Let’s change the church services. The church is losing its hold on people, especially young ones. Evening attendance is off. Let’s make church more popular, more palatable. For example, why do we need to hear two harangues each Sunday by a preacher? Wouldn’t it be more meaningful if we could all share our experiences with each other? Perhaps tell what God meant for me, or discuss some relevant problem. Or have a movie. Maybe the non-churched would be better reached by the movie The Antkeeper, or some religious drama. Let’s have some more modern music—young people with guitars and tambourines, singing religious folk songs, or read poetry or short stories. Or focus attention on paintings. Maybe we ought even to meet apart from the organized church, coming as we desire, barefoot, sitting on the floor. But let’s get away from the stifling, formal worship services, where there is little participation by the congregation.
Such is the thinking of some people in both the Catholic and Protestant churches.
Feelings like these are understandable. Too often church is too dead, academic and abstract. In some churches the minister has a captive audience (for the most part they will come back again and again even if he is uninspiring). He doesn’t agonize over his sermons. He finds it easier to counsel people than to make a thorough, studious, prayerful preparation for worship. He often has very little to say, and often when he does have something worthwhile, he doesn’t know how to say it. It doesn’t grab him. And if he can’t be turned on, neither can his listeners.
But the answer is not in the latest gimmicks, in posters on walls, flashing lights, movies, dramas, cantatas, dialogues, readings, folk songs, and dances. Pretty soon both the church and the world will tire of this too. Its novelty will wear off. And what will remain? Nothing except the Word of God.
And it is here that the church must begin and end: at the Word. God’s Word is the only thing that will really satisfy. When I go to church, I don’t want to listen to some brilliant student shoot off about his latest theory of ecumenicity, I don’t want to hear a half-baked discussion among three extroverts (and they’re the chief talkers) about their religious, but often mistaken, gripes.
I want to hear a “Thus saith the Lord.” I want to hear an exposition of God’s eternal, unchanging, ever relevant Word by a man who knows what he is talking about, who has been properly trained, and who has spent time in the Word.
When people are turned off by sermons on prayer, sanctification, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and divine election, when they clamor instead for something that deals with the front page of the New York Times, then they reveal their spiritual immaturity. Certainly, a live church will deal with the front page of the newspaper. And it is especially Dutch Calvinism that has seen this. The church should speak authoritatively from God’s Word on current problems. But to say that sermons on prayer, election, sanctification and the like are not relevant, do not meet the needs of the congregation, is plain nonsense. It reveals the spiritual immaturity of the complainers.
After all, what can be more relevant than to learn about how God Almighty dwells in the believer, sends his Holy Spirit into their hearts to change their lives. Now there is relevancy and timeliness—in fact, far more than Time magazine ever thought of being timely. If the Biblical teaching of divine election God’s eternal love towards those who believe—doesn’t grab a person, then the problem is not in the Bible, it is in the immaturity of the griper. Election is not an old, stodgy church doctrine that has no life. Man, it has more life than Life magazine ever thought of having. Life hasn’t even begun to live. It’s dead to God. It doesn’t even know where life is. Come to the action. Come to the Bread of Life.
Modernism goes in for excessive ritual and liturgy because it has no message. When the sermon has lost its meat and authority, then the pastor needs candles, kneelings, pulpit switchings, offertory prayers with the back to the congregation, cantatas that minimize sermons—anything to fill up for the lack of the Word of God.
The answer to the problem of the restless church and declining attendance is not in shortening the sermon and filling the lag with liturgical trappings, but in the precise opposite: in expounding the eternal Word of God. It is only the Word that will satisfy.
When a preacher delivers a sermon that is based thoroughly on the Bible, one that is well organized, clear and practical—when he has done this in the power and demonstration of the Holy Spirit, then a born-again believer will go home, warmed in his heart, filled with gratitude, and desiring to get into action.
Granted that we preachers do a very poor job of preaching. But the answer to the problem is not to do away with a main meal, the preaching of the Word, and substitute sawdust, but for ministers to get on the stick and improve.
If, however, after a good worship service, a person does not go home warmed and spiritually motivated, then he should ask himself if he is a good Christian, and not just a formal one. One of the prime troubles of many church goers—but not the only one—is that those who seek new Sunday services have never been turned on by the Holy Spirit. They have a dead orthodoxy. Never having made a total commitment to Jesus Christ, they are bored with catechism, traditional hymns, long sermons and an exposition of the Word of God. Frankly, they have not been born again. They have not really tried what the church is all about. Yes, they are in church, but not of it. They go through the ecclesiastical motions, but what the church is saying is really foreign to them, for they have not surrendered their lives to Jesus Christ. When a person has had a real encounter with God, then he will find lots of spontaneous joy and freedom in the church.
It won’t be oppressive, but liberating and exciting. After all, the Bible is living and it is active. The living God wrote it. When it is faithfully, lively, meaningfully, clearly, sincerely and accurately preached, then the living Holy Spirit comes into the lives of listeners, and acts like a two-edged sword, piercing into the heart of man. The Word so preached never returns void. There’s always action -plenty of action, because God Almighty is in the action. And people either accept it or reject it. They are either made a little better, or their rebellion makes them a little more corrupt. To try to get a more lively worship service by turning away from the preaching of the living Word to the gimmicks of movies, poetry, tambourines and congregational dialogue is the epitome of foolishness.
To those who arc restless in church, I ask: Have you been where the action is? Do you know the fullness of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit?
To us pastors, I say: Preach the Word. Study it. Spend more time in preparing for it than in any other task. Get excited about it. Make it plain. And pray for the demonstration and power of the Holy Spirit (I Cor. 2:4).
Dr. Edwin H. Palmer is Executive Secretary of the Committee of Bible Translations of the New York Bible Society.
Such is the thinking of some people in both the Catholic and Protestant churches.
Feelings like these are understandable. Too often church is too dead, academic and abstract. In some churches the minister has a captive audience (for the most part they will come back again and again even if he is uninspiring). He doesn’t agonize over his sermons. He finds it easier to counsel people than to make a thorough, studious, prayerful preparation for worship. He often has very little to say, and often when he does have something worthwhile, he doesn’t know how to say it. It doesn’t grab him. And if he can’t be turned on, neither can his listeners.
But the answer is not in the latest gimmicks, in posters on walls, flashing lights, movies, dramas, cantatas, dialogues, readings, folk songs, and dances. Pretty soon both the church and the world will tire of this too. Its novelty will wear off. And what will remain? Nothing except the Word of God.
And it is here that the church must begin and end: at the Word. God’s Word is the only thing that will really satisfy. When I go to church, I don’t want to listen to some brilliant student shoot off about his latest theory of ecumenicity, I don’t want to hear a half-baked discussion among three extroverts (and they’re the chief talkers) about their religious, but often mistaken, gripes.
I want to hear a “Thus saith the Lord.” I want to hear an exposition of God’s eternal, unchanging, ever relevant Word by a man who knows what he is talking about, who has been properly trained, and who has spent time in the Word.
When people are turned off by sermons on prayer, sanctification, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and divine election, when they clamor instead for something that deals with the front page of the New York Times, then they reveal their spiritual immaturity. Certainly, a live church will deal with the front page of the newspaper. And it is especially Dutch Calvinism that has seen this. The church should speak authoritatively from God’s Word on current problems. But to say that sermons on prayer, election, sanctification and the like are not relevant, do not meet the needs of the congregation, is plain nonsense. It reveals the spiritual immaturity of the complainers.
After all, what can be more relevant than to learn about how God Almighty dwells in the believer, sends his Holy Spirit into their hearts to change their lives. Now there is relevancy and timeliness—in fact, far more than Time magazine ever thought of being timely. If the Biblical teaching of divine election God’s eternal love towards those who believe—doesn’t grab a person, then the problem is not in the Bible, it is in the immaturity of the griper. Election is not an old, stodgy church doctrine that has no life. Man, it has more life than Life magazine ever thought of having. Life hasn’t even begun to live. It’s dead to God. It doesn’t even know where life is. Come to the action. Come to the Bread of Life.
Modernism goes in for excessive ritual and liturgy because it has no message. When the sermon has lost its meat and authority, then the pastor needs candles, kneelings, pulpit switchings, offertory prayers with the back to the congregation, cantatas that minimize sermons—anything to fill up for the lack of the Word of God.
The answer to the problem of the restless church and declining attendance is not in shortening the sermon and filling the lag with liturgical trappings, but in the precise opposite: in expounding the eternal Word of God. It is only the Word that will satisfy.
When a preacher delivers a sermon that is based thoroughly on the Bible, one that is well organized, clear and practical—when he has done this in the power and demonstration of the Holy Spirit, then a born-again believer will go home, warmed in his heart, filled with gratitude, and desiring to get into action.
Granted that we preachers do a very poor job of preaching. But the answer to the problem is not to do away with a main meal, the preaching of the Word, and substitute sawdust, but for ministers to get on the stick and improve.
If, however, after a good worship service, a person does not go home warmed and spiritually motivated, then he should ask himself if he is a good Christian, and not just a formal one. One of the prime troubles of many church goers—but not the only one—is that those who seek new Sunday services have never been turned on by the Holy Spirit. They have a dead orthodoxy. Never having made a total commitment to Jesus Christ, they are bored with catechism, traditional hymns, long sermons and an exposition of the Word of God. Frankly, they have not been born again. They have not really tried what the church is all about. Yes, they are in church, but not of it. They go through the ecclesiastical motions, but what the church is saying is really foreign to them, for they have not surrendered their lives to Jesus Christ. When a person has had a real encounter with God, then he will find lots of spontaneous joy and freedom in the church.
It won’t be oppressive, but liberating and exciting. After all, the Bible is living and it is active. The living God wrote it. When it is faithfully, lively, meaningfully, clearly, sincerely and accurately preached, then the living Holy Spirit comes into the lives of listeners, and acts like a two-edged sword, piercing into the heart of man. The Word so preached never returns void. There’s always action -plenty of action, because God Almighty is in the action. And people either accept it or reject it. They are either made a little better, or their rebellion makes them a little more corrupt. To try to get a more lively worship service by turning away from the preaching of the living Word to the gimmicks of movies, poetry, tambourines and congregational dialogue is the epitome of foolishness.
To those who arc restless in church, I ask: Have you been where the action is? Do you know the fullness of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit?
To us pastors, I say: Preach the Word. Study it. Spend more time in preparing for it than in any other task. Get excited about it. Make it plain. And pray for the demonstration and power of the Holy Spirit (I Cor. 2:4).
Dr. Edwin H. Palmer is Executive Secretary of the Committee of Bible Translations of the New York Bible Society.