Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between
Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high
school English, Latin, Greek and science, and served
as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve,
retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest
book, Don't Throw Out Your Bible, is now
in print.
My religious experience is about as diverse as one could
reasonably expect. I attended a Plymouth Brethren Sunday
school, and Youth for Christ at a Foursquare Church; flirted
with a girlfriend from the Church of the Nazarene; was
a member at Grandview United, preached my first sermon
at Grandview Baptist; and attended Toronto Bible College
where the teaching staff included Anglican, Christian
Missionary Alliance, Associated Gospel, and several flavors
of Presbyterians and Baptists. Besides having been ordained
in the Reformed Episcopal Church, my adult church-going,
both live and via TV, has ranged from Pentecostal to Roman
Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, and pretty much all flavors
in between.
I mention this multi-denominational salad because I think
I have a fair grasp of what goes on in North American
churches, and I think I have some valid, Bible-based concerns
about what we’re not doing right. One of those concerns
(I mention in passing) is about what passes for church
music these days among evangelicals: at its worst it’s
needlessly repetitive, heavy on feelings, but conceptually
thin. It comes across too often as a music-team performance
rather than thoughtful congregational worship. Just take
note of how many men in the audience aren’t singing.
To make matters worse, because evangelical churches typically
don’t use a printed liturgy, this conceptually thin
music may be the only act of corporate worship that the
congregation experiences. But that problem is just an
axe that I grind from time to time.
What
really concerns me is the quality of preaching and teaching,
Certainly, we preach sin and salvation, law and grace,
repentance and faith – but most preachers I know
have not yet caught sight of the need for what C.S.Lewis
called “pre-evangelism”, nor of what we might
call “post-evangelism”. Lewis’ “pre-evangelism”
is the recognition that many folks today don’t have
a world-view within which the gospel can resonate conceptually.
Lewis tried to bridge that gap with his novels, in which
he portrayed fictive worlds which, if you engaged them
imaginatively, might make you more receptive to gospel
ideas. By “post-evengelism”, I mean preaching
and teaching designed to build Biblically and theologically
literate congregations that can apply the gospel credibly
in their social and vocational callings. So what I think
matters with respect to our preaching and teaching is
the way in which speakers engage – or fail to engage
– the thorny issues that get in the way both of
people’s willingness to believe and of people’s
ability to properly apply what they believe. The need
for a conceptual framework in which to believe, and the
need for reasons to believe, are as important for the
faithful in the pews as they are for folks on the outside.
They are as important for building up the saints as for
reaching out to prospective converts.
I
met a well-educated man a few years ago who, having grown
up Jewish, now draws his strength from Eastern spirituality.
Why did he switch? As he quipped in a group meeting that
I attended, “The Jews invented sin, and the Catholics
perfected it.” If it’s true that “perception
is reality”, it’s not hard to imagine how
people like him might have got turned off by a certain
kind of preaching and cultural expectations, whether from
priests, pastors, or rabbis. Certainly, sin is real, and
should be denounced, but as a wise old pastor used to
remind me, “You can catch more flies with honey
than you can with vinegar.” Jonathan Edwards’
sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”,
brought people to faith during the First Great Awakening
(1730s-1740s), but today his title might be just a wee
bit off-putting.
In
fact, personal sins don’t seem to disturb people
the way they did in Edwards’ day. Maybe that.s because
we have reasons for not believing that lie outside ourselves
– like corruption in the church, and the sexual
abuse of children by clergy. There’s the “Why?”
that accompanies the perennial problem of evil. There’s
also the enormous growth in human knowledge that gives
us a picture of the universe with which our Sunday-School
images of God cannot compete. (J. B. Phillips was right:
“Your God Is Too Small”.) There’s neo-Darwinism,
which not only tells us that the Garden of Eden is a legend
(I have no quibble with that) but also insists that the
process of evolution functions without any Divine Purpose.
Then there’s Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Biblical
criticism, which invites a needless skepticism about the
reliability of Scripture. There’s also the reasonable
question of whether church-going really contributes anything
significant to our lives. And, of course, there are some
anti-intellectual Christians who give Christianity a bad
rep because they think there’s a necessary hostility
between science and religion, and between reason and faith.
So I ask: How much preaching and teaching do you hear
these days that competently addresses any of those issues?
Or perhaps we should ask it differently: How many Christians
do you know who understand the importance of those and
similar issues and even want to hear them addressed?
This
problem of what we’re willing to hear is nothing
new. It was around in the churches of the First Century,
and plagued even the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews:
”We have much to say that is hard to explain because
you have become sluggish in hearing. For though by this
time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach
you again the basic elements of the oracles of God. You
need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk,
being still an infant, is unskilled in the word of righteousness.
But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties
have been trained by practice to distinguish good from
evil. Therefore let us go on toward perfection, leaving
behind the basic teaching about Christ and not laying
again the foundation: repentance from dead works and faith
toward God, instruction about baptisms and the laying
on of hands, the resurrection of the dead and eternal
judgment. And this we will do, if God permits” (Hebrews
5:11 - 6:3).
What
you see in the chapter that precedes this excerpt is that
the writer wants to teach his readers about the priesthood
of Jesus as exemplified in the story of Melchizedek. Using
a rabbinic method of interpreting Scripture, he is going
to find multiple levels of meaning and application in
that story. But his audience doesn’t want to think
at a graduate level about Christology; they’re still
back in catechism class, with a six-topic course on repentance
and faith, baptism and the laying on of hands, resurrection
and judgment. That’s what they were taught when
they were being prepared for baptism – it’s
the basic stuff they needed to know about becoming a Christian
– and they’re not up for learning anything
new!
One
Sunday after a church service in Ontario, a lady of senior
years approached me with astonishment on her face and
exclaimed, “I learned something new this morning!”
I wanted to ask her if that didn’t happen every
Sunday, but tactfully I bit my tongue. But why should
people want to learn more, anyway, if they already know
and believe the gospel? Because – says the writer
of the Epistle to the Hebrews – “by this time
you ought to be teachers!” Now there may be a bit
of hyperbole in his answer, but note that he’s addressing
his frustration to the whole congregation, not just the
clergy. That’s pretty much like what Peter tells
the folks in all his churches: “Always be ready
to give an explanation to anyone who asks the reason for
the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). The Greek
word translated “explanation” is “apologia”,
from which we get “apology” and “apologetics”.
The theological discipline of “apologetics”
means doing just what that verse describes: to give the
reasons for the hope that is in you — to understand
and share the Faith with as much competence as you can.
Our collective failure to do so makes us less able to
explain our faith convincingly, and regrettably invites
the perception of Christianity as anti-intellectual.
The
Nazarene church that I used to attend with the girlfriend
had gospel meetings on Sunday mornings and holiness meetings
on Sunday evenings, which, with mid-week prayer meetings,
comprised pretty much the whole of their church-going.
Certainly, conversion and a holy life are the essence
of Christianity, but apart from the atonement, entire
sanctification, and a bit of eschatology, I don’t
think I ever heard these folk discuss any other aspects
of Christian theology. We have failed to grasp that both
the people who come to church, and those to whom we witness
outside of church, need to see that Christianity not only
implies a comprehensive world-view but is able to engage
the whole range of secular knowledge. As my favorite Bishop,
Robert Barron, is wont to say: “Stop dumbing down
our Faith!”
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