Every time I teach preaching and worship, I require students to read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Preachers who have never engaged with Postman are woefully underprepared to preach and lead the church at worship. At one point, Postman makes a profound claim: "I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether." Whether or not you preach online or on the television -- or even in the congregation's worship space -- every preacher, at one point or another, will regularly fight against the temptation to amuse and entertain. We'll exercise extremely poor pastoral insight and use a gimmick to gain attention. Performing for the approval of attendees may attract crowds. You may fill more seats on your high attendance Sunday. But at what cost?
Here's the truth that pastors have to keep in mind: The Sunday worship gathering of the local church is not to be consumed by parishioners, but completed by them. This is why those who lead a Sunday service are wise to encourage the active participation of church attendees in any number of ways: Adopting various bodily postures, greeting one another, saying amen, singing hymns, and others. These practices are important not because they're somehow holy or righteous, but because they discourage consumption and encourage participation.
Entertainment invades every part of our lives -- often in ways we don't even notice. It shapes the way our lives seem centered around amusement. Pastors who give in to the temptation to gimmickery have sold the preaching birthright for a porridge of popularity. Because the purpose of preaching is to edify and equip the people of God for the work of God in the world. And much to dismay of the popular culture, faithfulness to that purpose can appear, well, boring. God himself is full of wonder and is exciting, but the daily grind of following Jesus isn't actually all that exciting. If, in an effort to make it so, we cave into the temptation to use gimmicks, we preachers are betraying our fundamental vocation in the church.
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| Matthias Grünewald's "Isenheim Altarpiece" (c. 1510) |
Over the years, one of my primary tasks in ministry has been to train young clergy. I regularly tell them, any practice of ministry begins in the statement of John the Baptist: "He must increase and I must decrease" (John 3.30). We should lead our congregations to find contentment in the quiet lives of faithfulness rather than in the primacy of entertainment.
Recently, I observed a local pastor dress as Jesus, with the words "King of Kings" and "Lord of Lords" emblazoned on his legs, ride atop of a white horse, on his church's "high attendance Sunday". It's an exercise in poor pastoral judgment to dress as Jesus and attempt to preach using the text of Revelation 18. The optics alone are bad. But they certainly grab the attention of church-goers, who, in an age of entertainment, see the spectacle as gripping and wild. That alone was bad. But the sermon became worse. At several points, this young (likely unseasoned and untutored) pastor confused America for the church. He used the phrase "make America great again" and took the mantle of a Christian Nationalist preacher. In that, he began to preach a gospel quite different from that of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. His entertainment slipped out of preaching about Jesus to preaching some synergistic "gospel" that became nothing short of blasphemous.
The kinds of blasphemy spewed by the Babylon herself in Revelation 17.
Contrast that with an experience I had as a young pastor. At one church some years ago, I was leading the Prayer of Great Thanksgiving with the congregation during Communion. As I stood at the Lord's Table, the cross was literally in front of me (I'm a short guy, so everything about me was obscured by the cross.) Some in the congregation complained afterward. "We couldn't see you for the cross", they said. My reply: "Good! That's how it should be." I would, after all, rather they see Jesus, who is far more interesting, than to see myself. "My sin is ever before me", as David put it (Psalm 51.3), so I know that dressing up like Jesus is the least likely and most unfaithful thing for me to do (it's really nothing short of blasphemy), so I'd rather, like John the Baptist, just point to Jesus. That, after all, is what we preachers do.
In leading a worship service centered on himself, the local pastor caved too much in favor of the Babylonian entertainment in which the congregation was consumed by what they saw, rather than assisting them to complete that worship. Postman was right -- this kind of preaching is a different religion altogether. It's not the "demanding and serious" religion of following Jesus. It's performing in order to increase numbers.
Preaching, you see, is never a performance. It's the preacher's getting out of the way, so the congregation can see and hear Jesus. If it's not that, it's not Christian proclamation. It's something altogether different.