Despite its alleged position as the most important part of protestant church, the Sunday morning sermon has not aged well.
Once upon a time, knowledge of our religion was harder to come by. We didn’t even have a complete bible in English until 1538, when the Cromwell Bible was published. Even then, there were only 2500 copies, and they were often literally chained down so they could not be taken from the church (earning the sardonic nickname the “Chained Bible”).
Even much later, when bibles in the common tongue were easier to find, many church attendees could not read, and those who could had no means of exegesis but staring at the passage itself. And unchecked interpretation of cryptic passages in the cold vacuum of your own brain is a recipe for really weird theology.
Even thirty years ago, it wasn’t easy to mine the bible’s depths without the help of an expert. Not many had the means or dedication to go to seminary or even track down a fat set of commentaries. It was necessary to have a local expert to help the commoners make sense of Christianity, lest in isolation they become unwitting heretics.
But things have changed. Just now, it took me exactly 30 seconds to download e-Sword, a powerful bible study tool that allows me to compare multiple translations, commentaries, concordances and bible dictionaries at a glance, for free. If I want to know virtually any piece of information, I can Google my question faster than a genius sitting beside me can think of how to word the answer. It is faster than thought. While I’m at it, I can follow a dozen links to related topics and quickly learn a hundred things I didn’t even realize I wanted to know. Anyone who’s gone through college can find ten reputable sources with their right hand before finishing their sandwich with the left.
The upshot is that the pastor has been dethroned as the spiritual expert of the village. We live in a global village now, and I can access the foremost experts in any field without even leaving my room. While in church listening to the pastor explain a passage, I could pull out a smart phone and read several alternate interpretations by better scholars. In terms of scholarly prowess and eloquence, the local pastor is a comparative nobody.
It’s not his fault, either. A pastor cannot be expected to be the authority on every biblical and ethical topic. The pastor must crank out sermons every week while upholding the numerous other duties of the pastoral office: counselor, spouse, parent, CEO. He’s doing his best—but it makes no sense that a congregation should drive somewhere to hear one man’s musings on a passage he read (and googled?) over the weekend.
Standards for sermons are low by default, because the congregation is a captive audience who probably had no idea what he was going to preach on and wasn’t expecting to learn anything in particular. Not like the internet where we ditch a mediocre source and find a better one before you can blink.
But even if your pastor is the greatest mind of our time, the sermon model still has major disadvantages. A live but non-interactive lecture doesn’t have much going for it as a learning method. A book can thoroughly develop an idea, and the reader can digest it over days or weeks, at his own pace. A podcast or video can be rewound or revisited, letting the listener make sure he misses nothing. An academic lecture has space for questions and tests to review what you’ve learned. A conversation allows a personal connection and a free-flowing exploration of what interests the learner.
A sermon offers none of these things – just a canned explanation and perhaps an emotional appeal as the speaker marches through his notes. The next sermon will likely be on a different topic, as if people can really implement a new, unrelated, lasting change in their lives every few days. If some sermons change lives, I suspect it’s in spite of the weekly sermon model rather than because of it.
Lastly, sermons rob the congregation of interaction. As one blogger put it:
“…gathering people together, only to forbid them to interact for over half their time together is a terrible waste…
Get together to worship, to fellowship, to testify, to pray for each other… all these are sound reasons for us to be getting together. So why do we spend most of our time together looking at the back of our brother’s head, being fed information we could have easily have gotten at home?”
If the sermon model is still good, it’s only for taking the first steps on the spiritual and intellectual journey that is Christianity, under a pastor with the patience to spoon-feed children. For those of us accustomed to silverware, don’t be surprised if we’re no longer opening wide for the applesauce airplane.
