The preacher's dilemma

Now here is an opinion piece truly worth reading: G. Jeffrey MacDonald's article, "Congregations Gone Wild," in this morning's New York Times.

MacDonald (a minister in the United Church of Christ) suggests that one of the greatest pressures on clergy in the church today is found in "congregational pressure to forsake one's highest calling."

He's talking about preaching.

And what he means is that congregations want to be entertained rather than edified. They want a 'feel good' gospel rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ. He relates an experience from his own ministry, where an oversight committee of laity once instructed him to keep his sermons to 10 minutes, with a heavy dose of funny stories and an eye to sending the congregation home feeling better about themselves at the end.

MacDonald says that religion has become a "consumer experience." And that like all choices we make about what to consume, our choices about worship are increasingly aimed at obtaining a product that makes us feel better -- like we got our money's worth, so to speak.

MacDonald offers a pointed critique about this attitude, including speaking a prophetic word about what the preaching office is supposed to be about in the first place. He makes some theological statements I would disagree with - specifically, that the church exists "to save souls by elevating people's values and desires" - but over all I'm impressed by the clarity of the critique he's offering. In fact, I'm not sure what impresses me more: that MacDonald is so willing to make it, or that the Times is willing to run an op/ed so confessional in nature.

There is, however, some question-begging in the article that needs to be looked at more closely. MacDonald says that church members "increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them." But do they? He doesn't offer much evidence for support other than anecdotal observations about changing worship styles and the well-publicized Pew Forum survey from a couple of years ago that measured the frequency of Christians leaving the denominational tradition of their youth for other options. I'm sympathetic with what MacDonald is pointing toward in the culture, but I'm also not convinced that it indicates a desire on the part of churchgoers to receive feel-good messages affirming their every choice and whim in lifestyle and belief.

For example, it's possible that feel-good preaching is not a result of such shifts, but rather a cause of them. Even more likely, in my mind, is that the attitudes and habits of both preachers and worshippers are being influenced by larger cultural forces that are exerting a great deal of pressure on all aspects of our lives today. And for the record, I do think MacDonald is right when he points to the effects of a market society as one of the chief culprits. I would only add that the kind of rabid individualism and rampant consumerism that comes along with the capitalist ethos is, itself, only one symptom (albeit a very large one) of a liberal democratic society that place the highest value on the liberty of the individual citizen (and the notion that the highest good in society is found in that individual's choices for himself).

One other place I'd push back against MacDonald: His overarching thesis that preaching that aims at entertainment is really what Christians want. He may be right in a certain way, in that people generally want to be entertained the same way I want to always have that extra piece of chocolate cake and the way I want to live in a mansion, have a bank account with millions of dollars in it, and read novels out by the pool for the rest of my life. All of us have souls that are curved in upon themselves, which cause us to mistake sinful desire for true happiness.

But my experience of preaching is different than MacDonald's. I don't preach to entertain, and I rarely tell funny stories. I approach the preaching task with the assumption that the Word of God has something infiinitely better to say to the congregation than anything I could come up with, and hence that my charge is to present that Word to the best of my ability and help God's people see how it is a Word for us. The gospel doesn't want to bless the worldly lives and lifestyles we live apart from the redemption and reconciliation we receive in Christ, and that means preaching must always contain real judgment for the whole community of faith (though judgment that points toward repentance, forgiveness, and healing).

I've even found that the more I preach in this way, the more the congregation that is present seems to respond in such a way that it seems as if the Holy Spirit is really doing something with all of us. I think Christians generally want to hear the unabashed Word of God proclaimed, because they know that it is a life giving Word that offers them something no amount of shallow self-help message could ever match. If anything, the root problem with much preaching today is that it allows itself to get carried along by cultural expectations. For a preacher willing to preach "costly grace" (to use Bonhoeffer's phrase), the result is often a congregation quickened by the activity of the Spirit.

Of course, I might be wrong. Both about my preaching and the earnest desires of churchgoing Christians. If you've got opinions, I'd love to hear them.