by Luke Geraty
Systematic Theology. Exegesis. Church History. Contextualization.
Liturgy. Pneumatology. Hebrew and Greek. Pastoral counseling.
These are all subjects that most pastors are either familiar with or have taken seminary courses on.
Transitioning from seminary to pastoral ministry is pretty crazy. You
go from writing huge papers on how postmodernism challenges the
epistemological assumptions of one’s praxis to writing sermons for
diverse groups of people that range from being
forced to attend to those who have been followers of Jesus for longer than you have been living.
Try crafting a sermon for
that type of audience versus your seminary classmates!
After some time, you’ll hit your stride and some experience will help
you exegete your audience in a helpful way. You’ll start writing
sermons that are Christ exalting and applicable, and people will be
really encouraged and challenged by your ministry.
And then you’ll talk to someone who tells you that your preaching doesn’t do anything for them.
Your first instinct will be to either punch them in the face, laugh nervously, cry or quit.
If you are wise, you’ll remember
James 1:19
and will do your best to listen, be slow to respond and slow to anger.
Of course, the vision of choking that person out may be tempting, so it
needs to be constrained by the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the
Mount.
Over the years, I’ve heard this statement a couple of times and I’ve
talked to a lot of other pastors who have also heard this or similar
statements.
Here are three observations I have about people who say these things:
1. You need to understand how to properly evaluate whether or not your sermons are “feeding the sheep.”
I fear that some pastors are more concerned with
keeping their congregations happy than with keeping their congregations
fed. But most of the pastors that I know are very concerned with being
faithful in what they teach/preach.
Yet there’s something very peculiar about how devastating
one person’s criticism can be! We will actually take that
one person’s opinion and elevate it above and beyond the
dozens or even
hundreds of other people who think differently.
After encountering the “you-don’t-feed-me” person, you may even find
yourself canceling sermon plans you’ve had and jumping to the conclusion
that you need to preach
totally differently than what you’ve been doing. After all, someone told you that you aren’t feeding them!
It isn’t necessarily
wrong to consider making changes, but
your concerns should primarily be in regards to how God feels about the
matter. Are you talking about the “whole counsel of God” (
Acts 20:27)? Are you faithfully preaching the word (
2 Tim. 4:2)?
Is your preaching focused on exalting Christ, clarifying the gospel and
helping form the spiritual lives of those you serve? Questions like
these are
far more important.
So, should you do a series that addresses marriage and serves the
majority of your congregation, or do a series on the “deeper” things of
God like the “revelation of God’s seven spirits and how this all proves
both the pretribulational rapture and young earth creationism.”
While the former may not meet
everyone’s alleged needs (though it’ll meet
most),
the latter is a complete waste of your time. Yes, I did just say that a
sermon on the seven spirits of God proving the pretribulational rapture
and young earth creationism is vastly inferior in comparison to doing a
sermon on what God has to say about marriage.
2. What people often want you to “feed” them is simply a way for them to reinforce their stereotypes and bad theology.
I’m not kidding about this one. As I already alluded, those who talk about not being fed will generally give you ideas of what
would feed them.
In my experience, these suggestions are generally
not related
to primary doctrinal subjects (e.g., Christology, the gospel, missions)
or the “main and the plain.” Most of the time, these requests for
“depth” are on things so speculative that you won’t find
any theologians throughout the history of the church who have addressed them!
Of course, the kind of person that says “your sermons don’t feed me” has
zero time
for church history, and believes that the reason why no one has talked
about their favorite subject is simply because no one in the history of
the church has been either
smart enough or
spiritual enough to know those things.
Oh, and by the way, you are
obviously not smart enough or spiritual enough to know about it either, which is why they are informing you that you haven’t “fed” them.
Pay close attention here.
What these people often want is for you to reinforce what they already believe, no matter
how disconnected from life or how unbiblical their beliefs are.
I had a person once tell me that they wanted me to do sermons on why
Christians using Christmas trees was sinful idol worship!!! The fact
that they were mishandling Scripture to “prove” this novel position
didn’t matter to them at all. But when I couldn’t agree with their
horrific eisogesis of
Jeremiah 10:2-4, they left our church with no discussion and response to the questions I had.
After all, I wasn’t into “depth.”
3. The person who says they get nothing from a sermon is likely a prideful person.
Pride is almost always the
sine qua non of this statement. In other words, without pride, people
rarely say that they aren’t getting anything out of a sermon.
I say
almost and
rarely because I will acknowledge
that there are some preachers out there that could stand to be better
teachers and spend more time in preparation or be aware of the needs of
their congregation. But by and large, the statement that someone isn’t
getting anything from your sermons is a sign of pride.
If you are publically reading portions of Scripture à la
1 Tim. 4:13 and preaching Christ à la
Rom. 16:25, there’s something for people to be encouraged by and learn from.
In my experience, 99.9 percent of the time, this statement is being made by someone who is unteachable.
So you need to be aware of the fact that all of the discussion and
attempts to evaluate your teaching and ministry are almost always a
waste of time simply because the person assumes they know more than you
and are more spiritual than you. So it’s fruitless.
Except for when it isn’t, ha ha!
