“Five weeks to a stress-free you.”  “How to raise great kids.”  “How to prosper financially.”

Not sure if that represents three months worth of sermons at your local evangelical church or adult education courses offered at the local high school?  I’m not sure either these days.

I’ve been posting some thoughts on the seeker-sensitive approach to church ministry over the past few weeks.  One of the hallmarks of this approach is topical preaching designed to speak to “felt needs.”  For example, in a seeker-sensitive church, you’re likely to hear a series on parenting, or managing your money, or dealing with anxiety, with sermons that draw on Biblical wisdom in order to teach you God’s way to raising teens, balancing your budget, or living stress-free.  The goal is to attract people to church by speaking on relevant topics, and then to help people see how the gospel and the way of God is the answer to what they’ve been looking for, better than all the other wisdom out there. 

As a preacher, I’ve struggled with whether or not to adopt this method of preaching.  On the one hand, this is what many people seem to want to hear – “tell me how the Bible applies to my day-to-day life, like raising kids, keeping my marriage together, and doing well at work.”  It seems like more people would come to church and people might be more attentive if I would do sermon series like “how to have a great marriage” and “how to raise great kids.”  And that’s understandable – there’s usually little to be gained from a poor sermon on Leviticus that the preacher can not apply to the hearer’s personal experience.  But on the other hand, it’s pretty clear that God didn’t arrange the Bible according to neat and easy topics – there is no “Book of Workplace Behavior” or “The Gospel of Great Sex God’s Way,” nor is the gospel primarily about how God can help you have your best life.  If the gospel is primarily about our complete lost, sinful, and self-centered condition and our need for the salvation found in Jesus, and how experiencing that salvation will eventually transform us in every aspect of our lives, then is that compatible with seeker-sensitive, topical preaching?

As I mentioned last week, most churches that use seeker-sensitive methods do so out of a deep desire to see people come to Christ, and their commitment to be as creative as possible in order to reach that goal.  This is why I have a hard time agreeing with the harshest critics of the seeker-sensitive movement, because I think they often falsely characterize these pastors as just wanting to grow their church for the sake of ego.  For example, I recently heard a panel discussion from the Ligionier’s Conference which included Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and RC Sproul, theologian and pastor and host of Renewing Your Mind radio broadcast.  They were asked their opinion of the seeker-sensitive movement, and their answer was essentially, “it’s a horrible thing” (I recommend watching the 7 minute piece at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2zvqQ1w-Os).  Their opinions are worth careful consideration, as both of these men are heavyweights in the evangelical community, and they make some excellent points theologically, but I think they falsely conclude that such churches never get around to preaching the gospel. 

I have found that one of the dangers of topical, seeker-sensitive preaching is that you may end up never preaching on major themes and sections of the Bible.  If your preaching calendar is driven more by the felt needs of people, when would you preach through the prophets, for instance?  Unless your community is really striving for a good rebuke for failing to live up to God’s standards, you would have no reason to preach through Jeremiah or Ezekiel.  The result, therefore, can be a skewed perspective on what the Christian faith is all about.  The average listener can come away thinking that it’s about how faith in God can give us what we want instead of learning that it’s about centering our lives around what God wants. 

However, I think it can be beneficial to help people understand what the whole Bible has to say about a certain subject, like money or marriage.  When Paul wrote his letters to churches in Corinth or Galatia, or in his pastoral letters to Timothy, he took time to address the issues that were facing those particular churches in those unique cities.  For example, in 1 Corinthians he addresses marriage (ch. 7) and food sacrificed to idols (ch. 8), all in the context of how the gospel affects our view of those things.  Therefore, I think it’s very appropriate to preach on issues that affect a certain congregation, if it is done in the light of how the gospel transforms our handling of money, or stress, or work, for example.

 My counsel would be to occasionally preach topical series, but not to preach them in such a way that it sounds no different than any other man-centered, self-help message you can hear in the marketplace today.  God’s will is not just for you to get out of debt and have a healthy savings account; it’s for you to have been so transformed by the gospel that your trust is in Him and not your bank account, and as a result you become a generous person whose treasure is in heaven.  God’s will is not just for you to communicate well with your spouse and be appropriately affectionate; it’s for you to have been so transformed by the gospel that a husband loves his wife as Christ loves the church, and the wife submits to her husband as the church submits to Christ.  And His will is not just for you to learn relaxation and stress-relieving techniques, but to be so transformed by the gospel that you know that the one who gave His son for you will give you everything you need, and that he has conquered every enemy – even death – so you have no need of worry.

In the end, I don’t think seeker-sensitive, topical preaching is evil if it is done with the perspective of how the gospel transforms your view of the topic.  If it is done in this way, it can be relevant to those outside the church without compromising the central message of salvation or the radical nature of the gospel-transformed life.

Write a comment