Church this morning… My attitude needs improving. As soon as I realized a student was preaching, my first thought was, “Good; I won’t need to take notes.”
Student preachers typically suffer from three problems:
- Exegetical disconnect. They have a point, and it’s not necessarily a bad one. But because they want their sermon to be biblically based, they felt obligated to find a verse to go along with their point. It doesn’t. In some cases, it’s a huge stretch to go from their point to the verse (or, if they want the illusion that their point comes from scripture, it’s a huge stretch to go from the verse to their point). In other cases, it might connect with one of the points, but they felt obligated to write a traditional three-point sermon and their other points are sloppy.
- Congregational disconnect. They have something they really want to preach on. It’s not necessarily what God’s dealing with in that particular church; but it’s the preachers’ favorite passage, or favorite sermon, or something they recently discovered from their favorite devotional. Often it’s highly theological in nature and they never bother to find a way to connect it to the congregation’s present needs.
- Spiritual disconnect. In the worst case, it’s not even something from God. It’s something that annoys the preacher, and it’s disguised as a “you’ve gotta stop sinning” sort of message that only deals with symptoms, and never the root causes of the problem. (You know—the sort of message that makes people think, “My neighbor really needed to hear that sermon.”) Root causes require the Holy Spirit’s insight, which is usually lacking from most sermons on holiness.
Whenever a student gets up to preach, I typically assume one of the three will take place. I’m typically correct. But it’s still a sucky attitude. I need to be looking for the pony, and instead I’m trying to identify which disconnect will be showing up in today’s sermon. (Today’s was number 1, with a little bit of number 3 thrown in, and there might be some number 2 if some of the ideas were taken from a certain worship song sung at the end of the service.) Note how I’ve spent all this time ranting about the disconnects instead of discussing the topic of the sermon and its relevance to my life.
Bad habits die hard.