Mark claims he has heard about 3,500 sermons. This works out at three per week, every week, for 25 years! Now either Mark’s maths is suspect or he has a serious addiction. He thinks preaching is one of the most important tasks of the church’s mission and is concerned enough to write 1500 words to try to improve the quality of sermons. (It would be interesting to know which church activities he considers less important.)

He identifies ten reasons why sermons are boring and all of them are the fault of the listener not the fault of the preacher! He even beseeches us to do what our pastors tell us!!! A sort of ’slaves obey your masters’

Michael Holt on the other hand, whilst agreeing that something needs to be done lays the problem at the door of the preacher. In fact he decided to write a book … sorry, God led him to write a book on the subject. He might be right or he might be wrong about this, others must judge, but either way it is a rather worrying claim. It places him in the same company as George Bush, David Koresh , Jim Baaker and Gerry Falwell and Benny Hinn. Just to be on the safe side, a visit to an audiolologist and a psychiatrist would not come amiss. Best to check these sorts of things out. Actually if he is right, judging from the video he has made, things are worse than I feared.

Mark and Michael should be neither surprised nor dismayed that sermons are generally wearisome and may find it comforting that, as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries, William Hogarth, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson illustrated humorously and vividly, the dreary, mind -numbing nature of sermons. A contemporary analogy is ‘snails doing algebra’ (Eagleton 2008)

Teachers were urged years ago to give up monologues (more politely expositions) that lasted more than 10 minutes and if we take a moment to remember our own schooldays we surely would say amen to that. Anyway it is not at all clear why we should expect priests, pastors or ministers to preach better than, say, window cleaners.

Although congregations wisely favour brevity over quality, there is clearly a problem for those who feel a need to sermonise. Just maybe, one of the problems rests with the internal power structures of the evangelical enterprise. This is well documented by Percy (1995), Bebbington (1994) but perhaps most interestingly and purely sociologically by Basil Bernstein:

“How a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates the educational knowledge it considers to be public, reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control”

Bernstein B. “Class, Codes and Control: Towards a theory of Educational Transmissions . Vol 11” (1975)

What all this boils down to is that the power structures intrinsic to fudamentalism and to evangelicalism are such that;

monologue is favoured over dialogue
authority is favoured over opinion
uniformity is favoured over diversity
certainty is favoured over ambiguity

The ‘society’ or organisation becomes ‘closed’ rather than ‘open’. This is one ‘explainer’ of the existence of hundreds of different sorts of evangelical churches. An interesting and sobering exercise is to identify other societies or organisations which fit the same model.

In Bernsteinian terms, the language code is restricted not elaborated and the resulting hierarchical structure is strong and rigid.

This ensures that preaching becomes pre-eminent and over-important.

There is a continuous quest for agents that will deliver certainty and control of power through preaching. (note this blog). Ultimately, concrete faith is sought through propositions and the quest for authority: control and certainty is a way of receiving, holding and demonstrating power against any other power that might pose a threat. (Again, comments on this blog illustrate this).

There is an alternative way of working which has been outlined previously and consists essentially in a reversal of the above table. The transfer of power is noticeable and at first uncongenial. The examples below are ‘things hard for thought’ but if hard questions take the place of ready answers, as they do in the best poetry and in the sayings of Jesus, the rewards are high.

The sorts of questions that might be raised are:

“you call for faith;
I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.
The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say,
If faith overcomes doubt.”

“ Bishop Blougram’s Apology” Robert Browning.

Can we have faith without doubt? What about doubt without faith? Is Blougram right?

How can we be merciful? Does being merciful necessarily mean being unjust? Does being “just” necessarily mean being cruel?

What can I know? What ought I to do? What do I hope for? Notice not “what can YOU know? What ought YOU to do? Nor What YOU can hope for!

There are plenty more. I’m sure you can think of plenty of your own.

References

“Evangelicalism in Modern Britain – A History from the 1730s to the 1980s” Bebbington D W (1989) Routledge.

“Words, Wonders and Power – Understanding Contemporary Christian Fundamentalism and Revivalism” Percy M (1996) SPCK.

You are the one who will make progress. Remember Aristotle “The unexamined life is not worth the living”
and Socrates who believed wisdom lay in recognising the limits of our knowledge.

Very best wishes to you and to your wife.

Too bad.

I’ll leave you and Wigrd to yourselves, you don’t have to leave, I will.
bob

I think you have confused “Mr Edwards” in Lowell’s poem with Jonathan Edwards!

Was Jonathan Edwards a false convert? (I mean the triple jump champion!)

If there are some “false converts” it is logically possible that all are false converts isn’t it?

The squaring of justice and mercy is difficult isn’t it? Can it be done?

In Islam, justice has priority. Traditionally in Christianity it is the other way round. (Though not always! think tele-evangelists and Inquisition. Indeed think of some of the contributors to this site.)

To some extent your reply to Stan reminds me of the disgruntled stait-laced Presbyterian parishioner who, cheated of his weekly dose of hell-fire and smarting under the deprivation, complained that the preacher, Hutcheson, was a ‘silly loon’ who had ‘babbled’ to them for an hour about a ‘good and benevolent God’ without a word about the ‘old comfortable doctrines’ of election, reprobation, original sin and death.

This was about 1730. (‘The more things change….’!) Hutcheson, one of the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment and a great influence on David Hume, subsequently took up the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. Stan is in pretty good company don’t you think?

We might remember that the strong and older meaning of ‘repent’ is to ‘re-think’ through the French ‘penser’ – ‘to think’ and the Latin ‘paenitere’ It does carry that meaning today though to some extent it has been eroded to mean only ‘to be genuinely sorry’ ‘Change of mind’ might be more accurate, I don’t really know. Does God repent over his decision to make Saul king? What are the implications here?

Does all this mean that repentance is a continuous process? or a one-off? Billy Graham now thinks people of other faiths can be ‘saved’ and John Stott no longer believes in hell. Ironically some evangelicals now say Graham should burn in Hell! Is this ‘justice’ or ‘mercy’? Can it be both? Can it be neither?

Quote:
The preacher was able to cause folks to go to the front in tears and seeming repentance

Why would you characterize this as “the preacher being able” to “seemingly’ bring repentance? You know as well as I do that no preacher can “bring repentance.
Your example of the bully is fine, nobody says that there are not false converts at ANY service and in the church today…but does this shed any light on the validity of Edward’s sermon’s biblical content? Pragmatism?

QuoteThen again, maybe that is not the Gospel message?

As for your misquote of Psalms 139:7
“…if I make my bed in hell, behold you are there…”

and your comment

But, the idea that God has a personal interest in each of us and in our circumstances is one that should be inviting.

Don’t hold any water in this context and don’t make your point. It’s merely one of several examples of God’s omnipresence and says nothing like “takes a personal interest in our circumstances” as part of the gospel message.

Jesus: Repent for the kingdom of Heaven is near!

Peter: This man, handed over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you executed by nailing to the cross at the hands of Gentiles…”

Those are examples of preaching from the bible itself.

As followers of Christ, we, too, need to be inviting. Otherwise, there is no such thing as Amazing Grace, is there?

Is there an underlying idea that we must “entice” people to the message of redemption? I take exception. The preaching of the cross is FOOLISHNESS to those who are perishing…”

PS: Grace is amazing because NO HUMAN deserves it. God doesn’t owe anyone anything, if He NEVER SAVED ANYONE then He’d be well within his rights and He’d be JUST to do so…but thankfully God is merciful, and he took pity on me, a rebel sinner and saved my soul…

Now THAT’S AMAZING GRACE.

You seem to have a very “man-centered” view of the gospel vs a “God centered” view as presented in scripture.