Good Preaching #3

Last weekend a friend of mine announced that he had started attending a Pentecostal church after years ministering in a 'typical' Sydney Anglican setting. His most startling comment was that for the first time since high school (he is now in his mid 20s) he is now reading his Bible in a devotional way. He says that the preaching he's now hearing is getting him excited about God and about what can be found in Scripture. What were we doing wrong to deprive this man of the affective wonder of God's word? Here's a thought:

Could our use of the Bible from the pulpit and in the small group Bible study be feeding an approach to Scripture which is about knowing things about God rather than knowing God himself? Such an approach could lead us along the path of Gnosticism; saved, kept and fed solely by information and not by an informed relationship. Yes knowledge is important, but in the sense that it feeds our relationship with the one we have knowledge about. To fail to draw out and make this connection in our preaching is a severe discrepancy. This is the problem with common statement that our goal in preaching is to 'help people be able to read the Bible'. Unless that help includes a renewed passion for being a child of the Almighty then I fear that we aren't teaching people to read the Bible at all. At best we are giving a lesson in hermeneutics; helpful to a point, but not adequate on its own.

Aside from this issue, there is a problem with our current obsession over ministry 'training'. I saw one document recently which suggested that the goal of ministry was to raise up other ministers and to train them to train and raise up more ministers who will then train others to train others to train others etc. So who actually does the ministry? Yeah, training is important, and we need to provide for subsequent generations, but the problem with this approach is exemplified in the attitude of my friend mentioned above. He never stopped to enjoy his status as a loved child of God. Why? Because his church and university Christian group taught him that being Christian was all about serving others and training others to serve others; about doing and not being. If we had more 'be' along side the 'do' then we would be in a better state of spiritual health.

Of course these issues aren't found everywhere in the Anglican Church in Sydney (of which I'm a proud member), but I fear that they are issues which we are particularly susceptible to. It's probably a good idea to keep an eye on our own particular temptations.