Christianity is a matter of life and death … and yet who also describes Christianity as an exciting emotional buzz, moralized without remainder into treating other people the way Jesus would treat them.

The novel remains powerful and evocative, and I don’t regret reading it. But the unrealized potential makes the whole thing all the more disappointing. Oh well.

Theses on preaching

1. The principal subject matter for preaching, always and everywhere, is the triune God of Israel attested and revealed in the good news about Jesus, the Lord and Messiah of Israel. If a sermon could not plausibly be said to have been about that, it was not a sermon.

1.1. This is primarily a substantive point, that is, regarding what a sermon is "about," which doesn't mean that counting the number of times the words "God," "Lord," "Jesus," "Spirit," "Trinity," etc., are mentioned in a sermon is going to do the job. Throwing around those words isn't good enough; indeed, imagine an expertly crafted sermon on the book of Esther that somehow avoided such terms, just like the text in question, while nevertheless rendering God's providential, saving hand throughout.

1.2. Having said that, the point is secondarily grammatical. That is, months and months of sermons unpopulated by liberal use of the sentence structure, "God [verb]," would be deeply suspect. In most sermons God ought to be the grammatical subject as much as he is the subject matter. God is not passive—in Scripture, in the world, in the church, or in the sermon—and he shouldn't be implied to be by the rhetoric of preachers.

2. A sermon is the proclamation of the gospel by an authorized member of the church out of a specific text from Holy Scripture in the setting of public worship among, to, and for the sake of the gathered local assembly of the baptized.

2.1. Proclamation means announcement, attestation, verbal testimony, public witness, a herald's message from the royal throne. A sermon, therefore, is not a lesson. It is not (primarily) teaching, or didactic in tone or content. It is not a pep talk, an inspirational message, or personal sharing. It is not a comedy routine. It is not a TED Talk. It is solemn, joyful, awesome declaration of the gospel of the incarnate Lord.

2.2. The gospel is the good news about Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God become human, crucified, risen, and ascended. Jesus is Immanuel, God with us; the autobasileia, the kingdom himself in person; the God-man who takes away the sins of the world. He is the promised one of Israel, the grace of God enfleshed, the King and Ruler of the cosmos. His name means love, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption. A sermon is not a sermon that does not point, like the outstretched finger of John the Baptist, to this Christ, and to life in him, the life he makes possible.

2.2.1. That the sermon announces the gospel, and the gospel is the good news of friendship with God through the grace of Christ, does not mean that every sermon must be about or mention the name of Jesus. Most should, no doubt, and no sermon should fear mentioning Christ lest he be "imported" into or "imposed" on, say, a text that does not mention him by name. A Christian sermon should not fear to be a Christian sermon. But it is certainly possible to preach a faithful Christian sermon out of an Old Testament text without mentioning Jesus. Why? Because the good news about Jesus is the gospel of Israel's God, whose covenant with Abraham is the very covenant renewed in Christ and extended to the gentiles. God's grace, in other words, and God's identity and attributes, are one and the same across the covenants. To preach the one God just is to preach the gospel.

2.2.2. Having said that, reticence about preaching Jesus from Israel's scriptures is an inherited prejudice worth unlearning in most cases. Moses and David and Isaiah foretold Jesus, as Jesus himself taught. We should take him at his word, and God's people deserve to hear of it.

2.3. A sermon is and ought to be rooted in and an explication of some particular passage of the Christian Bible. This should go without saying. A sermon, however thematic, is not on a topic or theme first of all. The topic or theme arises from the text. A sermon series that does not follow the lectionary and is organized thematically should be very careful so as to commit itself to concrete texts each week.

2.3.1. Expository preaching may be done faithfully, but not all preaching need be expository. The danger of so-called non-expository preaching is that it become unmoored from the text. The alternative danger, however, is mistaking the sermon for a class lesson. But a sermon is not a lecture; the pulpit is not a lectern. A lecture's aim is understanding. A sermon's aim is faith. One can proclaim the gospel out of a text without parsing its every verb and explaining its every historical nuance. But one can do the latter without accomplishing the former. That's the error to avoid.

2.3.2. A sermon is not a book tour. It is not a personal testimony. It isn't time for church business (or, God forbid, budget talk). A sermon isn't practical advice, or suggestions for living your best life now, or ideas about how to parent. It is not electioneering and it is not political advocacy. If you hear attempted preachments that, for example, do not have a biblical text as their source or the living God as their subject or the gospel as the matter of their announcement: then you have not heard a sermon.

2.3.3. Texts preached on should be diverse in every way: narrative, epistle, Torah, psalms, wisdom, paraenesis, apocalypse, etc. For both lectionary and non-lectionary traditions, the harder texts should not be avoided (purity laws, money, war, nonviolence, gender, miracles, politics, justice—whatever challenges you or your audience's preconceptions or sacred cows).

2.4. Preaching is an item of Christian worship. It is an element of the liturgy, the word proclaimed in speech and sacrament. Preaching is not secular. It is not a species of human speech in general. It is the word of God communicated through human words. The preacher is an instrument of divine speech, a sanctified mediator of Christ's saving gospel. The Holy Spirit sanctifies the words of the sermon to be, in all their unworthiness, the medium of the eternal Word that slays and makes alive again.

2.4.1. Preachers and Christian hearers ought to approach the word proclaimed mindful of what is happening. Which is not to make the occasion a somber or rarefied event: a sermon's environment is and ought to be the lively reality of human community, which means nursing babies and fussing kids and coughs and tears and inarticulate moans (offered by, for example, profoundly intellectually disabled persons, who are welcomed by Christ himself to hear him speak). The sermon, in short, is not cordoned off from real life; the assembly need not resemble the silence of a monastery before God can begin to work. But precisely in the midst of and through all such common features of human life together, the Spirit of Christ is making his presence known in the speaking of his holy word.

2.4.2. The long-standing catholic practice of the church is for the proclaimed word to precede the celebration of the Eucharist, which is the climax of the liturgy. Churches descended from the Reformation tend to reverse the order, so that the service culminates in the sermon (sometimes tending, regrettably, to eliminate the meal altogether). The catholic sequence seems right to me, but in either case, there are dangers to be avoided.

2.4.3. Protestants must resist the temptation to make worship talky, so word-centered that it really does become like one long classroom experience, peppered with prayers and a bit of music. The word, moreover, must not swamp the sacrament. Far too many sermon-centered churches, even if they celebrate communion, downgrade its importance through a minimum of ritual, time, and emphasis. The sermon becomes the reason the people are gathered; and if the sermon, then the preacher; and if the preacher, then a mere minister has displaced Christ as the locus of the church's assembly. The gravest theological danger is that the sacramental principle of ex opere operato ceases to apply, practically, to the sermon, because its centrality highlights the need for technical quality, and preachers are no longer trusted to successfully proclaim God's gospel apart from their own worthiness or talents, for those very things become exactly the measure of their faithfulness, and thus their appeal.

2.4.4. Catholics (East and West) must resist the temptation to make the sermon, or homily, a mere prelude, preferably brief, to the Main Event. The gospel is proclaimed in word and sacrament; that need not imply equality in every respect, but it certainly requires a kind of parity, a recognition that each has its proper work to do, under God, for God's people. Ritual is good and liturgy is good, but proclamation of the gospel has the converting power of Christ himself through the Spirit (a sword in the hand of the servant of God, to mortify the flesh and vivify the soul), power to convict of sin, awaken faith, to work signs and miracles, to raise the dead. The centrality of the Eucharist does not logically entail, and must not become an excuse to enact, the liturgical devaluation of the proclaimed word.

2.5. A sermon is an ecclesial event; it exists by, in, and for the church of Christ. Preaching is a practice proper to the baptized. The proper context and principal audience for the word of God is the people of God. In this the sermon is no different than the Eucharist, whose natural home is the gathered community of faith.

2.5.1. The twofold telos of the sermon is the awakening of faith and the edification of the faithful. The sermon, then, is preached primarily to and for baptized believers, not to nonbelievers, visitors, seekers, or pagans. The sermon is not first of all evangelistic or apologetic. Doubtless there have been and are contexts in which sermons ought to be oriented to nonbelievers, but that is not ordinarily, not normatively, what the sermon is or is for. The word proclaimed is for the upbuilding of the saints in via, the (audible) manna alongside the (visible) manna that the Lord provides for the journey through the wilderness to the promised land.

2.5.2. Simplifying sermons so as to be intelligible, week in and week out, to people who know nothing about the Christian gospel or Holy Scripture is unwise and, though it may provide short-term results, in the long-term it is impracticable, ineffective, and damaging. The Lord's people require feeding. Refusing, on principle, never to move beyond milk for infants will leave the people famished and arrested in their spiritual maturity.

3. Preaching in a digital age presents challenges the church hasn't had to face in nearly its entire life. It's a genuinely new world, and the changes are still fresh, historically speaking. Microphones, video, images, projected text, recording, podcasts, broadcasting to multiple sites at once—I don't envy pastors who have to make decisions about such things in real time. But there are principles worth keeping in mind while navigating the new landscape.

3.1. Technology should serve the sermon and the sermon's ends, not the other way around. It should serve, in fact, every one of the theses above. If it does not—if it distracts, if it draws attention to itself, if it becomes an end in itself, if it is superficial, if it is flashy, if it is ugly, if it abets rather than subverts the hyper-technologizing tendencies already gnawing and corrupting the minds and souls of the faithful—then it should be resisted and rejected out of hand.

3.2. Preaching is an oral event. Considered as a natural occurrence, it is essentially a verbal communication spoken by one human being to the hearkening ears of a gathering of other human beings. Technology can aid this occurrence: by amplifying sound, for example, for the large size of an assembly; or, say, for the hard of hearing. It can even transmit the sermon to those unable, for medical or travel or other reasons, to attend the convocation of God's people in person. These are clear ways in which technology serves the orality of gospel proclamation.

3.2.1. Technology can also mitigate the spoken nature of the sermon. Such technology includes videos, extensive use of screen text, involved graphics and images and slide shows, and so on. The question is not whether these are absolutely forbidden in any and all cases. The question is whether they are subjected to rigorous theological inquiry as to their suitability to the essential form of churchly proclamation, rather than their merely instrumental capacities with respect to desired secondary ends (e.g., lack of boredom, capturing youths' attention, entertainment, laughs, viral videos). The medium is not neutral, not an instance of adiaphora; the medium is, literally, the message: the word of God for the people of God. If it isn't a word, if it isn't God's word, then it isn't the preaching of the gospel. And that's the whole ballgame.

3.3. Churches and preachers should be wary rather than eager to use new technologies. Technology takes on a life of its own. It masters its domain. Nor is it neutral: a social media app cannot reinforce good habits of sustained attention, for example, because by its very nature a social media app is meant to colonize your attention and destroy your ability to concentrate for sustained periods of time without interruption. Nor is technology master-less; it serves gods, rabid and hungry and insatiable. Those gods are the market and Silicon Valley. Technology doesn't descend ready-made from heaven. It comes from somewhere, and is made by human beings. Those human beings make what they sell and sell what they make for one reason: money. Letting what they make and sell into the church is a dangerous game to play, even if well-considered and well-intentioned. A pastor ought always to be suspicious rather than sanguine about the power of technology in the life of the church—and such suspicion should bear on its use in preaching.

4. Technique is, hands down, the least important thing about preaching. If a pastor has spent the week dwelling in the biblical text for that Sunday's sermon and, from the pulpit, strives, while petitioning for help from God's grace, to preach from Scripture the good news of God's grace in Jesus on behalf of and for the sake of the upbuilding of Christ's body—then the job is done. In a real sense that is the only criterion for any sermon: was that thing accomplished (even, was its accomplishment sought)? If so, then questions of delivery, eloquence, clarity, form, etc., are all secondary, and of little import. If not, if a truly Christian sermon was not even attempted, then all the good humor, articulateness, pathos, personal anecdotes, intelligence, powers of rhetoric, and the rest don't mean a damn thing.

4.1. Method is a matter of prudence, native talent, gifts of the Spirit, audience, context, training, and many more largely uncontrollable variables. A faithful sermon can be 20, 40, or 60 minutes long (or more); it can be done from memory, with a basic outline, or with a manuscript; it can involve gestures and movements and animation or minimal intonation and emotion; it can encompass the whole spectrum of human passions and virtues; there is no platonic ideal of Faithful Proclamation. (Nor, by the way, is there The Biblical Model of it.) Method depends; don't be a slave to method; don't be a disciple of methodologists.

4.2. Preaching should wear its study lightly while depending on it as the sermon's lifeblood. You can spot a preacher who doesn't study from a mile away. A preacher who doesn't read except for what is strictly necessary. A preacher who doesn't read widely, who doesn't read for pleasure, who doesn't read anything but commentaries (though, please, read the commentaries!). A preacher whose primary—or, God forbid, exclusive—allusions and references are to pop culture. A good preacher doesn't flaunt sources and drop names. But the research that informs a sermon should be discernible in the rich substance of it; should be there to be offered to anyone with further questions following the sermon. "Oh, you had a question about that line? Here are half a dozen books I'd recommend on the topic if you want to go deeper on it..."

4.2.1. Speaking of pop culture: steer clear of it. Nine times out of ten an explicit and/or drawn-out reference to pop culture is a distraction and undermines the aim of the reference. Lovers of pop culture vastly overestimate the universality of their pop culture darlings. Harry Potter may have millions of fans, but here's the truth: half of your church hasn't read the books or seen the films. Moreover, pop culture almost always skews young, and playing for the youth is a capitulation to market pressures. A sermon is catholic: it is meant for the one holy church of God—not some upwardly mobile demographic slice of it. Finally, pop culture references usually denigrate rather than elevate the material. What hath Hollywood to do with Jerusalem? Children's movies and science fiction are silly and insubstantial compared with the holy ever-living Trinity and the sacrifice of Jesus upon a Roman gallows. "When Jesus calls a man he bids him come and die—oh and that reminds me of this funny little anecdote from Finding Nemo..." The juxtaposition is absurd, and though congregants might chuckle or wink, in their hearts they know something great and weighty is being set alongside something weak and shallow. Don't do it.

4.2.2. The pop culture rule is a species of the greater genus of illustrations. (Another species is anecdotes.) Illustrations are certainly useful and have their place. But at least two dangers are worth addressing. One is the tendency for illustrations to swamp the text. Instead of the preacher's experience at the DMV illuminating the real matter at hand, which is the text from Scripture, the opposite happens: God's word becomes a bit player in the larger drama of the preacher's life. The other danger is related: illustrations, consistently used, can come to shape the people's minds in the following way. Instead of Scripture being the relevant, formative, immediate influence on their souls—their hearts, minds, morals, imaginations—Scripture is instead pictured as distant, alien, strange, ancient, foreign, irrelevant. And what illustrations do is bridge that gap, translate that language, assimilate that culture into ours, our time and context and culture and language being the dominant factors. Illustrations and stories and anecdotes and allusions need, rather, to serve the relevance and power and relatability and authority of the scriptural text, not reverse the terms and increase the alienation people (perhaps already) feel about the Bible.

5. All that the preacher does, all that the many facets of the sermon strive to achieve, must be in service of the one thing necessary: to speak human words, rooted in God's written word, that may, by the Spirit's grace, become a conduit for the living and eternal Word, Christ risen and reigning from heaven, to speak himself in person, in his saving presence, to his beloved people, that he might justify and sanctify, equip and encourage them in faith, hope, and love; and that they might, when the words are finished, give glory to God—and say Amen.

A coda on doubt

I forgot to include one thing in yesterday’s post about doubt. The unqualified affirmation of doubt, combined with the extension or requirement of experiencing it to all, is a problem also on pastoral grounds. Namely, the goodness of the good news depends on the ability to proclaim it without reservation or condition. The gospel announces an unrestricted promise of divine grace and love: “God has come near in Christ Jesus—repent and believe the good news!” The creeping, casual generalization of doubt to all believers and all belief as such has the effect of nullifying the force of this proclamation. For it is not only the unconditional quality of the message but the divine subject of the evangelical predicate that makes the message a matter of glad tidings, an announcement that is much more than a strong suggestion, but rather a word that of itself has the power to change lives, because it has already changed the world.

For example, the gospel does not say “You are forgiven.” It says “In Christ God has forgiven you.” It does not say “You have worth.” It says “You are made in the image of God.” It does not say “You have the power to do the good.” It says “God has given you his Holy Spirit, who will empower you to do the good.”

Moreover, such claims lose all power with a question mark placed next to them. “God loves you—maybe.” “God’s grace covers your sins—possibly.” “God’s Spirit will not abandon you—hopefully.” The gospel is a promise, and for the promise to take effect, it must be believed. It can be believed because of its speaker, the creator and redeemer of all, the One who keeps his promises. The irony is that, in seeking to be responsive to pastoral needs, those who absolutize doubt as an inevitable and even healthy mark of mature faith in the modern age rob themselves of the greatest pastoral resource available to them: the power of the gospel.

On the contrary, then: Do nothing to qualify or undermine the liberating promise of God’s good news in Christ: as the power of God for salvation, it places a question mark next to all human endeavors—not the reverse.