The 3 audiences in every congregation

One of the most challenging things I find in preaching is that you are always preaching to a mixed body. No matter how small the congregation, the people who are hearing your sermon are at different places in their relationship with Jesus Christ.

In his sermon “Scriptural Christianity,” Wesley writes about the ways that we should vary how we speak to people depending on where they are spiritually.

To the careless, to those who lay unconcerned in darkness and in the shadow of death, they thundered, “Awake thou that sleepest; arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” But to those who were already awakened out of sleep, and groaning under a sense of the wrath of God, their language was, “We have an Advocate with the Father; he is the propitiation for our sins.” Meantime, those who had believed, they provoked to love and to good works; to patient continuance in well-doing; and to abound more and more in that holiness without which no man can see the Lord. (Heb 12:14)

Wesley describes three different spiritual states: those in darkness and unconcerned that they are in darkness, those in darkness and fear and fully aware of their jeopardy, and those who believe in Christ but need encouragement to stay the course.

As three broad categories, I think these are pretty useful to the purposes of shepherding souls, but herein lies the problem.

Without turning every sermon into a monstrosity that attempts to speak to all three conditions in every sermon, you end up intentionally missing the mark with some of your hearers every Sunday. Quite often, preachers tend to focus on one of these three categories to the neglect of the others. Some preach so often as if their audience were all true believers in Christ, that you would think the are preaching works righteousness. All they seem to talk about is the work we have to do in the world as Christians. The assumption being made is that their entire congregation are actual Christians. A subset of this kind of preaching are the churches where every week is some variation of “here is how the Bible can make you a better parent, worker, spouse” or “here is how the Bible can solve this common problem we all face.”

Other preachers treat every Sunday like the last night of a revival meeting. They try as hard as they can to get sinners to the altar or the baptismal. They preach every Sunday as if the entire congregation are coming to church deeply convicted of their sins and needing to hear of the grace and pardon that Jesus offers. It is never bad to hear about that, of course, but it is the rare case when a congregation needs to hear that message every week.

I do not often hear pastors preach to the third group — the people who sleep peacefully in the mouth of the lion, unaware and uncaring that their souls are in eternal danger. I’ve certainly never heard of a pastor who preached every week as if his or her only task was to wake up the sleepers like a bugler blowing Reveille, but this might actually be the largest group sitting in the pews on most Sundays in many of our churches.

I don’t think it is possible to center your preaching each week on all three groups. I try to be conscious, however, of the existence of all three groups in the congregation, and I try to make sure that I am at times blowing the trumpet, at times calling to the altar, and at times encouraging the congregation toward greater holiness of heart and life. In recent months, I’ve been wondering if there are better ways for me to be more intentional about moving through these modes.

The only thing I am certain about is that I could do better at this than I do.

Methodism in three verses

As an exercise, I tried this morning to set down three verses that I believe are especially important to Methodism. I set a limit of three to force me to try to focus on what I thought were the most important. None of these are unique to Methodism, but I do think these three together at least capture something of the core of what animated Methodism as a movement and helped make it powerful.

1. Without holiness, no one will see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14)
2. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith (Ephesians 2:8)
3. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2)

The first statement reminds us of the central importance of holiness of heart and life to Methodism. John Wesley was convinced of the need for inward and outward holiness long before he came to understand that his sins were forgiven by grace through faith. Holiness was the first, and remained the enduring, aim of Wesley’s spiritual journey. Striving to find a way to holiness based on his own efforts occupied a good decade of his early ministry. Justification by grace through faith was such a radical experience for Wesley because he had spent so much energy trying to justify himself through good works. He was completely convinced that holiness was essential to his ultimate salvation. Remove holiness from Methodism and there is no movement that leads to Methodism in the first place.

The second statement speaks to our conviction that salvation is a gift of God (by grace) that we receive by faith. We cannot earn salvation. We only receive it. This was the realization that warmed John Wesley’s heart and caused Charles Wesley to long for a thousand tongues to sing the praise of Jesus. Without salvation by grace through faith, Methodism remains mired in the grinding misery of the pre-Aldersgate Wesley. (If you want to go deep on this, you can read my 16-part series on John Wesley’s sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation.”)

The third statement speaks of our belief that grace is freely offered to everyone in all places. The death of Christ was not only effective for a narrow subset of the human race, but it is for everyone. Jesus desires that everyone be saved. This is not quite so controversial an idea today, although you can find plenty of guys on YouTube who are still holding up the banner for TULIP Calvinism. In the era in which Methodism arose and even within early Methodism itself. however, the debate between limited and unlimited atonement was critical. I think some recognition of that needs to be part of my three verses.

Just memorizing these three verses won’t tell you everything there is to know about Methodism, not even close, but I do think that any version of the Christian faith that discards or contradicts one of these three statements is moving significantly away from Methodism and toward something else.

While these three verses to distinguish Methodism from some forms of Christianity — Calvinism, for instance, or many forms of progressive or liberal Christianity — they can be embraced by many other traditions. That is no problem from my point of view. Wesley’s intention was not to create something new, but to recapture something very old. Methodism has never sought to be anything other than old-fashioned scriptural Christianity.

This is my attempt at picking just 3 verses to get at the heart of Methodism. If you were going to try to capture the heart of Methodism with 3 verses, which would you use?

Butchers, hackers, and pastors

Two of the writers who have had a lot of influence on my understanding of the pastoral vocation are Wendell Berry and Eugene Peterson.

Berry does not write much about the church or the work of the pastor, but I find many things he writes about farming and poetry have a lot of resonance for the ways that I think about the work of the pastor. I don’t know if Berry and Peterson were aware of each other’s work, but I hear a lot of overlap in their attentiveness to the local and the particular and their rejection of consumerism and efficiency as the highest goal in the life of an organization.

In his book, The Pastor, Peterson writes about working as a young person in his dad’s butcher shop, where he learned valuable lessons that would inform his later work as a pastor.

“I learned that a beef carcass has a will of its own — it is not just inert mass of meat and gristle and bone but has character and joints, texture and grain. Carving a quarter of beef into roasts and steaks was not a matter of imposing my knife-fortified will on dumb matter but respectfully and reverently entering into the reality of the material.”

Peterson writes that his dad would use the name “hackers” for butchers who ignorantly imposed their will upon the meat. I don’t think you have to look very far in the American church to find congregations that have been subject to hackers in the pulpit. Sometimes, if they are skillful enough, hackers can impose their will so well that the congregation is remade in their image. More often, I suspect, they make a mess of things. At the same time, they grow to resent that the congregation is so resistant to their efforts. There is blood everywhere, and no one is happy with the result.

I am not denying that toxic churches exist. I’ve never personally been a part of one, but I’ve heard the stories and believe them. The existence of such churches, however, should not blind us to a much more common problem in pastoral ministry: We pastors often struggle to respectfully and reverently enter into the reality of the congregation as it exists.

The congregation as it exists is messy and full of sinners. It has a history. It has bad habits. It has dreams and longings that might not match up with the ones in our heads. It does not “get with the program.” It is full of contradictions and impossible expectations. And it is, all the same, the body of Christ.

To pastor well, you have to learn how to separate the gristle and bone from the meat. The key word there is “learn.” You don’t enter a new congregation or pastor a changing congregation with perfect understanding of it. You have to find your way and build up a feel for the strange geography and anatomy of the congregation as it exists right there in front of you. It is slow work and most pastors have to learn how to do it through trial and error.

The task is made all the more difficult because most of the time the we work alone. The apprentice butcher has more experienced and skillful butchers watching over, correcting, and teaching them. Pastors tend to be lone rangers, especially early in their calling. For the novice pastor, it is often difficult to tell the hackers from the masters of the craft when you are looking for mentors and guides, and so we tend to follow the celebrities and self-promoters instead of serving apprenticeship with a master who cares more about the work than building a following.

In short, being a pastor is difficult work and it is easy to make a mess of it. It takes every Christian virtue to do it well. It requires humility and submission to the Holy Spirit. It requires nothing less than dying to ourselves and taking up our cross each day.