Today’s preacher faces the twin challenges of biblical illiteracy and chronic distractability. A 2014 study showed that 40% of Christians who attend church read their Bibles once a month or less (Jared Alcantara, “Preaching Sermons: 2027 Edition, Five Challenges and Five Opportunities Facing Pastors in the Next 10 Years,” www.preachingtoday.com/state-of-preaching). Our churches are increasingly biblically illiterate, and our attentions are constantly distracted. The average American receives 54,000 words and 443 minutes of video every day on social media. Furthermore, there is a new “outrage” demanding our attention every month. The result is that churchgoers have the spiritual attention span of a minnow darting in the shallows (Matt Woodley, “Deep Preaching in a Distracted Age,” www.preachingtoday.com/state-of-preaching). 

 

How should we respond as preachers? A popular response is to “dumb down” our preaching by broadening our theology to focus on the lowest common denominator. The logic runs like this. We want to reach people. We live in a distracted and divided world. Our audience knows little about the Bible and cares even less about theological concepts. Doctrine divides. Theology bores. Let’s give them Jesus Lite. Jesus lite preaching is Jesus words without Christ doctrines. It is spirituality without Christology, salvation without soteriology, and faith without the faith. Sermons remain sufficiently ambiguous to retain the amalgamation of people in attendance. And it works to draw crowds even as it fails to make disciples.

Jesus Lite preaching is not the apostolic model we see in the New Testament. Paul’s preaching to the church – those who have accepted Christ – is demonstrated in his letters. The epistles are sermons that dealt with real people in real situations in real churches. William Barclay identified the twin aims of Paul’s preaching ministry to Christians. It was “to produce and to preserve right belief and right conduct” (William Barclay, A Comparison of Paul’s Missionary Preaching and Preaching to the Church,” Gasque and Martin, eds., Apostolic History and the Gospel. Biblical and Historical Essays Presented to F.F. Bruce, The Paternoster Press, 1970, p.170).  The first half of each sermon series (Paul’s epistles) dealt with right doctrine and the second half dealt with right conduct.

 

Barclay summarized the three theological dangers that Paul addressed in his preaching to the church: 1) the danger of relapse, 2) the danger of syncretism, and 3) the danger of perversion. The early Christians were in danger of relapsing into legalism, astrology or mysticism, so Paul taught doctrine to protect them from returning to what they formerly believed. The first century world was highly syncretistic. The Hellenistic culture had married the east and the west. Pluralism ruled the Greco-Roman world. Paul preached the exclusiveness of Christian doctrine to fight the tendency toward syncretism. The world seduced Christians to pervert the faith by tolerating popular cultural lifestyles and incorporating philosophical ideas into the faith. Therefore, Paul preached doctrinal vigilance so that the world did not pervert the faith.

Doctrine is intensely practical. If we do not preach doctrine, Christians are ill-prepared for the dangers they face in society. Our evangelical churches are filled with people who wed cultural values with spiritual desires leading to fuzzy thinking and poor choices. We often see people profess faith in Christ only to fall back into the lifestyles of their past over time. Christians today defend all sorts of personal beliefs which contradict Scripture by saying, “this is what the verse means to me. What does it mean to you?” The church welcomes the “prosperity gospel” as if it is biblical Christianity because they fail to grasp the doctrines of Lordship, hamartiology, sanctification and eternity. A flawed soteriology promotes legalism. Conflicts erupt among Christians because of poor ecclesiology. Mysticism spiritualizes Scripture out of a faulty bibliology. Christians can justify almost any choice today because our churches are theologically distracted and illiterate.

 

Paul’s sermons to the Ephesian church began by addressing a trinitarian explanation of the unfolding of God’s saving purpose. He addressed election, predestination, redemption, sealing of the Spirit, resurrection, and sovereignty from an eternal perspective (Ephesians 1). Talk about a doctrinal introduction! He moved quickly to preach on the worldly lusts of the flesh and God’s great mercy and grace that makes us alive in Christ. He preached about the relationship of the church to Israel and how we are now citizens of one new family. God’s power builds the church of Christ into a temple for God (Ephesians 2). What a sublime ecclesiology he proclaims in just the first two chapters of his sermon series! The pastors of local gatherings took Paul’s messages and explained them to the people in their churches. Here is a model for doctrinal preaching we can follow today.

How should we respond to a Jesus Lite world? As counterintuitive as it seems, I think we need to dive deeper. The temptation is to stay shallow while we chase the minnows. We can attract people in our distracted and illiterate culture by staying shallow, but sooner or later people want more. They thirst for deeper truth – a truth that is meaty, not pureed! Preaching to those who want more leads to transformed lives. I don’ t mean that we impress with theological jargon like the terms in this article! We must become translators taking the doctrines and explaining them in the language of our people today. We must show people how these doctrines feed their souls for the deeper living all true followers of Christ crave.