This is a response to a thread on CRC-Voices about sermon length. The discussion got into various aspects of sermon preaching and listening.
The conditioning of modern media often comes into the discussion here. Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” is a standard text. I remember John Stek remarking that past congregations had the capacity to listen carefully for extended periods of time, could follow audible detailed and nuanced argument, had critical listening skills and an amazing ability to retain. We also forget that past educational methods emphasized memorization (it was expected that huge amounts of material traditionally would be devoted to memory, not the least of which being Scripture).
Read a Jonathan Edwards sermon sometimes, like this one: http://www.biblebb.com/files/edwards/charity.htm It’s not easy for us to read. CCEL.org has some Edwards sermons that are read by some nice West Michigan woman and you can get a sense for what “regular” congregations a few hundred years ago expected.
In our consumer culture the audience sits back with a demanding posture and says “It’s all up to you, communicator!” In some sense it is, especially if the listener adopts this posture, but the listener then basically defeats their own interests. If the listener enters the process and takes some responsibility for what they get out of the process, they will likely find something of value that occurs within the process, even perhaps from the most unworthy sermon. Papa of the older Berenstein Bears demonstrated that even negative examples can be instructive.
There is a real component of this in the gospel. Again, I’m doing Revelation with our Sunday School. God’s wrath gets poured out and even God’s children are subject to its general and widespread havoc. To those in rebellion against God it is all negative, but for the elect even the negative works to their purification and strengthening.
I find this all the time in life. I am most often a very selfish, self-centered person who’s greedy little id wants to dictate and evaluate every waking minute. Other people intrude. They bring requests, stories they want to tell me, agendas they want to foist upon me. My id resents it. I want to send them away, to mock them, to belittle them, to banish them from my precious eyeball time and consciousness so I can direct my life along the way I think it should be so that my little will fills my experience of this world, so that things that I like fill my life and I can avoid things I find annoying.
It’s not too hard to see that I am in my selfishness a prisoner of my own smarmy little will and that all of these annoying people are God’s gift to break me of my self-centeredness, which if left to its own progressive growth with result in hell itself.
Why would I say that? Because as my selfish little will expands in power it must block out the ultimate intruder, God himself. So God comes to me in children who have little, sometimes inane stories to tell me. He comes to me in the mentally ill who are going to ramble at me in twisted and irrational fears and notions. He’s going to annoy me with people presenting political or theological views that I disagree with. He’s going to place me in a world filled with sinful, broken people that do real damage and whose irresponsible ideas do real damage. He places me here and he says “love them as I have loved them because I love them”.
Why does God allow there to be lousy preachers and terrible church musicians and annoying and offensive congregations? They are all for our benefit, as opportunities to grow in his generosity and love.
You can sit in that church service letting that internal grumbler and critic find fault in innumerable things around you and you can leave angry and upset. You can walk out desperately wishing, like Hyacinth Bucket from “Keeping Up Appearances” or like the denizens on CS Lewis’ imaginary bus from hell in “The Great Divorce”, for a more suitable, more elevated, more appropriate context for your obviously refined and informed sensitivities, someplace where others properly measure up to your fine standards. Or you can accept the invitation into the relational polarity of the life of God, who listens to the selfish, rambling prayers of everyone, who pays attention to us who, to him look both insane and childish.
In Christ every lousy day filled with evil, annoying and obnoxious people and experiences is yet another opportunity to grow in love for the unlovely and the unloving. Why wouldn’t church fit into this picture? pvk
Leadingchurch.com 
Sorry – not buying the excuse for lousy preaching. Would you be content with a lousy doctor if you were having a heart attack, or a lousy mechanic if your car were malfunctioning? So why would you expect a congregation to listen to a lousy preacher simply as an exercise in listening, or perhaps because there might be some nugget of truth embedded somewhere in the sermon? What about our quest for excellence? I would hope that “do it with all your heart” would include doing it with all our minds! I am a qualified, experienced, careful teacher. I expect the same from my preacher.
Don’t take this personally, Paul! I know your sister and your father, so I’m guessing your preaching is done with integrity.
I’m not making excuses for lousy preaching. It’s the preachers job to do it well. But what if you’re not the preacher? Does the person who comes to listen not have a job as well?
Our society has an implicit faith in consumerism. This article of faith suggests that the audience is the judge. The standard is the pleasure of the crowd. This does bad things to the preacher, and it does bad things to the listeners. 2 Timothy 4 is instructive. In verse 2 Timothy is instructed to proclaim the message. Verse 3 warns that the time is coming when people have itching ears and they accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their desires. I think that’s a pretty apt description of a consumeristic environment. It is the tyranny of that anxious, hungry nudge inside all of us that demands to be the center of existence that is already treading in the foothills of hell.
In preaching the preacher has a job, and the listeners have a job. Both should work to do their job well. That’s what I’m saying.
Thanks for your comment Jenna. 🙂 pvk
Thanks,Paul. 1st one of your blogs I have read. You are right about both.
I think you were implying this, but I am not sure. I think too often we the regularly attending forget that we are the sinful, broken people who do real damage too and no less so than the visitor. Too often the visitors, guests, walk away b/c they are bored or offended or something else. Though they certainly could have done more to engage themselves, how can we ask them to do what they are unaware of? Once I became interested in Christ, all sermons engaged me, prior to that nothing did. I only became interested when some delivered Jesus to me on my level.
I had an interesting discussion about this post yesterday with a colleague of mine who saw my FB post. We had to make distinctions between church done poorly, church done weakly, and church done wrongly. We defined the terms ourselves, but essentially wrongly referred to preaching and teaching of false doctrine and/or self-serving worship. Weakly referred to the absence of doctrine, or what I call “feel-good” church. Poorly meant that the doctrine (the goods) were sound, but the delivery (the package) was poor. I think that your post refers to this–certainly striving for excellence is part of our calling, but the quality of the presentation was never the purpose of the church, and in my opinion does not necessarily better serve the purposes of the church. If we agree that all our worship is broken and tainted by our sin, but that God can make it perfect through his grace, I don’t see how any one act of worship or preaching is any “better” in God’s eyes than another. In some ways you could argue that God’s grace is more evident in poor packages than in spotless ones.