Preaching, Practice and Participation

I read this amazing post on Jordan Cooper's blog today, which Len Hjalmarson also took some time to write about on his own blog. Cooper starts with preaching, the church's continual idol. He brings up the painful truth that we listen to sermon after sermon for year after year, but can remember very few and are arguably changed by even fewer. So why do we continue on in such a preposterous way? Of course there are the obvious answers; we are afraid to change, we have elevated one element of the faith above others, and we continue to falsely believe that the transfer of more knowledge equals spiritual growth. But none of these are my biggest issues with preaching.

My issue comes with the help of Paul Tillich. Tillich, whenever he discusses discipleship, describes it as participation. For him, following Christ means taking part in what God is doing in creation. The modern, preaching-obsessed church asks its members to show up consistently on the weekends and hear a talking head that is supposedly going to lead them towards transformation. Obviously there is a place for this, but it is a lie for any church not to claim that this is where it believes 90% of its transformation is going to occur. Why do I say this? Look at any church and how much of its budget and employee time go into its weekend services and tell me I am wrong. Besides the fact that this is the usual sad fact that the majority of church budgets go back into the church, it also points out that churches, especially "outreach churches" are self-centered and are not asking their population to do anything with their faith.

Jordan Cooper ends his post by claiming that this has a lot to do with preachers not living it out, so they are not asking church-goers to do so. I think there is a lot of truth to this. But that's only half of what is going on here. The other half, I believe, goes with a post I did last week. For most churches, attendance is an idol. If we call people to higher, tougher standards (think of Jesus and the rich young ruler), if we spent a Sunday morning praying for our cities, if we took an hour of a service time to brainstorm how God might use us in our neighborhoods for his glory, basically if we did anything that called all of our "attendees" to become participants in the Kingdom of God who actually practice what they supposedly believe, our attendence would most likely drop, especially at first. And if our attendance dropped, we would lose our beloved idol, the functional savior of most pastors. How could we measure our impact if not by numerical growth, I ask with sarcasm. But wow, how great would it be if we became truly missional, and began to participate with our Lord and put our faith into practice.

Peace,
Matt