One of the common denominators of the seeker-friendly/seeker-driven worship services I have attended these past few years has been the style of preaching.  More a teaching really, the intent is to give the hearer a very clear, practical message from the Bible on daily living.  Explicitly religious and mysterious terminology is eschewed in favor of every day, concrete expressions.  The message is outlined in the bulletin, often with significant words left blank for the hearer to fill in as the preacher gets to them.  The use of an overhead or slide presentation of the main points is almost mandatory.  Great passion is neither emoted nor invoked; these are reasonable, civil men representing a reasonable, civil God, after all.  Sometimes the preacher will sit on a tall stool, as if hosting a talk show.  One preached in jeans and a gas-station-attendant shirt with his first name written in cursive on a patch over his pocket.  I do not mention these details to ridicule, but to paint a picture.  Given what he was trying to do, I thought it rather a nice touch.  Gone from every one of these sermons, of course, were all semblances of pulpit, robe, mystery and urgency.

Now I cannot gripe too much with the loss of pulpit or robe which are, in fact, clearly extra-biblical and not necessary for the preaching of the gospel (although I find a music stand or my own memory to be a poor substitute for holding notes.)  I do not use a pulpit or robe when I go to a nearby retirement home to lead a Bible study, for instance, though I still expect the Word of God to be made effective by the work of the Holy Spirit.  It is the Word, and not the instrument or means, which is authoritative, so the loss of these props is not fatal.  But the loss of mystery and urgency in our preaching is, for their replacement with sermons driven by accessibility and practicality cannot help but lead to a common place works-based religion, even if the metamorphosis begins subtly.

Here is what I mean:  first, the loss of mystery in favor of accessibility makes God and His Salvation so familiar as to devalue the very Gospel of grace it is purporting to promote.  So many of the statements of the New Testament epistles are so vague, spiritual, and well, other-worldly, that on first reading, I have to admit that I have little idea what the author is getting at, much less what sort of immediate application I should derive.  And if this is so with the epistles, mind you, how much more the case with the prophets, poets, and our own Lord, who spoke in parables, in part, that those outside the kingdom “may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand?” (Mark 4:12).

Now the good news is this:  when through effort, exasperation and prayer, the Holy Spirit begins to show us the glory and the beauty and the truth in these passages, we find their meaning and import to be far greater than we can have ever imagined at a first reading.  This is grace.  This is valuable grace.  And it cannot be had at a glance or through terms which communicate easily to our world, for heaven is a foreign land with a foreign language.  If a first-time visitor is able to easily apprehend the storehouses of our faith, I am not sure that I can wait until Wednesday night to be fed; I would rather doubt that there was enough there to begin with.  But when we represent a prize so precious that only words such as “redemption,” “atonement,” “sinner,” “justification,” and “glorification,” can describe it, then we present a prize worth panting after, a prize worth the selling of all one has to get.  A sermon diet whose primary purpose is to be palatable to the uninitiated cannot serve forth anything so nutritious as to merit the name of grace.  But preaching which retains a mystery about it, which holds the prize a little beyond reach, can only be accessed by one means -- that of faith in the Good News of Jesus Christ.  That is how real, heart-rending, and life-changing grace is made accessible.

But this is still not the real danger to gracious religion.  The real danger is the second characteristic of “seeker-friendly” preaching, that of its practicality.  Why so?  The loss of urgency to practicality in preaching makes it more man-centered than God-centered, which in turn, leads to us trying to please God by our own efforts, the death-nell to the doctrine of grace.  This is not to say that urgent preaching is not ultimately practical, but it starts where it should: the desperate plight of people given over entirely to their own sin so that they have no hope but for the rich, mysterious grace of God.  Add to that a God who does what pleases Him without being bound to any machinations of man, and that should create a sense of urgent need for the grace of God to grant us the faith that is needed to produce any sort of helpful activity in our lives.  And so the urgent preacher exegetes scripture as it is given, with the hope that his hearers’ hearts would be worked upon by the Holy Spirit, who comes and goes like the wind.  Specific application he often cannot give from the text, but must trust that God, in His sovereign ways will be at work the rest of the week.

But if you start with the premise that all messages should be ready-made to take home and apply right away, the urgent dependence upon God is replaced by the hearer’s ability to put the lesson into practice.  This inevitably leads one to rely upon oneself to fulfill the very practical and specific applications from the message.  And relying upon oneself ultimately leads to one of only two results -- self-condemnation, or what is worse, self-commendation.  And this is the kind of religion we call moralism or legalism -- that the basis of our relationship with God is dependant upon our own behavior.  It may not seem like moralism because it is not stern and does not come from a high pulpit, but that is exactly what it is in every danger of explicitly becoming.  Moralism in blue jeans is still moralism.  Legalism made comfortable is still legalism.

This is our chief complaint with liberal Christianity -- not that they engage in empty rituals or support homosexual rights or any number of other things -- but that they have abandoned the Gospel of grace, and have nothing to replace it with except moralism.  And as liberal aberrations have always been driven by apologetic concerns -- to make the gospel relevant to the present age -- so the “seeker” movement is likewise driven.  And like liberal Christianity, its chief problem is not innovation but simple unbelief -- unbelief that God saves people through sincere, rich, sin-and-grace-based preaching.  It would rather believe that God needs our help through new and creative methods.  And since its methods are essentially man-centered and works-based, so will its disciples also be.  I do not doubt that “seeker-driven” churches will thrive in the next few decades; what I doubt is that they will remain Christian.

And that is why, Sunday, I will simply try to tell you what I think Paul meant in Romans 15:7-22!  I think that is what we each need most this coming Lord's Day, as I try, with God's help, to apply the text to our hearts.  And from there, good works are bound to come as God leads.  That is what I have been seeing all year long across the church.  See you then! ~ Pastor H