To Whom Shouild we Preach?
I hadn't planned on posting on this subject, but Adrian Warnock has called me out. He and John at Blogotional have been having a discussion on "to whom should we preach?" Should preaching be targeted toward believers or unbelievers, or can it target both. John has spoken about this here, and he has rounded up a collection of posts on the subject here.
The discussion is great - I've waded through a few of the posts and people on all sides have said lots of great stuff. I'm not sure I can add much to the discussion or say anything that hasn't already been said. But since Adrian has called me out I'll add a few observations.
1. It has become increasingly clear to me that the mind of man plans his way but the Lord directs his steps - Proverbs 16:9
This goes especially for preaching. We can target whoever or whatever we want, but God seems to speak to people in unique ways. C. J. Mahaney tells a hilarious story of preaching one Sunday and how someone came to him afterwards and told him how blessed they were that day. C. J. asked what part of the message it was that blessed them in particular. The guy said, "well, you read and preached from chapter so and so and verse so and so, and I read the text. But I kept reading past the point in the text where you stopped and was really blessed by what I read." C. J. cracked up and all of us who heard the story cracked up too.
It's a good illustration - God has plans for our lives and sermons that we are not privy too. Sometimes a word we target to a believer may be just the thing that encourages an unbeliever, or vice versa. Another story I enjoy is one told by Dick Innes. He speaks of working for a Christian organization and how one time a delivery man was dropping off something. Innes lost his temper at someone else in the office and the delivery man overheard it. This man was drawn to Christ because he met a Christian leader who was a real person.
My point is obvious - God works in mysterious ways through our messages I'm not really against targeting messages - I did a mother's day message a week ago that was targeted toward a very, very narrow range of people, but I think God may have blessed some who were outside of the bullseye. He'll do things with our messages that we can't see.
2. Let's avoid the modernistic mindset in preaching.
I am certainly no expert when it comes to modernism, post-modernism, pre-modernism and whatever-modernism, but I do remember hearing something valuable on the subject that is pertinent. One of my old seminary profs pointed out that modernists had a penchant for trying to chop reality up into its constituent parts. By chopping reality up into its constituent parts, the modernists felt that they could understand the parts better and could then understand the whole from a study of it's parts. Well yeah maybe.
You can certainly understand trees better by studying individual trees but you can never comprehend the beauty of a forest until you step back and take a wide angle view of the whole forest.
Similarly, there is some value in targeting the audience. Different audiences have differing cultural and language conventions we ought to be sensitive to, and differing states of spritual maturity. So it is valid to take these things into consideration.
But we take this too far when we maximize the differences in audiences and continually chop humanity up into smaller and smaller subgroups, each needing their own indvidual gospel. That is what I mean by the modernistic mindset - we are going to keep chopping up humanity into smaller and smaller units so that we can get more and more precisely target messages to them. That's really an impossible task because we can't know all there is to know about the background of every individual we preach to. But in trying to do so the tradeoff between demographic analysis and study of Scripture may swing too far to demographic analysis and lead to weak exposition of the Scripture.
I'm not arguing against demographic analysis and some "chopping up of humanity," let's just not get carried away with it.
3. Remember that the gospel is the means of conversion and growth.
Someone once asked Spurgeon how he preached and he said he always started at his text and made a bee-line for the cross. Tim Keller says it this way "the gospel is not the A-B-C's of the Christian life, it is the A to Z of the Christian life."
Keller is kind of a pastoral hero of mine. His messages are weighty and in depth and they speak to believers and unbelievers alike. What he does well is tie all of his messages into the gospel, no matter where they are. He says that we should always speak as if unbelievers are present. This means that when you are speaking to believers, go ahead and say what you need to say to believers, but say it in such a way that it can be overheard in a winsome way by unbelievers.
Maybe you are preaching on the Great Commission from Matthew 28. Rather than talking about taking the gospel to the heathen, or even preaching to unbelievers, you can speak of taking the gospel to those who have never heard. It's a minor semantic issue, but by speaking of "those who have never heard" you are conveying the meaning of the text faithfully without using words that would be offensive to those who have never heard.
4. Rather than focusing on preaching to unbelievers or believers, maybe we should simply focus on preaching the text.
In saying this I am laying my cards on the table in that I believe sermons should be expository in nature. I do topical sermons and series from time to time (all of my topics are based on an exposition of a passage or passages though) but for the most part I will preach straight through a book. John at Blogotional issued the following challenge:
Now I'd like to issue a challenge to those in the "preaching can do both in the same context category." It's twofold. Please provide an exegesis of Hebrews 6:1-2 as quoted in my original post linked above and apply that to preaching within the context of regular Sunday worship. Also, what model would you have a church follow in terms of organization and structure to provide for both outreach and maturity within the context of a Sunday morning?
Maybe its providential that he issued that particular challenge because that is my sermon text for next Sunday. The text is:
Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, 2 instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.
That is obviously not the first text that a person would choose for an evangelistic message, so on the surface it would seem hard to target that to a person who has never heard the gospel. But that's ok with me - to say that this passage is not targeted toward evangelism is not to say that it is harmful to evangelism. This verse has a particular application to believers, but it has a tremendous application to those who have never heard the gospel because it paints a picture of what the Christian life is to be like. Consider Luke 14:25-33:
25 Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: 26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. 27 And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
28 “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? 29 For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, 30 saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’
31 “Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? 32 If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. 33 In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.
Before a person follows Christ they are to count the cost of following, ergo when we share the gospel we must share the cost of believing the gospel. So, simply exegeting and explaining the text of Hebrews 6:1-2 is a great means of explaining the cost of believing the gospel. It paints a picture to the one who is considering following Christ of what the Christian life will be - it is expected to be a life of continual growth.
I could at this time digress into a discussion of our modern evangelical propensity to divide evangelism and discipleship, but for now I'll just say that this is a very modern thing that is not biblical. I don't think the biblical writers had the same worries that we have about potential problems from improperly targeted messages.
5. Just do your best and trust that God knows what He is doing with your preaching.
I have yet to preach or hear the perfect sermon. I've yet to preach or hear a sermon that brought out everything there is to be brought out of a text, that dealt with all of the modern issues raised by the text or that applied perfectly to all members of an audience.
I think the main goal is to let the text be your guide. If a text is obviously aimed at believers, then aim your semon at believers while being cognizant that some who haven't heard the gospel may be present. If your text is obviously aimed at those who haven't heard or believed the gospel then aim your sermon at them and trust that God will encourage the believers present. If Billy Graham invites you to fill in for him at his next crusade then I think you know what kind of a sermon you should preach. If you are asked to teach a class on supralapsarianism at the local seminary then I think you know what kind of a message to bring.
I think the main thing is simply to relax, do the best job you can at explaining the text and discerning the needs of your audience and trust God to work His will through you.
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