If you have never been to a (NBM) Annual Fellowship Meeting, you ve missed out on one of the most unique, close-knit bands of preachers and their families anywhere in the country. No humbugs. No spiritual charlatanism.
It is fellowship with a big capital F. Or should I say family, only in all bold letters?
Yes.
We are unique and, probably to outsiders, quite an odd, mixed bunch. But just notice where we live and minister. Not every man who lives in a predominant Bible belt is cut out to fit the exact holes in such places as Rexburg in Idaho, Winnemuca in Nevada, or Nephi in Utah.
Don’t you think? One-of-a-kind men are needed for such vividly singular places. Maybe that is why NBM get togethers tend to be just that fun and colorful.
You never know what is going to shoot down the pike or jump out from the sagebrush. This year, it happened to be good ol’ Aunt Martha (you have to watch out for some of those pesky relatives), who lovingly, playfully scolded Pastor Jason Ehmann and Pastor Dennis Rodgers right up on the front stage in view of a full auditorium. Some of the new preachers probably didn’t know what to think.
Watching from the audience, Brother Dan Mauldin (and brand-new executive board member) was ready to invoke 1 Timothy 2:11-12.
But no worries; ol’ Aunt Martha and I go back quite a spell. We just want to make sure everybody is awake.
Alert. On their toes. Better to meet Aunt Martha than some predacious six-shooter.
Ron Ehmann, the director of the mission, on the opening night of the meetings (Sept. 25 in Idaho Falls, Idaho), preached out of 1 Samuel 17. He spoke of Goliath snubbing the Israelite army, and I am paraphrasing Ron.
“These men’s perspectives had been conditioned by the giant. The whole army was thinking the same way.” But then a new perspective came along in verse 26.
Excellent. Because “we forget whom we serve. We get use to standing around and looking at each other.
” Note: in this series surveyed the mindset of today s listeners as well as the pitfalls to avoid when communicating to them. Part 2 addresses the specific means by which to engage this mindset and to avoid the aforementioned dangers.
Although the preacher is not at liberty to compromise or change the timeless truth of God’s Word, the manner by which he communicates that truth is not under such rigidity.
The what of our message is ultimately more important than the how, but the how is not rendered unimportant. It is so important that we do a great disservice to our students when we do not evaluate a sermon’s delivery just as strenuously as we evaluate a sermon’s content. Delivery and manner is not neutral.
The message of a sermon is either helped or hindered by delivery. There are great sermons that today’s listeners will never hear because there was no effort to communicate the truth appropriately. Reference to delivery and/or presentation is not referring only to voice inflection, facial expression, and bodily movement during the preaching event.
In addition to one’s speaking manner, I am referring to the logic of the sermon outline and the choice of discussion elements. Effective communication of God’s Word to today’s “whatever” listeners requires that preachers give attention to a sermon’s presentation as well as to the exegesis of the passage under consideration. During sermon preparation, we should be asking, “Is the message of Christ being heard, not just preached?
”
The aforementioned mindset of today’s “whatever” listener reveals several characteristics that should mark sermon presentation.
Our sermons should reflect an expository philosophy.
If a preacher is going to preach with any kind of authority in a culture that rejects authority, it must be an authority from Someone higher than himself.Preachers must learn to trust in the authority of God to speak through the Scriptures. Today’s listeners will not tolerate the musings of a man who seems to be enamored with his own powers of reasoning. Our listeners do not want to have an encounter with a preacher but with the God of the Scriptures.
An expository philosophy allows this to happen. Regardless of our sermonic style (topical, narrative, textual), we are committed to relate every statement and conclusion to the text of Scripture.
Whatever. Our culture today uses this word frequently. Its breadth of meaning within its pronominal usage spans from meaning anything or everything ( Take whatever you want.
) to a statement of surprise ( Whatever made you think that? ). The word’s adjectival meaning is similar as well ( He ate whatever food he could find.
). Perhaps the semantic range of whatever shines most brightly, however, in its use as an interjection. More recent dictionary editions include this use of whatever and describe it as indicating “indifference to or scorn for something, such as a remark or suggestion.
” This definition is more representative of today’s use of the word. Still, others have attempted to catalogue other nuances of the interjectory use of whatever. One author humorously lists over 10 uses for whatever used by modern speakers.
Among them are the following: The Apathetic Whatever ( Oh, I’m immature? Whatever. ), The Pseudo-Impartial Whatever ( She’s dating the boss?
Whatever. ), Self-pitying Whatever ( Never mind, I did all the work but whatever. ), The Sulking Whatever (Him: I’m sorry, honey, let’s have dinner.
Her: Whatever. ), The Get-over-it Whatever ( Dad, whatever, it’s just a tattoo. ), The Jealous Whatever ( His uncle got him the job but whatever.
), The Faltering Cliché Whatever ( Perhaps then you can get some closure or whatever. ), The Bashful Whatever ( Could we go steady or whatever? ), and The Doubting Thomas Whatever ( He said he sent the check last week, and I am like whatever.
).
Although the use of whatever might be an interesting and even amusing linguistic phenomenon, it is more. Words and the way speakers use them reveal specific cultures.
A ready example of how usage of words reflects culture would be the prolific use of the word like in our culture. High school and college students use this word repeatedly within the bounds of a relatively short story. We may hear the word like and wait expectantly for a simile to follow.
Instead the storyteller pauses to make a facial expression and follows up with a rather weak adjective (e.g., “When he came around the corner, I jumped out at him, and he was like [facial expression] scared.
”). Such usage suggests that our culture is immersed in multimedia. It is easier to show an idea than to speak it.
The term like may reveal a culture flooded with pictures and sounds, but the term whatever reveals an entire mindset of our current culture. Utterances of whatever reveal a culture marked by apathy, dismissal, indecisiveness, non-discerning tolerance, and confusion. If the people to whom we and our students are going to minister are part of this “whatever” culture or at least affected by it, we must learn for ourselves and teach our students how to communicate the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ accordingly.
In a dingy, dirty, six-dollar-a-night motel room in downtown Los Angeles in 1976, I made a commitment to the ministry. My revival meeting for that week had been canceled.
I had nowhere to go for six days and after paying for my motel room for the week, I had just two dollars in my pocket. I had no gas in my car, no friends to call on, and the television in my room got only snow. But it was there, alone with God in fasting and prayer, that I made a commitment to Him to preach regardless of the cost.
That week may have been the best meeting I ever held in all the years of evangelism, for it produced a decision in my own heart of commitment to God’s call (11).
Eleven years later, up in the high country of Red Cliff Bible Camp near Pinedale, Wyoming, God used Goetsch’s preaching to burden an introverted, 17-year-old Idaho boy about being a preacher of the Word. I have been preaching since.
John breaks down his book, Homiletics from the Heart (Lancaster: Revival Books, 2003), as follows:
To some, good preaching is primarily evangelism. To others it is primarily exhortation. To still others it is primarily explanation of the biblical text.
Some envision preaching primarily as oratory, some see it as entertainment, and some believe it to be mainly exposition.
There has always been a regional and associational element to these differences. Exposition has been more common in the North, while evangelism and exhortation have tended to dominate preaching in the South.
Presbyterians and groups that came out of the Northern Baptist Convention have typically been more centered on the text, whereas the groups that owe their origin to the influence of J. Frank Norris have tended to center on issues and applications. The further east one moves, the more oratorical preaching becomes, while the West has fostered a more folksy style of preaching that incorporates a good bit of storytelling.
The last two generations of fundamentalists (my own middle-aged generation and the upcoming generation of so-called “young fundamentalists”) have reacted against the theatrics and weak exposition that have sometimes characterized fundamentalist preaching. For more than thirty years we have witnessed a push toward a more biblical, textual, and doctrinal type of preaching. In several branches of fundamentalism, pulpit pyrotechnics have fallen into disrepute.
Mainstream fundamentalists have largely abandoned the abusive confrontationalism that used to pass for courageous pulpit work. Manipulative emotional appeals are viewed with increasing suspicion. A more thoughtful and deliberate presentation is becoming the order of the day.
This alteration, however, has led to problems of its own. In order to create and hold interest, much of the older fundamentalist preaching relied upon precisely those elements that are now being abandoned. While the new preaching certainly is more faithful to Scripture, it can sometimes become bookish, pedantic, and even dull.
Of course, monotony is not uniquely the province of either fundamentalists or expository preachers. Still, we who are the most concerned that the Word of God be preached should also be the most concerned that the Word of God be heard, understood, applied, and lived.
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