That isn’t to say that a Christian shouldn’t vote or do his part as a good citizen. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. But I am absolutely convinced that the constant barage of contentious talk radio shows, doomsday news broadcasts, and muckraking political books have an adverse effect on modern christianity.

Christians need to be politically involved, but never politically absorbed. Unfortunately, politics has become the god of many, many, well meaning Christians.

Here are two things to keep in mind this political season:

1. Christians are first and foremost citizens of Heaven.

The old song says “This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through”. That may be cute, but it is also biblical. Philippians 3:20 says “Our conversation is in heaven”. That word “conversation” is the Greek word “polituma” from which we get our word “politics”, and it refers to citizenship. God’s Word also calls us “strangers” and “pilgrims”.

While we need to do our part as citizens of our country, that citizenship should always be secondary to our citizenship in Heaven. Our loyalties should first and foremost go to our Lord and our eternal King. Like Christ, we should “be about our Father’s business.”

2. The best thing a politician can do is make the world a better place to go to Hell from.

If God’s word is true, millions of people are heading towards eternal damnation unless they hear and accept the gospel. The best thing a politician can do for those people is make their ride down a little more comfortable. Christians, however, have the ministry of reconciliation and get to be ambassadors for Christ.

One day, I was working in a campaign office across from a Christian man who had served as the long time mayor of New Hampshire’s biggest city. Without prompting, he put his arm on my shoulder and told me I could do far more good by investing my life in the ministry than I ever could by spending my life in politics.

That’s not to say Christians should never be politicians. We might not have the Bill of Rights in this country had it not been for the political involvement of the Baptist preacher Roger Williams. Slavery would probably never have come to an end without the crusading efforts of the devout Christian William Wilberforce.

God sometimes directs his servants into political involvement, but we must remember that God’s work is in the winning of souls, not the winning of elections.

“I know no more about theology than a jackrabbit does about ping-pong or an elephant does about crocheting.” Billy Sunday

Ignorance is not a virtue. While there is always the danger of pride in learning, we are commanded as preachers to “study to shew thyself approved unto God, rightly dividing the word of truth.” Paul commanded Timothy to “give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine.”

The apostle Paul was knowledgeable about the issues of his day, about current literature, and most of all, about the scriptures and doctrine. His writing was terse, logical, and sometimes verbose. Though a man of action, he was definitely an intellectual.

Yet if you were to comb the ranks of fundamentalists today, you would be hard pressed to find many intellectuals. Fundamentalist publications, fundamentalist colleges, and popular fundamentalist leaders all revel in a form of anti-intellectualism. Anti-intellectualism is as much a part of the fabric of modern fundamentalism as hymn books or the King James Bible. This is really scary.

If you were to go back in time, say, before 1870, you wouldn’t find many faithful professing christians displaying anti-intellectualism. To be uneducated back then was dishonorable. Leaders were thinkers. Imagining Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, or even Charles Spurgeon fitting in in modern fundamentalism is difficult. Even uneducated preachers of earlier years, men like John Bunyan and John Newton, were serious students of the word.

“Oh”, you say, “but the apostles were mostly fisherman.”

True. But have you read 1 Peter, or 2 John? The apostles may not have been members of the ancient inteligencia, but they knew their Bibles, put thought into their speech, and knew how to string a sentence together. They were both thinkers and doers.

So where did this anti-intellectualism come from?

Here is my theory, take it or leave it.

Fundamentalism first came about as an opposition movement. Fundamentalists were opposing the influx of “Modernism”: ideas spreading throughout established religion mostly through the influence of seminaries. While some fundamentalists, like Princeton professor J. Gresham Machen, sought to combat this error through scholarly engagement, it wasn’t the intellectuals who were the most magnetic and who drew the biggest crowds. It was fundamentalist “evangelists”, and none were more well known and liked than William Asher Sunday.

Billy Sunday’s attacks against modernism usually came through attacks against seminarians and intellectuals. While attacking modernism and evolution coming out of seminaries, he shot with birdshot, not bullets, and came across as extremely anti-intellectual. His harsh tone, his crude speech, his love of strung together insulting adjectives, his one liners, all of these alienated intellectuals. Quips like:

“academic types tried to tickle the palates of the giraffes with their high-sounding rhetoric while their sheep starved”

or

“seminaries turn out bottle fed preachers stuffed in theological molds”

or

“I don’t need to have some doctor to doctor my doctrine”.

This method accomplished its goal of charging up the troops against modernism, but it also pushed intellectuals from the camp of the revivalism and thus largely out of fundamentalism.

“Well that was 100 years ago, what does it mean today?”

You can trace an unbroken line from Sunday to J. Frank Norris and from Norris to men like Jack Hyles and Lester Rolloff, and from them to Curtis Hutson, Shelton Smith, Jack Schaap and the like. The further down the historical chain you go, the further entrenched the anti-intellectualism.

This doesn’t mean that Sunday, and those who followed him didn’t do great things for the Lord or that they weren’t God called preachers. It just means a negative side effect of their ministries was the presence anti-intellectualism in fundamentalism.

And here’s the thing: the Bible doesn’t jive well with anti-intellectualism. The Bible is a book of truths; truths presented in ideas that have to be understood in sentences and words. To be a student of the Bible is to be a student of language and a student of history. The farther we get away from this study of context (which cannot exist in an environment of anti-intellectualism), the farther we get away from the true meaning of the Bible, and the more we open ourselves up to doctrinal and practical error.

We need to be aware of the dangers of intellectualism, but we also need to see the grave danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Annually, Charles Spurgeon would gather the graduates from his Pastor’s College and give them a lecture on something that was important to him and that he thought would be useful for their ministries. This book was the transcript of the last such lecture he ever gave.

I am and was a Spurgeon fanboy. The fact that Spurgeon wrote the book was enough to get me to read it with interest. But this book was entitled The Greatest Fight in the World and that it was sort of his parting address to preachers. I was going to get it and I was going to read it.

Around this same time, I was reading in my personal devotions the first part of 2 Peter and was enthralled with the phrase

“According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who hath called you to glory and virtue. . .Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises . . .”

That this was in the back of my mind was the best preparation possible for what I would read in that book.

Things like:

“The scriptures in their own sphere are like God in the universe – All-sufficient. In them is revealed all the light and power the mind of man can need in spiritual things.”

and

“We need nothing more than God has seen fit to reveal.”

and

“I can have no wish to preach at all if I may not continue to expound the subjects which I find in these pages. What else is worth preaching? Brethren, the truth of God is the only treasure for which we seek, and the Scripture is the only field in which we dig for it.”

In short, The Greatest Fight in the World is, among other things, a treatise on the place of the Bible in the ministry. It was my first real exposure, outside of my Bible reading, to the idea of “the sufficiency of scripture”. To say it made a big impact on me would be an understatement. This idea, championed by Spurgeon in this book (and I would find by many others) has:

• Changed my view of preaching.
• Steered my ideas about the meaning of worship.
• Caused me to be skeptical about much of what goes on in fundamentalism.
• Opened my mind to so many truths.
• Heightened my study of scripture.

In ministry, the idea that scripture is sufficient keeps me from getting discouraged when things in church don’t go well. It helps me focus on long term health not short term results. It gives me confidence that I can plan a long Bible teaching series and God’s word will take care of our church. In short, it lets me relax and removes the temptation to think that the pastorate is all about me.

If you’ve never read it, I recommend it to you. I promise you’ll find it wholly relevant to what is going on today.

Last night, an idea hit me about my own uneasiness about a lot of what is going on in fundamentalism, and it has to do with where our allegiance lies. Does your allegiance to fundamentalism spring from your understanding of biblical principles or from your love of the unique fundamentalist counter culture?  Unfortunately, before I can explain this, I have to define a few “muddy terms” that I will be using for the rest of this article.

Biblicist.

A biblicist is one whose faith in the power of the word of God causes Him to make the word of God the central element of their worship services/preaching. A biblicist is careful not to express their opinions as fact and only expects listeners to accept a truth after it has been clearly presented as biblical. Biblicists tend to be expository preachers and tend to view conversion as more than a series of steps you can manipulate someone through, because of this many biblicists end up labeling themselves as calvinists (although I do not).

Though I don’t feel worthy of the term, I consider myself a biblicist.

Conservative Revivalist

A conservative revivalist is a product of and adherent to the old-line revivalism movement. A conservative revivalist would self associate with people from the past like Billy Sunday, D.L. Moody, and John R. Rice. This movement has always had cultural elements attached to it, so these conservative revivalists tend to have a unique conservative culture (conservative both socially and politically). Most, but not all, conservative revivalists tend to identify themselves as fundamentalists.

Enough with definitions. Though I consider myself both a biblicist and a conservative revivalist my allegiance is weighted far more heavily toward biblicism than it conservative revivalism.

Here is what hit me as I was thinking about this.

1. It’s possible to be a biblicist and a conservative revivalist.

I was educated in a place that could be described by both terms. For the most part, consistently emphasizing biblicism while also promoting and modeling conservative revivalism. The halls of my alma mater are adorned with artifacts from both Charles Spurgeon and G. Campbell Morgan (committed biblicists) and Lee Robberson and Jack Hyles (champions of conservative revivalism). I’ve also known many pastors who were undoubtedly biblicists and undoubtedly associated with conservative revivalism. I guess what I am trying to say is this isn’t an either or thing, the terms aren’t mutually exclusive, there is a lot of room for overlap here.

2. It’s possible to be a biblicist and not be a conservative revivalist.

I often read books by people who, though biblicists, have never had anything to do with conservative revivalism. For example, few would say Mark Dever isn’t a biblicist, but he has never been a part of conservative revivalism. I wouldn’t put David Doran, Kevin T. Bauder or even Stephen Jones in the camp of conservative revivalists, but they are all self-styled fundamentalists and undoubtedly biblicists.

3. It’s possible to be a conservative revivalist and not be a biblicist.

More and more, I’m learning that many (most?) people who call themselves fundamentalists are more attached to the cultural/historical element of it than the biblical element of it. How else can you explain the depth of allegiance to men and institutions that increasingly are more about a unique culture of “soul winning” and “separatism” than they are about the teaching and preaching of God’s word? How else can you explain the wholesale acceptance of these institutions while simultaneously slandering and slighting anyone outside of fundamentalism (whether biblicists or not)?

Conclusion

Increasingly, I feel the urge to pull away from conservative revivalism towards a truer biblicism. I no longer judge a person (think “try the spirits” not “judge not that you be not judged“) on whether they too are conservative revivalists but on whether they are biblicists. While I would prefer to associate with people who are both, I’ll take a biblicist who hasn’t swallowed the cultural end of things over an adherent of the cultural end of things who doesn’t view the Bible right any day.

If you muddled through that and have anything to say, fire away in the comments.

This post is copied from my “Pastor’s Pen” blog at biblebaptistmattoon.org.  While I primarily try to write this blog about issues for fellow young ministers, my church blog is a place where I discuss philosophy and vision for Bible Baptist Church.  Whenever those two interests intersect, I will be posting them on both sites.

The first of our four purposes as a church is to “worship”, yet we spend little time in what many churches would categorize as “worship”. We don’t have a praise band leading us to repeat “I could sing of your love forever” 53 times. We don’t gather together in an architectural masterpiece complete with stained glass windows, statuary, and dozens of well placed candles. We don’t even have a bunch of brown clad bald headed monks singing gregorian chants at the beginning of our services. So what do we do that we can say is worship?

Biblically speaking, worship has nothing to do with architecture, with music, or with chanting monks. Biblically speaking, worship is putting God in His proper place. The classic passage on worship is found in Isaiah 6, where we see Isaiah ushered into the thrown room of God and we see God worshipped in this habitat. I encourage you to read that passage when you get a chance. If you do, I think you’ll find the following three things to be true about worship.

1. When God is really worshipped, we see Him as He is.

When Isaiah saw God, he saw Him as “sitting upon a throne, high and holy and lifted up“, angels surrounded Him singing “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts“, and the whole temple shook at the voice of the angels. (Imagine how it would have shook if God himself spoke). When God is really worshipped, we see Him as He really is.

While it is possible and important to worship God in song (Psalms is the longest book in the Bible), there is no greater way of worshiping God as who He is than in the preaching and teaching of the Word through which He reveals himself. This is why far more is said in scripture about the early church coming together to study and hear preaching than is said about them coming together to sing. If worshipping God means declaring who He is, then there is no better way to worship than proclaiming His self-revelation.

When God is really worshipped, we see ourselves as we really are.

When Isaiah saw who God really was, it moved him to cry out “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips.” When we really see God as who He is, it becomes all the more clear who we are: unclean sinners before a holy God. As we study God’s word together and come under the conviction it brings, we are worshipping God by admitting who we are in light of who He is. Real worship always brings us to an awareness of our sin.

When God is really worshipped, it moves us to action.

When Isaiah saw who God really was and saw who he really was; he responded to the call of God. God said, “Whom shall I send?“, and Isaiah replied, “Here am I; send me.”

When we really worship God, it will lead us to act for God.

So what is the primary act of worship of our church? The preaching of the Word! When we preach God’s Word, we declare God as He declares Himself. When we preach God’s Word, we are convicted of our sinful condition. When we preach God’s Word, we are moved to act on His Word. All of this is the very definition of worship.

“Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.”

In Ephesians 5:21, God gives us the best marriage advice possible: Be in a constant state of mutual submission.

The thing about mutual submission is I can’t know if I am going to receive, I have to give in faith. I can’t control her, I can only control me (and me is all I’m responsible for). I’ve always had a hard time with this (After all, I am a human being and thus inherently selfish). Over the last couple months, I’ve been praying that the Lord would help me to be a better husband to my wonderful wife, Amanda.

Somewhere over the last couple months (I have no idea where, but I’m sure it’s not original to me) I got the idea to be constantly asking my wife a two simple questions.

1. Honey, is there anything I can do for you right now?

I try to ask my wife this at least three times a day. At first she thought I was after something. More than once I heard “What do you want?” or “What are you after?” but the reason I was doing it was because it put me in the frame of mind to be a servant. Sometimes she answers with “you could do the dishes” and sometimes “you could watch the girls” or “you could put that book down and talk to me”. Whatever she says, it forces me to be thinking about what she wants, and not what I want. It gives me an excuse to submit.

2. Honey, what’s on your mind?

This question is even harder for me to ask than the first one. The one thing I value more than my time is my attention. I’m constantly thinking about what is going on at the church or about some message or something else and I’m sure quite often I leave my wife feeling starved for attention. By asking her “What’s on your mind?” I am forcing myself into a conversation dictated by her.

Do you have any mutual submission tips from your marriage? Share them in the comments:

(but please keep it PG, I’m a pastor, but I’m not trying to be like Mark Drisoll or  Ed Young here.  thanks)

While fundamentalism seems to be overrun with people who go to extremes trying to be exciting, evangelicalism tends to be overrun with people going to extremes trying to sound smart. (Before my evangelical friends through out the  false dichotomy dodge, I am speaking in generalities. I am fully aware that there are people of all shades who identify as both.)

In this post I want to prove, if just anecdotally, that one extreme is as dangerous as the other. So here are some dangers of intellectual preaching:

Intellectual preaching tends to ignore application.

As a part of preacher’s command to “preach the word” we are told to reprove, rebuke, and exhort. We are told that all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, yes, but also for reproof and correction. If Paul’s writings are an example, our preaching should be equal parts doctrine and application.

Summing all of this up, preaching should be practical. It shouldn’t just make us change our mind, it should make us change our lifestyle.

Intellectual preaching can be mistaken for professional preaching.

While there are many people who try to be exciting preachers who are relying on a painted kind of fire, no fire is necessary to be an intellectual preacher. In other words, it takes effort to pass yourself off as an exciting preacher if it’s just a job, but it takes no effort at all to pass yourself off as an intellectual preacher, no matter how dispassionate you are about it.

There are far to many pulpits in our country filled week to week by people who are so dispassionately intellectual, their hearts couldn’t be warmed by an inferno. As my old pastor (who had about 100 post grad credits under his belt) used to say

“Seminary is the place where they take young men with great hearts and minds and turn them into young men with great minds.”

If fundamentalists today are to be equated to the pharisees, making up a bunch of extrabiblical rules for people to follow, too many self-labelled evangelicals are like the scribes, willing and able to argue for hours over how many angels can dance on the head of a needle.

Most preachers today show far more passion when talking about whether they are monergists or synergists, whether they are dispensationalists or covenanters, calvinist or arminian and so on and so forth than they do talking about the need of a lost world or about the grace freely given in Christ.

Charles Spurgeon said that the most essential quality of a preacher is earnestness. Preachers should aim at light (teaching) first, but they should also include fire, faith, life and love.

Are you putting as much effort into making disciples of Jesus Christ as you are into making others into monergistic reformed liberated evangelicals? Just saying.

Intellectual preaching can easily be over people’s heads.

Our supreme example in preaching is the Lord Jesus Christ. While he was definitely a teacher who didn’t shun the deep truths or the controversial subjects. He spoke in the language of the people. He used simple, concrete, unexpected, emotionally charged language. He told stories. He explained God’s word in a way that the common people could understand.

Education is valuable. We are commanded to study. We are to labor in doctrine. All of this is true. In all of this we need to be careful, however, not to become the kind of stuffy, verbose, abstract, pensive intellectual sand men that have been the bane of the ministry since there has been a ministry.

What do you think?

Here is a question for you:

If an idea cannot stand because it isn’t derived from the Bible, and if an idea can’t stand by the virtue of its principles, does it deserve to stand?

In the debate about where fundamentalism has been going, its defenders have consistently relied on the slippery slope argument in it’s defense.

The slippery slope argument goes like this: If you change that, or challenge this assumption, or (you fill in the blank) then the next thing you know, you’ll be wearing mini-skirts to church and having a rock concert instead of worship and your people will become weak insipid Christians. In other words, don’t take even the slightest step away from where you are, because you might be on a slippery slope and that one position was the rock keeping you from falling into the abyss.

I see three problems with this line of thinking:

First, it could be applied to anything.

If you’ve always held the position that churches shouldn’t have curtains on their windows or that blonde haired, brown eyed males from Topeka shouldn’t use the word “is” you could use the slippery slope argument. “If we let those toeheads from Kansas start using being verbs, we’re in for a heap of trouble”, “If we let the church hang up drapes, then we are speeding toward compromise.”

At what point do you decide to invoke the slippery slope argument? We could be living like the Amish if we followed that line of thinking. It’s a completely subjective thing.

(There are times when it makes sense to talk about slippery slopes: when the principles of a decision logically lead to worse and worse consequences. Spurgeon’s Downgrade Controversy is a good example. Unfortunately, most people don’t put as much thought into invoking the slippery slope argument as Mr. Spurgeon did.)

Second, it doesn’t really deal with ideas or principles being discussed.

Most of the time people invoke the slippery slope argument, it isn’t really an argument at all so much as it is a refusal to think about the topic. It’s far easier to talk about slippery slopes than to think through the implications and biblical mandate for a certain change.

Third, it shows you are more anchored to your current position than to scripture.

Paul praised the Berean Christians because they weighed his every word against scripture, not because they drew a line in the sand and said “if it’s new, it aint true”. The truth is, if your orthodoxy is a biblical orthodoxy, then you have nothing to worry about.

The problem comes when people base their decisions around a hand drawn map of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, in stead of looking for guidance from the compass of principles from scripture. The hand drawn map is useless when the landmarks change, take a hand drawn map from the early 1800s to Chicago and see how much good it does you. Principles from scripture can guide you through any time of change.

In stead of asking “Is this going to send me down a slippery slope?” Why not ask “What does God’s word say about this?” If God’s word, either in principle or precept, condemns the change than we don’t need to take one step closer to it. If God’s word is mute on the issue, then maybe its worth thinking and arguing about.

In my last post on fundamentalism, I made this statement:

In my opinion, every single problem that fundamentalism is grappling with today flows from our movement’s weak spot for charismatic speakers who refuse to limit themselves to “rightly dividing the word of truth”.

We fundamentalists love our exciting preachers. Of course, each of us has our own definition of what exciting is: Some people like to hear a guy who stand behind the pulpit and “rips face” and incites controversy, while others like someone who yells, hacks, or runs around constantly. We hear people say things all the time like “that will preach”, “can I get an amen”, and “bless God”.

Where did all of this come from? Do we really think that Paul stood up at Athens and called for amens, or that Jesus punctuated the Sermon on the Mount with “Bless Go-ods”? Do christians who live in other countries or who have lived in other ages show the same preference for warped communication from the pulpit? My limited experience in reading history and traveling is that for the most part they don’t or didn’t.

Could it be that our hunger for “exciting” preaching has led us away from biblical preaching?

My favorite preachers are true exciting preachers. They have the ability to hold my attention, they know how to speak clearly, and they can speak with authority. However, they are my favorite preachers because of what they say, not how they say it. In other words, they are exciting because they follow what Charles Spurgeon said was the golden rule of keeping peoples attention – say something worth listening to.

I want to lay out several dangers of exciting preaching (I’ll write later on this week about dangers of intellectual preaching). These aren’t meant to dissuade you from being an exciting preacher, but to dissuade you from setting excitement as a goal – or worse – as a measuring stick for other preachers.

So here they are my 6 reasons why exciting preaching is dangerous:

1. Exciting preaching can cause more attention to be on the preacher than on the word.

Read the recorded sermons in scripture and you’ll see that the emphasis was on what was said, not on how it was said. There is no doubt that Peter spoke with a loud voice when he preached at Pentecost or that John the Baptist had to project to be heard as he preached by the Jordan River, but the emphasis in scripture is on what they said, not on how they said it.

We are commanded in scripture to “preach the word”. Paul said that he had preached “the whole counsel of God”. John the Baptist was just a “voice crying in the wilderness”. The point is, God’s word, God’s message is the important thing, not the speaking style of the person giving it.

There is definitely a “gift of prophecy”. It takes a giftedness to preach and hold people’s attention, but it is the message, not the messenger which should be attended to. In my opinion, the best preachers get out of the way and let God speak through His word.

2. Exciting preaching is often based on a misunderstanding of history.

Why do preachers yell? Why do some preachers hack or clear their throat constantly (even though there is nothing wrong with their throats)? Why do some preachers seem like a totally different person when they are preaching than in normal conversation? I would say invariably it is because they grew up around preachers who acted like that, so they don’t feel like a preacher if they aren’t acting like that. Probably, the people they are imitating are imitating someone, and on and on it goes.

Consider this. 100 years ago preachers didn’t have microphones. Popular preachers would have to preach to hundreds or even thousands of people in large, non-air-conditioned rooms with absolutely no amplification. Charles Spurgeon wouldn’t even take a preacher into the Pastor’s College that didn’t have a strong voice. So loud boisterous preaching made sense in its time, but its time is over.  (Actually, even in its time it was criticized.  Spurgeon used to take his students into the Metropolitan Tabernacle and show them how it was possible to whisper to the back pews.)

Preachers today have microphones and other assistive technologies that make shouting an entire sermon completely unnecessary. That isn’t to say that raising your voice and showing emotion isn’t important, sometimes, its a natural outflow of earnestness (which every preacher needs). Preaching in a yell from start to finish though will result in bored people, bad preaching, and a broken-worn out preacher.

Other “preacherisms” like hacking and clearing your throat are the product of circumstances from times past that no longer apply to us. Hacking, for instance, started because preachers were working in coal mines and had lung and throat problems – its just been copied by people in a perpetuating cycle even though they live no where near a coal mine. A lot of followers of Jack Hyles clear their throat a lot while they preach, he had medical issues, they don’t. Many northern preachers try to preach in a southern accent because some “exciting” preacher they heard was born in Georgia. It doesn’t work.

3. Exciting preaching is often culturally motivated (and propagates its own culture)

I’ve already touched on this, but there is a funny tendency among preachers to take on accents that aren’t their own when they preach. It’s as if you can’t preach well if you aren’t southern. I know of a guy from New England, who lived in New England his entire life that talks more like a Tennessean than any I met in Tennessee, presumably because it makes him seem more “preachery”. How ridiculous.

There is a certain self propagating preacher culture that develops in different parts of the country and it is almost always dangerous. Like inbreeding, it often makes preachers into human charactertures by magnifying their most distinctive traits. What you end up with is churches that make absolutely no sense to visitors and messages muddled by tradition.

4. Exciting preaching isn’t sustainable.

Speaking of muddling messages, when a preacher tries to be exciting all of the time, he is shooting for an unsustainable goal. Just like no batter can hit a home run every time he gets to the plate, no preacher can have a “home run” sermon every sunday. Usually, when they swing that hard, they end up wafting hot air at their congregations, and striking out a lot.

Many pastors who try to be exciting are mimicking people who are traveling evangelists who preach the same sermons over and over again. These guys can afford to be “home runner hitters” because they get to hit the same pitch every week. If you had to listen to some of these guys every week, it would get old and their strengths would become weaknesses.

Along this same line, preachers who aim to be exciting are going to have a tendency to be preach often on what they feel are exciting passages of scripture, and thus fail at preaching “the whole counsel of God”.

How much better to pace yourself, go line upon line, precept upon precept, and aim for a hit every week? Better yet, just aim to be obedient to your commands to “preach the word” and to “study to show yourself approved unto God”. It takes time to turn a field into harvest, just be faithful and do the work.

5. Exciting preaching minimizes reason.

Possibly the biggest danger at trying to being “exciting” is that exciting and reasonable don’t mingle well together. God said “come now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18) not “come now, let me yell at you.”

The only speaking related qualification given for pastors in scripture is that they be “apt to teach”.

If you study the recorded sermons of Paul, Peter, and our Lord, you will find that they preached to people’s reason. Peter made a case for Christ at Pentecost. Paul reasoned and argued in the synagogues of western Asia, our Lord taught with parables. They weren’t, as some preachers are today, working up emotion, they were trying to change people’s minds about something .  It seems their aim was to line up people’s thinking with God’s thinking.

In one of Spurgeon’s many lessons on preaching he said that a preacher should aim to have five ingredients in every sermon: “light, fire, faith, life and love.” He chose light to come first, because it is through light that the other four are transmitted.  Look at this paragraph from the lecture:

Get plenty of light, brethren, and when you have obtained it, give it out.Never fall into the notion that mere earnestness will suffice without knowledge, and that souls are to be saved simply by our being zealous. I fear that we are more deficient in heat than in light; but, at the same time, that kind of fire which has no light in it is of a very doubtful nature, and cometh not from above. Souls are saved by truth which enters the understanding, and so reaches the conscience. How can the gospel save when it is not understood? The preacher may preach with a great deal of stamping, and hammering, and crying, and entreating; but the Lord is not in the wind, nor in the fire;—the still small voice of truth is needed to enter the understanding, and thereby reach the heart. People must be taught. We must “go, and teach all nations,” making disciples of them; and I know of no way in which you can save men without teaching on your part, and discipleship on theirs.

“Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God.”

6. Exciting preaching, in the end, isn’t all that exciting.

Really exciting preaching is a misnomer.  (I tried in vain to think of a better title for this.) When a preacher tries to be exciting, it usually ends up as anything but. It ends up being an unbiblical, manipulative mess or more often, just plain boring.

This is part one on a series on extremes in preaching, here are links to the other parts:

The Danger of Intellectual Preaching

Let me know what you think in the comments:

Being called to the ministry is a scary thing.  When I graduated from Bible College, I knew that God wanted me to be a pastor.  In my mind though, connecting the dots from where I was right out of college to being the pastor of the church was like trying to build a bridge across the pacific ocean, I just didn’t see how it was going to happen.  For good reason, very few churches are looking for 22 year old pastors, yet most Bible college graduates are 22 years old and chomping at the bit.  I liken feeling called to the pastorate as a young man to when you first started being interested in girls when you were twelve: there is so much desire welling up in you and seemingly no outlet to for it.  It is like being shot out of a cannon into a brick wall.

The same advice that I’d would give to a twelve year old that is interested in girls is the advice I’d give a very young man wanting to be a pastor.  God doesn’t give you these desires to consummate right now, God gives you them as a wake up call to get serious about preparing for a later stage of your life.  I am by no means an expert on pastoral ministry, I’ve been a pastor for all of five months, but as someone who just left that stage of preparation just a few months ago, I feel like I do have some advice to give about how to best spend it.

Take these eight tips as what they are: Not as the advice of a pastor who has arrived, but as the advice of a friend who was just where you are at and wants to help you.  Without further ado, here are the eight pieces of advice I would give to people who feel like God wants them to be a pastor.

First, make absolutely sure that God has called you.

It doesn’t matter that you just spent $ 30,000 on Bible college or that you don’t know what else you could do. Too many people are in the ministry for the wrong reasons. There are other options for someone with a bible college degree (if you are like most graduates, you may even be able to go back to school, lots of people don’t get out of school till they’re 26) and anything is better than doing something you aren’t fit for for the rest of your life because you made an emotional decision at a youth conference as a teenager.

It is really important that you are sure that God has called you. When you answer the call to the ministry, you really are stepping out by faith and if God isn’t working on the other end, then you are headed for a mess. When I was in college, I was so insecure, and worried about silly things: My home church pastor was stepping down and his son in law was taking over. No one in my family was in the ministry and I really didn’t know where my “in” was going to come from. If you are called, God works all of that out though.

“Faithful is he who calleth you, who also will do it.” 1 Thessalonians 5:24

Second, buckle down for a long haul full of disappointments.

You are out of college, but you are not out of the woods yet. Not hardly. Prepare to be tested. Prepare to be let down.

Whatever you think is going to happen between now and when people call you “Pastor Joe”, forget it. About the only thing that you can be certain of is that you are thinking wrong.

In my case my projected path to the pastorate went something like this:

• I’ll get my masters of ministry
• I’ll be a youth pastor for ten years
• I’ll take over the church when the senior pastor steps down.

But here I am and I’ve never been a youth pastor. I don’t have a masters degree (though I’m half finished with one in elementary education – what gives?) and I didn’t take over anyone’s church. I made many other plans for myself over the last six years and exactly none of them came to pass. My journey took me to my home church in New Hampshire, then small town Tennessee, then rural Illinois.

Again, if you are sure that God has called you, he is working everything out according to his plan. David’s journey from anointing to kingship led him through Ziklag. Moses journey to leadership had him a fugitive and a shepherd in the middle of nowhere for forty years. Have faith that God will work it all out and don’t get bitter.

Third, find an old general and get your feet under his table.

Far and away, the most useful thing you can do with the next few years of your time is to find some pastor who has been faithful in the long haul and respected and get around him as much as possible. Take a job, any job, be it youth pastor, elementary school teacher in the christian school, or even janitor or landscaper, if it gets you under the tutelage of a seasoned man of God.

Too many Bible college graduates seem focused on becoming a “youth pastor” right out of Bible College. I’ve seen a lot of guys take any youth pastor job that comes available, often for a small church or for a young, inexperienced pastor. (I’m not putting you down, I almost did it.)

Pastor Scallions the year I was born. He had already been pastoring for twenty years.

In my experience, I got the awesome privilege of working with Dr. Jack Scallions. I taught school, I worked in a camp, I managed ministries and did a bunch of little stuff. Most of all though, I spent countless hours in his office talking about the ministry. Under the tutelage of someone in the ministry for forty years, I got to dip my toes in almost every area of the ministry. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. If I had to skip Bible college to work for Dr. Scallions for four years, I wouldn’t even flinch. It was that awesome.

I would say be very careful who you choose. Choose someone with character. Choose someone that thinks for themselves. Choose someone who isn’t trying to build his own kingdom. There aren’t too many pastors who meet all of those requirements, but if you can find one, do whatever it takes to work for him. Seriously, move thousands of miles and cut your income in half if that’s what it takes. You’ll thank me later.

Fourth, read everything you can get your hands on.

I read on average one to two books a week. I read the newspaper every day. I read several blogs. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read over the last seven years, but I can tell you I don’t regret much of it.

Here are some things reading will do for you:

Reading will inspire you to be a leader

“Readers are leaders.” You saw it on the wall in your fourth grade classroom, so it has to be true. Right?

I don’t know if reading makes you a leader, but I know it inspires you to be one. Whether it is a book on leadership (like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) a book by leaders (like Winning by Jack Welch) or a good biography of a leader (like Hershey) reading about leadership makes you want to be a leader. It broadens your horizons and makes you dissatisfied with the status quo.

One of the books I read that inspired me as much as anything was How to Be Like Walt a biography/leadership book about Walt Disney. I thought it would be entertaining, but it was the kind of thing where I’d stop several dozen times and write notes and ideas of things I thought God wanted me to accomplish. It was a startling reminder to me that one person devoted to a cause can accomplish so much and that is a regular inspiration to me.

Reading will give you the intellectual capitol to think for yourself.

I love the phrase “Intellectual Capitol”. Just as a businessman needs money (capitol) to invest and thus do business the currency of thought is information.

The Bible says that we are to “study to give an answer”. You’ll never be able to speak intelligently about different things if you don’t spend a lot of time reading nonfiction.

Reading will fill your mind with stories.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard Scott Pauley use the illustration about Steve Jobs asking John Skully “Do you want to spend the rest of your life making sugar water or do you want to change the world.” This is a perfect example of how reading can give you good illustration content for your preaching.

Now I don’t preach stories, I preach the word. Sometimes though, a relevant story is like some salt and pepper in a Biblical message and helps keep peoples interest and make the message more palatable. You won’t get these stories if you aren’t reading.

Reading will help you write.

As a pastor I write at least three 3,000 word sermon manuscripts every week. I write a pastor’s pen/church blog every week and a personal blog at least once a week. If you are a pastor, you’re going to be writing.

Reading a lot from talented authors will improve your writing style and it will give you a high standard to measure your own writing against.

Reading will keep you striving for the mastery.

Nothing is worse than a man in the ministry who has “arrived” and doesn’t feel the need to study, grow and learn new things. People who read are rarely these kinds of people. If you are reading for a sermon, you might fall into a plateau (you probably also only studied for an A in school), if you are reading for yourself, you are probably the kind of person who is striving for the mastery and God will bless you for it.

Reading will strengthen your faith.

Certain books, like the life of John Newton or the life of George Muller always come to mind when I am going through a hard time. Reading the stories of how God saved and led men in different situations in time past will inevitably strengthen your faith in God for your own life.

Fifth, learn some skills that you wouldn’t learn in Bible college.

Nowadays, being a pastor who knows how to use a computer, build a shed, run electric wiring and lay out an attractive bulletin are a plus. If you use the time between graduation and when you become a pastor to learn some skills that will help you, you’ll be blessed for it.

Let me recommend some:

• graphic design
• computer repair and networking
• anything construction related
• music (play the piano, etc.)
• videography
• photography
• sound engineering.

The list could go on and on. Learning these things will also give you some “hobbies” that will help you keep your sanity and balance you out a little.

Sixth, work on people skills.

People don’t support your ministry, people are your ministry. I confess, I have to work on my “people skills”. Call it ADHD, call it being a cerebral person, or call it rudeness; whatever you call it, I live in my own world and have a hard time coming across as a caring person.

A lot of people skills is perception: standing up straight and tall and smiling will go a long way in helping you seem to be a people person. The easiest way to be a people person, though, is to genuinely care about people and work on cultivating relationships. If you really care about people, over time it will be obvious.

Few things are worse than a pastor with no people skills. When a leader doesn’t care for his people and can’t spend time with them, it puts everyone on edge and causes a lot of unnecessary self-doubt.

I recommend you get a mentor who will help you with this. Pastor Scallions told me things all the time like “you look dejected today” and “stand up straight”. You can’t imagine how helpful that is.

Also, it wouldn’t hurt to read How to Win Friends and Influence People. It’s a little bit old fashioned, but there is a lot of wisdom in there.

Seven, practice.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers he makes a pretty compelling case for what he calls “the ten-thousand hour rule” which simply states that if you are going to be an expert in any field you need to spend 10,000 hours practicing. 10,000 hours is a long time (I’m no where near that mark myself).

If you want to be a pastor, get serious about preparing for it. I’m sorry but your Bible College education is woefully insufficient. Take the next few years as an opportunity to dig a deeper well of Bible knowledge, homiletic technique, and teaching ability. You need to work on it as much as you possibly can now, because when you become a pastor, you’ll spend almost all of your time working in it.

Use this time wisely and you’ll appreciate it for the rest of your life.

Finally, walk with God.

This probably should have been the first piece of advice, because it is certainly the most important. You will never be a good spiritual leader if you aren’t following God yourself. Get in the word, develop a prayer life, and get close to the Lord.

I hope this is helpful: these are the things I am most glad I did during the last seven years.