The Gospel leads us to practical discipleship, but it doesn’t create a religion of simplistic success principles. Good preaching leads to practical application without obscuring the Gospel itself.

To gain some idea of the state of contemporary preaching, survey what is being preached at any ten successful megachurches in your state, or any ten churches who very much want to become megachurches in the future. Compare these sermons to the sermons of any group of “great preachers” of the past, or well-known expositional, exegetical preachers today.

In other words, compare Ed Young, Jr or Joel Osteen with Jonathan Edwards, Martyn Lloyd-Jones or John Piper. The differences are more than just pronounced; they are stunning. Aside from the fact that someone is talking, it can easily appear that these sermons have no similarity to one another at all.

There will be many differences. Length. Titles. Use of illustrations. Theological depth. Use of the Bible. The effect of technology. Foremost, however, among the observed differences will be the focus on “practical,” “How-to” messages in contemporary churches. Contemporary preaching, especially in the successful megachurches that are populating the western landscape, has become primarily focused on “practical,” “How to be” and “How to do” messages. [Continue reading]

Are current fears of Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity among Southern Baptists reasonable or ridiculous?

I first bumped into the charismatic renewal movement in the early 1970’s. Episcopalian friends were going to a charismatic prayer meeting at a Catholic church. Curious, I began attending, observing, and eventually participating, right down to–briefly and insincerely–speaking in tongues.

Riding home after a meeting one evening, I told my friend that “charismatic Catholics are a lot like Baptists who just got excited during revival.” I was very serious. Big red Bibles. Shouting “Amen” and “Praise the Lord!” Animated testimonies of salvation, deliverance from sin and physical healing. A determination to “witness” about Jesus to other people. Confidence that God was at work, doing the same things he did in the book of Acts. Remove the tongues and the theology of the second baptism of the Holy Spirit and this exuberant, evangelical expression of faith felt almost just like what the revivalists and evangelists tried to stir up at our church twice a year.

That was before I’d ever heard of Pat Robertson, a Southern Baptist turned charismatic, or John Osteen, a Southern Baptist who began charismatic Lakewood Church. In 1973, James Robison turned our little town upside down with a city wide crusade. I had never heard such emotionally impacting preaching or seen such demonstrations of the power of the Holy Spirit. [Continue reading]

Mark Dever is pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., a member of the Founder’s Ministries inner circle, an accomplished Puritan scholar, director and resident scholar at 9 Marks Ministries, seminary professor, author and one of my very favorite preachers to listen to anytime. Dever’s new book The Message of the New Testament: Promises Kept, is a must acquire for many IM readers.

Dever has written a unique “preacher’s introduction to the New Testament.” This isn’t scholarly, critical material; it is 27 extended and expanded “overview” sermons. Each sermon introduces a single New Testament book. (I know Dever’s material well enough to know that many of these chapters were two or three sermons, but the sermon-style is intact.) The goal is to give the interested layperson a solid, theologically driven, textually serious, thematically expounded introduction to the New Testament books. He succeeds marvelously. [Continue reading]

The Southern Baptist International Mission Board’s new guidelines for missionary appointment set the standard for meddling innovation.

Best way to get up to speed on this story is to read this piece from the Oklahoma Baptist Paper: We’re At The Crossroads.

(This post is going to discuss the current controversy regarding the IMB’s new guidelines for missionary appointment. I am, at heart, a convinced credobaptist, and I’m going to discuss baptism as a credobaptist who comes to baptism with a covenant theology framework. Fred Malone has explained that position in detail, so I would ask paedobaptist and sacramentalist commenters to please pass on commenting on the baptism portion of this post. I would prefer to engage Baptists regarding these issues. Thanks.)

The Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission board has new guidelines for missionary appointment. You can read the old guidelines, and compare them to the new guidelines, at Wade Burleson’s blog. [Continue reading]

The third in a series of posts examining the basics of good contemporary preaching.

This post is not about people whose communication skills are too poor to get the job done. If you are ignorant, or mumble or can’t get a talk organized in any sort of comprehensible way, the road for you is clear and striaght ahead: Get to work improving your skills. Take a class in communication or speech. Get mentored. These obvious problems can be addressed relatively simply if you have the humility to admit you need work.

We’re going to go a different direction. [Continue reading]

When did “emerging” get to mean something that was so clearly, definitely bad? When did we all agree that “emerging” means wrong about everything?

I thought “emerging” was an approach, a “style,” not a theological confession. According to recent posts at various self-proclaimed theological watchblogs, “emerging” equals heresy, open theology, charismatic error, liberalism, denial of the authority of scripture and registered Democratic.

I thought “emerging” was an intentional effort to do church in a way that employs a non-traditional missional approach to reaching younger people in postmodern, western culture. Now it appears to mean “everything bad you can find in a Brian Mclaren book is embraced enthusiastically by everyone with a goatee.” [Continue reading]

In an entertainment addicted, spiritually depraved culture, the Christian message will never escape the charge of being boring, so preachers should tell God’s story clearly, creatively and persuasively, but without trading the Gospel for the applause of an audience.

Today’s criticism:2. The sermon is boring.

What did we do before the word boring was invented? It must have been tough.

One of the ironies of the study of preaching is that I’m pretty sure most of the great preachers of history would have been boring to the vast majority of people who ever happened to hear them. [Continue reading]

UPDATE: Here’s My Review of End of the Spear”

Chad Allen is a homosexual activist, and an actor playing a martyred missionary and his son. Some people can’t stand it. Sounds like the outrage of the Gospel to me.

Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. The former proclaim Christ out of rivalry, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. Yes, and I will rejoice… Philippians 1:15-18 [Continue reading]

A new Internet Monk series examining the basics of good preaching by listening to common criticisms.

I’ve been preaching for…well…longer than a lot of you have been on earth. Thirty-four years ago next month I preached my first sermon, and I’ve been at it ever since. I currently preach sixteen times a month, and I love it. I figured out a long time ago that preaching was probably the one thing I do competently enough that God keeps me around.

I also listen to a lot of preaching. Part of that is a consequence of my vocation as chaplain at a Christian school with daily chapel and lots of visiting groups. Some of it is simply my own interest in preaching. I listen to everyone from Osteen to Piper to Keller to Driscoll regularly. I try to pay attention to good communicators in the pulpit from various traditions. [Continue reading]

Readers of the Boar’s Head Tavern or SBC blogs are aware that the SBC’s International Mission Board has recently decided to draw several inexplicable, extrabiblical, lines in the sand:

-Banning anyone who ever spoke in tongues from serving as a missionary.
-Making baptism in an SBC church the only recognizable form of baptism for missionary candidates.
-Attempting to remove Wade Burleson as a trustee for the crime of blogging his opinion of these actions.

I have recently blogged about the future of the SBC. I believe that the convention’s younger leaders are its only hope. The current conservative leadership is pursuing a kind of “spiritually cleansed,” elitist vision of the SBC that returns to issues- like landmarkism- the SBC had left behind almost a century ago. The common sense of men like Tom Ascol is being ignored, and the standard wise men of the new leadership are strangely silent.

SBC pastor and blogger Steve McCoy is one of the most eloquent voices among these younger leaders. Read his open letter to Southern Baptist seminarians. Read it and pass it on. McCoy is dead on target: legalism and the quelling of dissent to enforce a too-narrow vision of the denomination is a crisis that must be named and responded to.

Steve McCoy’s Letter To SBC Seminarians.

In April of last year, a well known Reformed Baptist-apologist-debater-cruise promoter announced to the world that I was “emergent.” The word was often repeated about me and the Boar’s Head Tavern fellows in general. Rumors must spread fast, because a few weeks ago an emailer in New Zealand quite familiar with the emergent church movement said that my name was frequently mentioned as a promoter of “emergent” Christianity.

Huh?

I find this fascinating for a number of reasons. First, I have little or no idea what it means to be emergent. Second, I have never been to an emergent church. Third, I have no desire to promote this thing I do not understand and have never experienced. Fourth, and most importantly, I think my views on the church would raise considerable horror among some (many?) in the circles of current ecclesiastical innovators, as my positions on “What is a real church?” put me safely in the paleo-conservative classification. [Continue reading]

People with answers for Appalachia arouse considerable suspicion from those who know the region well. A multi-millionaire standing at a microphone, explaining how his money and ideas will turn the tide, may get his picture in the paper, but I assure you the applause is less than adoring. Experience has taught Appalachians and those who know them that these hills bury idealists right beside the feudists of old.

I don’t want to even come close to such shallow egoism. I have no answers. I do have some conclusions and suggestions based on my own experiences and observations, and I offer them with every possible exception and difficulty noted. Four of them particularly excite me, and perhaps may stir your thinking and prayers as well. [Continue reading]

I want to talk about the Gospel, but first I’m going to tell some stories. Why I am telling these stories should become plain as we go along, but for those of you who might need a clue at the beginning, these stories are about the difficulty of change here in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky.

Just a few years ago, we graduated twin brothers. They were local students, and had been with us for several years. Local students often reflect the best and the worst of local culture, and these boys generally reflected the best (though they were always ready to fight over the smallest matters of perceived honor, a characteristic of mountain people.) I taught both and found both to be excellent, popular, hard-working students, making almost all “A’s.” Their mother and step-father were very involved in their educations, which is very rare in this part of the world. Both said they wanted to go on to college, and both were certainly capable. [Continue reading]

I have 2 or 3 posts about The Gospel for Appalachia that I want to share. This first one introduces the unique aspects of this region and the reasons I am here.

The past few days, most of America has been watching–or at least aware of–the tragedy of the 12 perished coal miners in the Sago coal mine in West Virginia. In the coverage, with its constant scenes of the Sago Baptist Church, interviews with pastors, friends and family members, the world has caught one of its very, very rare glimpses of the world where I live and work: the mountains of Appalachia. [Continue reading]