There
is no excuse for poor preaching. Neither is there any justification for an
unfriendly or self-righteous church. However, the reason is not what we might
think in today’s culture. Good preaching and a friendly, humble church
atmosphere are not “tools” for church growth. They are not packaging for
selling a product to a consumer base.
This
matter of packaging is more important and sinister than we want to realize. If we do realize it we also realize our vulnerability and the hypocrisy
of trying to play the game. A friend who works for a major corporation said something
like this not long ago, “Our company had a reputation for making a reliable
product. Now the name of the game is how to cut costs in production so we can
make money on the packaging.” A friend in another country described a man who
raised carrots not for the sake of selling carrots but as a means of selling
the packages which contained them. That's where the money was.
The
driving force behind good preaching is not the building up of a clientele or
the creation of a monument. The driving force is the mercy of God received by
the preacher which makes him want to express God and God’s Word in its full,
dynamic reality. His is the heart described by one who said he was “a dying man preaching to dying men."
The driving force behind a friendly and humble congregation is not to persuade
customers that they have a good product. It is, rather, the natural atmosphere
of individuals who have received God’s mercy and, with it, God’s Spirit which
creates in them a stand-on-this-hill dedication to truth, a logical attachment to each other as mercy receivers and an empathy for those
who need the same mercy even though most may not want it.
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