But there are two reasons we probably need to reconsider that in our preaching. Number one: it doesn’t work like it once did. These aren’t in any order of priority but perhaps in order of interest for some pastors. You know, ten years ago if you put out a sermon and said we’re going to have ten ways to do blank, and it’s practical and meaningful, you’d send out mailers and unchurched people might say, “You know, I might like to go and hear that. Church has been irrelevant to me. This seems relevant. I’ll come. It will meet my needs.”
Well, the reality is that really anybody who wants to go to a cool, contemporary, cutting edge church—whatever language you want to use—anybody who wants to go to a church like that already is. The reality is that our task is now to ask the question, “How do we engage a culture that already knows that there are great, cool, exciting churches and still has rejected them?” So number one, it doesn’t work.
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But number tw it presents a picture of a Gospel that I think is probably problematic. The picture of the Gospel is that God wants you to come rather than God wants you to be, do and tell. And so it’s built on the wrong idea. Our churches, for 20 or 30 years, have revamped their services. They’re cutting edge. They’re creative. And that’s great—I’m pro all of that stuff. But at the end of 30 years we’ve spruced up the buildings and spiced up the sermons and the culture’s more lost and people who go to church are less committed. So I think ultimately we have to ask: how do we retool our preaching to teach people to live on mission, so that they see it as central to what it means to be a Christian.
Preaching: Many of our churches have identified their worship style through music, and think of themselves in generational terms. If that is a valid position to take, should it then make any difference in our preaching? Do you preach differently to a Baby Boomer generation than you do to the millennial generation?
Stetzer: Let’s take a step back philosophically. This is a big issue, and how to figure this out is not easy. We’re really the first generation in the history of Christendom where there are three generational expressions of church. You’ve got builder churches, Boomer churches and then whatever the next generation is called. People used to call them Gen X, but the only people who still use that term are pastors and seminary professors. So whatever that last generation is—the emerging, postmodern generation.
Ultimately I don’t think it is tenable or healthy that the church would be split in a tri-generational approach. But the reality is what it is. One of the reasons for that is there seems to have been a shift in the way people understand preaching. You and I can walk into a church, and we can tell if we walk into a builder church. Preaching tends to be much more of a text-based, running commentary. Maybe a Boomer church might be sermons with five points built around, hopefully, some Scriptural themes. If we went to an emerging church reaching more of a postmodern generation, then it might be narrative preaching, kind of working through and threading a stacked narrative. And so I do think that there are some shifts.
