Six Fatalities of Mainstream Evangelical Preaching

1. Entering “Preacher Mode” and Not Being Yourself

Some pastors think when it comes time to deliver a sermon they have to enter into “preacher mode.” It’s like some kind of universal personality, a standard code of behavior that all pastors should follow: over-dramatic speaking, gestures that demand some kind reaction, and odd mannerisms that nobody actually uses in real life.

Trying to fully imitate some of the most well-known speakers who have thousands of people in their congregations makes a pastor look mentally unstable, not prophetic. It does nothing more than distract the listeners from the message. The congregation is not in awe of how smooth and powerful you are. Instead, they are wondering what happened to the pastor that they talked to the other day at the post office, who looked and acted nothing like this odd figure currently behind the pulpit.

Granted, preaching is a serious task, and the one delivering a genuine sermon is illumined by the Spirit of God. But that does not swallow up personal identity. If it is not a person’s sermon, then it’s hard for anyone to take it personally. In short, don’t try and change who you are in front of people.

2. Appealing to Original Languages When It is Completely Unhelpful

Every pastor needs to have a reading knowledge of New Testament Greek, if not Greek and Hebrew. Most don’t. They don’t see the value of knowing the original languages or don’t have the patience. Both of these shortcomings indicate that the pastor probably shouldn’t have become a pastor in the first place. Someone who doesn’t think it’s vital to know the original languages to exposit the Word of God doesn’t realize how important expositing the Word of God really is. And someone who doesn’t have the patience to give the best (or at least his best) to the people of God, doesn’t have one of the most critical features all pastors should have: patience.

As an alternative to learning the original languages, mainstream evangelical preachers pretend they know the original languages. They get enough knowledge to the point where they can use a dictionary/lexicon and impress the congregation with new words. This can sheepishly make people think “Wow, he knows Greek! He can’t be wrong about anything!” Of course, that assertion is false. And in fact, a great portion of appeals to the original languages are useless. For example, I heard one pastor say “covet comes from a Greek word that means ‘to wish for earnestly,’ or ‘to desire,’” – as if this standard dictionary definition somehow adds to the sermon, the context, or the issue being spoken about at all. Giving the definition of a Greek word when its meaning is not any different than its ordinary English definition (in translation) is pointless. What’s the difference between saying “the meaning of this Greek word theos means ‘God’” and “the English translation of ‘God’ means God,”? Nothing. Granted, some members of the congregation are now impressed, thinking that the pastor did his homework. But in reality he merely waste 30 seconds of precious time in front of God’s people. The point is, where a good translation is sufficient, a good translation is sufficient. Real scholarship and exposition brings ideas to the table that the translation doesn’t capture, and the preacher/expositor shows why that happens and why it is significant.

3. Expecting a Certain Response, and Becoming More Dramatic When it Doesn’t Happen

Pastors should never come to the pulpit looking for certain reactions to what they say. The Word of God, when preached, affects the flock in different ways. As such, people react differently, and that is not for us to determine. Preaching is not about emotional stimulation (i.e. Joel Osteen) or psychological manipulation (i.e. Charles Finney). If pastors truly understood this, they wouldn’t change their style all of a sudden and start speaking louder and waving their arms more and walking faster when they notice people aren’t aweing or “amening” or “hmming” like they thought the audience would. Granted, there is a dynamic interaction between the speaker and listener. But we do not know how words will affect people; the Spirit must always speak before man speaks.

4. Talking Too Much in Fear of Irrelevancy

One of the greatest “pulpit crimes” is talking too much, fearing that the biblical text isn’t relevant for today. That is, “This biblical story is really obscure; the people will never understand it if I were just to read it, so I’m going to re-create it in my own language and apply it and apply it and talk it to death.” This is unnecessary. The Word of God speaks to His people in ways that A. we may not always understand; B. ways that we could not understand; C. ways that we may never understand. A substantial portion of the entire sermon should be just reading the Word of God out loud in front of the assembly (actually, large portions of the Bible were originally meant to be read in this way).

This error of talking more and more forges a difference between the message of the Word and the message of the preacher.  This should never occur.  How does this happen? From pastoral distrust. The pastor does not trust that the Word of God when read plainly can be powerful and relevant by itself. No text can be understood, it is assumed, apart from external, direct, and intentional contextualized “application.”

However, it should be clear that the expositor of the Word should naturally have the most trust and faith in it, just as it is written. But for the mainstream evangelical preacher, the meaning and power of the Word comes from him and not inherently from the Scriptures. It was for this reason (among others) Luther reformed the church; Luther was tired of watching the laypeople be told they couldn’t possibly understand the word of God without the clergy.  It is ironic, then, that mainstream evangelicals, while preaching under the general label of Protestantism, undermine one of its most basic principles: the Word of God is by itself powerful, relevant, and speaks to the heart of the Christian. In summary, application is important, but it is part and parcel of the message of the Scripture, a unified whole where the Spirit speaks through the minister. Application is not a separate, autonomous, or more powerful entity.

5. Eisegesis – Reading an Idea into the Text that Is Foreign in the Text

An even more heinous crime is eisegesis. If the primary task of the preacher is essentially to let God speak in His Word, then there is nothing more dishonoring than for a pastor to muffle the voice of God. Exegesis is reading out of the text what it has to say. It does whatever is necessary to find out the original context of the writing so as not to mistake its original purpose, intention, and meaning.

Eisegesis, however, is inserting ideas that are entirely foreign from the original writing. This can happen unintentionally through the lack of preparation and familiarity. Or it can happen intentionally through a pre-disposed agenda on what a particular passage must mean. In both cases, the preacher essentially puts a sock in the mouth of God. He is the polar opposite of what a preacher should be; he dims, not illuminates; he distorts, not clarifies. He puts a lens on the text, instead of letting the Word of God put a lens on his eyes and everyone else’s.

6. Not Preaching the Whole Counsel of the Word

I know a pastor who for years preached from nothing more than the book of James. How harmful this was to the church! If, by distrust, a preacher doesn’t eisegete the text and insert his own ideas, then he will probably end up skipping over verses that he prefers not to read or does not understand. In John MacArthur’s words, “Christians do not know how to interpret and share the hard words of Jesus, so they skip over them. But delivering half the message is almost worst as delivering no message at all. It’s not up to us to decide what we’ll pass on and what we’ll try to hide…The idea is to make Christianity easy to believe. But the unvarnished, untweaked, unmodified, unavoidable truth is that the gospel is actually hard to believe.” ^[1]

God expects His Word to be preached in its entirety. There is no ranking in the canon. We have no top-down list of importance for which books have a higher priority than others. For that reason, we ought to preach the Word of God – all of it. That means reading the entire Bible, preaching all of it, tackling and addressing what problems God and the writers bring to our hearts and minds.

What a risk this is! To be up in front of hundreds, thousands of people and come upon something in the Bible that…makes us feel uncomfortable, offended, or simply baffled! What then? The true minister of the Word will confront the text as he does any other text, and with humbleness in heart and discipline of mind, exegete the text as he is so capable. The false minister, so often manifested in today’s mainstream evangelical preaching, will avoid the texts that are offensive or simply gloss over the blunt realities of God’s wrath, judgment, and justice – not knowing what a judgment he has brought upon himself. The pastor and teacher, after all, “will incur a stricter judgment,” (James 3:1).

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[1] John MacArthur. Hard To Believe (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003), 18, 20.