The Posture of Listening to God's Word - Part 3

In The Meaning of Revelation, H. Richard Niebuhr points out that by “revelation,” we must mean more than just the “historic Jesus” (Barth) or the egocentric “self” (Descartes). We must mean the centrally radiating reality of a revealing, eternal God. Niebuhr wrote, "When we say revelation we point to something in the historic event more fundamental and more certain than Jesus or than self. Revelation means God, God who discloses himself to us through history as our knower, our author, our judge and our only saviour. “All revelation,” Professor Herrman writes, ‘is the self-revelation of God’ (Der Begriff der offenbarung, 1887)…it is the peculiar activity of God, the unveiling of his hiddenness, his giving of himself in communion.”  

Eugene Peterson writes that two of the greatest enemies of the Christian faith are (and always have been) moralism: “dishonoring the Son” (or legalism) and gnosticism: “dishonoring the Father” (or “spiritualism”). The third enemy that he identified was sectarianism: “dishonoring the Spirit” in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places he writes, “Gnosticism is a virus in the bloodstream of religion and keeps resurfacing every generation or so advertised as brand new, replete with a new brand name. On examination, though, it turns out to be the same old thing but with a new public relations agency”. And later, “moralism works from a base of human ability and arranges life in such a way that my good behavior will guarantee protection from punishment or disaster. Moralism works from strength, not weakness. Moralism uses God (or the revelation of God) in order not to need God any longer. Moral codes are used as stepping stones to independence from God” 

When Susan Wise Bauer wrote her June 16, 1997 Christianity Today review of the two new books on the life of King David by Eugene Peterson (Leap Over A Wall: Earthy Spirituality for Everyday Christians, San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997) and Chuck Swindoll (David: A Man of Passion and Destiny, Waco, TX: Word Books Publishers, 1997), she made note that the major difference between the two books was that Peterson took the story of David seriously as Scriptural narrative, while Swindoll reduced the story (and the Scriptures) to a set of moralisms. She writes, “topology creeps into Swindoll’s stories: David’s life is a series of moral lessons...to flatten story into principle takes away a vital dimension of revelation.”

The Posture of Listening to God's Word - Part 2

God has shown himself to be a God of revelation. This does not mean that he has revealed all knowledge, but merely that he has chosen to initiate the revelation of his nature and his will himself, by initiating revelatory speech. God initiates and his people respond. God speaks; his people listen. As Alister McGrath points out, “Revelation” does not mean merely the transmission of a body of knowledge, but the personal self-disclosure of God within history. God has taken the initiative through a process of self-disclosure, which reaches its climax and fulfillment in the history of Jesus of Nazareth.

God’s self-revelation is his Word. His Word created everything. His Word came to his chosen people, through his chosen leaders. His Word to and through his chosen prophets was recorded and regarded as Scripture. Later, his Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. This Word was witnessed and proclaimed by the apostles. The people of God are the people who come together to listen to the Word of God. God’s Word defines them. It draws God’s people into relationship with him. As Eugene Peterson writes, "The very essence of “word” is personal. It is the means by which what is within one person is shared with another person. Words link spirits...when a word is spoken and heard, it joins speaker and hearer into a whole relationship...The intent of revelation is not to inform us about God but to involve us in God."

The primary role of the Christian leader, then, ought to be to lead people to pay attention to God’s initiating revelatory speech. The leader must position God’s people to a place and posture of receiving God’s Word. Paul Barnett points out that the role of God’s leader is often described as that of a “shepherd” who leads God’s flock (Num. 27:15-18, 2 Sam. 5:1-4, Jer. 3:15, 23:4, Jer. 50:6-7, Eze. 34:23, Zec. 10:2-3, Jn. 21:17, Act. 20:28, 1Pet. 5:2 NIV).

            

God is not in some faraway country, to which leaders must take the flock of the people of God. Rather, he is the radiating center of all existence. God is ever present and ever revealing. The Christian leader’s task is to help people pay attention to God’s self-revelation. This is not a matter of humans initiating searches or opinions about God, but an active leading of God’s people to listen to God’s personally initiated revelation to his people and his Word. A leader does not gather God’s people to listen to his ideas about God, but to listen to God revealing himself.

            

It is essential that leaders begin by being formed themselves by listening to God’s Word through careful exegesis and study, and that they publicly direct their congregations in such a way that the Word is heard regularly and clearly. The act of preaching cannot merely be a lecture of human opinion. It must be more than a talk from a topical series on people’s perceived needs. It surely moves beyond the repetition of introductory evangelism or apologetics. It ought never to be the simplistic reciting of legalistic platitudes that uses God’s Word as merely an encyclopedia of morality. Nor ought it ever be an Ouija board-like use of Scripture for the spiritualistic practice of personal, esoteric experience. The first and most important principle must be the fundamental posture of any leader of God’s people, to see himself, above anything else, as leading God’s people to pay attention to God’s radiating revelation. God’s revelation must be set as the center of attention, rather than all of the competing human centers, which call for attention, both inside and outside the Church.

The Posture of Listening to God’s Word - Part 1

It can be demonstrated that the authentic definition and approach to the content of Christian Spiritual formation for every generation has always been shaped through the public proclamation of the texts of the Holy Scriptures. Preaching can be seen throughout the panorama of the entire story of God’s redemptive history, recorded in the Scriptures, as the greatest work of the shepherds of God’s flock. Authentic Christian preaching, in every generation, has always been the act of God’s representative messenger, paying attention to logos of God’s revealed Word and proclaiming the meaning of that Word to the people in their contemporary context. 

The leaders of Christian communities must give precedence to the text of God’s Word, and defer to it for the authority and context of their messages. They must preach the Word. They must not begin with themselves. They must read the text, exegete it, understand it, and proclaim it to their gathered audience, in their language, history, and culture. They must then apply it to their existential reality.

God wants to form us, reform us and transform us. He formed all that is. He has been reforming a people for himself through all of history. He is transforming individuals to fit them into his reformed humanity. This is a Spiritual formation, and it comes through his revealed Word. 

Guard Against Conforming

The postmodern context offers us many strange and enticing ways to substitute authentic Christian worship for entertaining, exciting, selfishly fulfilling experiences. The Church must guard against conforming to the patterns of this or any era. God does not change, and his mandate for the Church remains the same. Authentic Christian Spiritual formation comes through careful listening to and proclamation of the logos of the Word of God, in the ethos of our contemporary context, with valid pathos. Dr. Stanley Grenz died suddenly in 2005. One of his last interviews contained this answer to a question about his thoughts on the next 25 years of the Church in this postmodern setting. He said,

As I look to the future I am profoundly hopeful – not because of what I believe we will accomplish, but because of the God in whom I believe. Although the problems we face are enormous, we stand under the mandate of Jesus Christ who is the Lord of Creation. We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And, we are children of the Creator of the universe. For this reason, I am convinced that just as the gospel has gone forth with power in every era and to every generation, so also the gospel will sound forth in the postmodern context in which we live. And the God who promises to bring creation to its divinely intended goal invites us to participate in the divine program. May we, therefore, empowered by the Spirit, be faithful to the mandate Christ has entrusted to us, to the glory of God! 

One will do well to heed these words as one endeavors to be God’s faithful steward, listening to his logos – exegeting it, believing it, and living it with authentic pathos – and truly exposing it to the genuine ethos of this postmodern generation.

Dumbing Down the Story

Ralph and Gregg Lewis wrote a helpful volume called Inductive Preaching, which emphasizes the need for good storytelling in postmodern preaching. They make an excellent case for the fact that this is the essential means of faithful biblical preaching. They stress the fact that the Scriptures come to us primarily as narrative and are, therefore, story. The Bible is basically one long story; God’s story. This is his revelation of himself through his own story about himself and his personal revelation through the lives and histories of his people. The art of good storytelling is an essential skill one must master to strike authentic pathos as a proclaimer of God’s Word. Jesus primarily asked questions and told stories. The Church today tends to give answers and lectures. In this postmodern culture, there is especially a vital need for the skills of good storytelling.

One of the sensitive issues in this contemporary climate is the popular rebellion against any kind of institutional authority. If one is perceived to be a paternalistic, archaic, hierarchical, bigoted Church spokesperson, spouting dead, theoretical rhetoric, one will have a small audience of postmodern listeners. But, if one tells a story with real contemporary pathos, one will be perceived as being captivating, real, and relevant. Then one will find a waiting audience who will listen, be fed, and come to hear the truth of God’s Word.

There are some ways that one must resist a compromise with a kind of pathos that is not biblical. Marva Dawn brings her witty and insightful mind to bear on the controversial issue of worship in today’s churches in her book, A Royal “Waste” of Time. She makes a very good case for the value and necessity of historic, traditional liturgy in Christian Spiritual formation. In this postmodern setting, there is a growing interest in tradition, mystery, and sacred space. There has been a growing distrust and distaste for the sometimes antiseptic, rationalistic, deductive, and linear approach to church life that some Evangelicals have taken during the modern era. It can be argued that, after swallowing modernism completely, the evangelical Church lost a crucial sense of sacredness.

Dawn argues for a renewed sense of being the Church in its most basic purpose: worshipping God. This worship will have no other value or purpose other than to glorify the Triune God. Though there is constant temptation and pressure to make the Church’s worship do something or be something for some sake other than purely worshipping, Christians must resist this Satanic magnetic pull and refrain from using worldly trained skills to make the worship accomplish something other than “wasting” time with God.

There is a strange yet popular idea today of making worship into an evangelistic endeavor. The theory is: invite the unconverted person into a worship service, and, as he experiences the “presence of God,” he will be converted. Dawn addresses this misguided, experientially based, gnostic-like program in her other book, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down. Another troubling trend is to see worship as a means to the end of “bringing people into the presence of God.” This of course misses the biblical point that one is always in God’s presence, and again uses worship as a device to create a self-centered, subjective experience.

One more strange development in worship today is the emergence of the non-leading leader. In many postmodern churches, the musician at the front may be having his own little personal worship experience, which the congregation is invited to join in on if it knows the tune. There is very little “leadership” in this. It fits the postmodern, individualistic, private religious desires of those who want the common church experience that is a popular replacement today for authentic Christian worship. But it is not authentic pathos.

The Responsibility of Congregants

The following was written by great Presbyterian preacher Floyd Doud Shafer in an issue of Christianity Today dated March 27, 1961. It addresses the responsibility of congregants to demand nothing less than a hearing of God's Word. What congregants must do to their leader is:

Fling him into his office, tear the office sign from the door and nail on the sign “study.” Take him off all mailing lists. Lock him up with his books, his typewriter, and his Bible. Slam him down on his knees before texts and broken hearts and the flick of lives of a superficial flock and a holy God. Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God. Throw him into the ring to box with God until he learns how short his arms are. Engage him to wrestle with God all the night through. And let him come out only when he is bruised and beaten into being a blessing. Shut his mouth forever spouting remarks and stop his tongue forever tripping lightly over every nonessential. Require him to have something to say before he dares break the silence, and bend his knees in the lonesome valley of prayer. Burn his eyes with weary study. Wreck his emotional poise with worry for God. And make him exchange his pious stance for a humble walk with God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of God. Rip out his telephone. Burn up his ecclesiastical records. Put water in his fuel tank. Give him a Bible, tie him to the pulpit, and make him preach the Word of the living God. Test him, quiz him, examine him, humiliate him for his ignorance of things divine. Shame him for his good comprehension of finances, game scores, and politics. Laugh at his frustrated effort to play psychiatrist. Form a choir, raise a chant, and haunt him with it night and day “Sir, we would see Jesus.” When at long last, he dares assay the pulpit, ask him if he has a word from God. If he doesn’t, dismiss him. Tell him you can read the morning paper and digest the television commentaries and think through the day’s superficial problems and manage the community’s weary drives and bless the sordid baked potatoes, green beans add infinitum, better than he can. Command him not to come back until he’s read and re-read, written and re-written until he can stand up worn, and forlorn, and say, “Thus saith the Lord.” Break him across the board of his ill-gotten popularity. Smack him hard with his own prestige. Corner him with questions about God. Cover him with demands for celestial wisdom. And give him no escape until he’s back against the wall of the word. And sit down before him and listen to the only word he has left: God’s Word. Let him be totally ignorant of the down street gossip. But give him a chapter and order him to walk around it, camp on it, sup with it, and come at last to speak it backward and forward, until he says about it all things that ring with the truth of eternity. And when he’s burned up by the flaming word, when he’s consumed at last by the fiery grace blazing through him, and when he’s privileged to translate the truth of God to men, and finally transferred from earth to heaven, then bear him away gently and blow a muted trumpet and lay down softly, place a two-edged sword on his coffin, and raise the tune triumphant. For he was a brave soldier of the Word and ere he died he had become a man of God.

Just deliver the message!

The fundamental task of the Christian Spiritual leader has always and only been to listen to God’s Word, understand God’s meaning, and proclaim it to his contemporary community. The Christian leader is to lead his people to pay attention to God. In these last days, God is paid attention to through the text of his spoken Word, the Bible (Heb. 1:1-3). The primary call of the Christian leader, then, is to continue to exegete God’s Word and teach it to his community. John Stott points out that when the Church has neglected to execute its first duty to authentic, exegetically based, expository preaching, it has experienced its eras of decline and weakness in strength, numbers, and vitality.

                        

Imagine I had to suddenly leave my home for a foreign country without a chance to say good-bye to my family. But, before I left, I dictated a letter for my family to a friend and charged him with the task of delivering my message to my family. Suppose though, on the way to deliver this message to my family, my friend decided that what my family really needed to hear was a series of lectures on his opinions of the perfect family. He then delivered these lectures, using quotes from my letter, taken out of context, to back up his points. If I found out he had done this, I would be furious at my friend! I gave him a message for my family. His task was to deliver it to them with no embellishments or distractions. I would say, “Just deliver the message! Only ad what you need to say, to help them understand it because they weren’t there when I dictated it!” I believe God is furious over what passes for preaching in many churches. He has given a message to his family and has appointed teachers and preachers to “just deliver the message!” and to only ad what they need to ad to help God’s family understand it because they are in a new context. His message is his transformative Word. It is to be listened to, understood and obeyed. This is the fundamental task of Christian attention.

Some may assert, “Of course the content of Christian proclamation is the Scriptures. That’s obvious.” If it is obvious, why is it so often not practiced? Why do we find, in so many gatherings of God’s people, that there is so much topical, human opinion being proclaimed, while God’s plain message to his family is ignored or changed? The fundamental task of making sure God’s Word is heard, is not just the responsibility of Christian leaders. The people of God must take responsibility for their own spiritual formation. They must demand that their leaders expose them to an authentic hearing of God’s authentic message.

The Art of Christian Persuasion

In 'The Mind Changers', Em Griffin brings the lessons he learned from being on the staff of Young Life U.S.A., lessons learned from years of “earning the right to be heard” by hundreds of uninterested, cynical, pagan, American teenagers, the right to proclaim the good news of Christ. Using humor, Griffin offers Christian apologists some great points to consider. 'The Art of Christian Persuasion' is the subtitle to the book. This is the sentiment of his whole approach. One cannot force anyone to believe anything, whether through clever argument or violence. The best one can do is learn the art of loving people and the art of loving the message of Jesus Christ, and bring those two loves together in introducing friends to the friendly God. This is perceived as authentic pathos in this generation.

A helpful picture of Spiritual formation that Griffin uses throughout the book is that of candle making. In candle making, one takes the wax through the stages of becoming a candle. One must melt the wax, mold it, and wait for it to harden. Here are the steps to the art of authentic Spiritual formation, especially in the postmodern context. One must melt the hearts of those one wishes to reach, through building trust-filled relationships of love and friendship. Next, one must mold the ideas of the pre-Christian through gentle persuasion, transparent modeling of the normal Christian life, and clear presentation of the historic, biblical message. Finally, one must harden (solidify) the commitment to the new life in Christ through an ongoing discipleship relationship with the pre- and new believer. This is a very helpful book for all believers to use to grow in confidence and interest in communicating and demonstrating the good news of the Christian hope.

Evaluating the pathos

The evaluation of the logos and the ethos of the preached message are only two of the three parts of the communication of the eternal Word to one’s contemporary audience. One can rank the logos and the ethos of a message in a grid of nine options. Finally, one must also evaluate the perceived pathos of the message. This adds a third dimension to the evaluation process, enabling anyone to assign the sermon to one of twenty-seven options, as in the figure below:

The pathos of a message is the ability of the speaker to connect with his or her audience. It is the perceived authenticity of the speaker. What allows an audience to receive a message depends on the perception of the speaker as one worth listening to, one who can hold the audience’s attention. The pathos of Christian Spiritual formation is the authentic, Spirit formed conveyor of God’s logos in the contemporary ethos. The goal is to be in the one quadrant that would have the message be the authentic logos, in the authentic ethos with authentic pathos. 

Here then, is a tool to evaluate the full measure of a given message. After hearing a message, my wife, Liz and I will ask each other, "So, how was the message: logos? ethos? pathos?" Then we will rate it as high, medium or low on each dimension. The serious conveyor of God's Word must aim for the only acceptable square out of the 27 possibilities. Only that would be the proclamation of God's authentic Word to the authentic contemporary audience by an authentically reliable proclaimer. And, only that will lead to kind of authentic Spiritual formation in the lives of the hearers we want from preaching.

Some believe this contemporary generation will not accept a hearing of God's Word proclaimed. Darrell Johnson of Regent College comments, "The younger generation, in preaching, is looking for authenticity in the communicator; the communicator having something to say that they don’t hear anywhere else, and the communicator treating young people as smart and not dumbing it down and buying into the television view of a young person. I think (being) given the chance to enter into a text and engage that text is what young people are looking for, and (it) is much more powerful than the “pabulum” that they are given. And I think young people would flock to a church where, either young or old, a communicator was to do that."

Evaluating the ethos

The evaluation of the logos of Spiritual formation through the preached message is only the first of the three parts of the communication of the eternal Word to one’s contemporary audience. One can rank the logos of a message in one of three places: low, medium, or high. When one adds a second dimension of persuasive speech, one now has nine options in evaluating the preached message, as in the figure below. 

The ethos of the message is the perceived authenticity of the speaker, based on his ability to communicate in the language, culture, and history of his audience. One cannot only evaluate how well the preacher exposes the authentic logos, but also how well the preacher reaches the authentic ethos of the receptor language of his audience. One may have the very Word of God to convey, but if one is not perceived as authentic, the message is not heard. 

In this case, “ethos” is not used strictly in the sense of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. By “ethos,” Aristotle means something more akin to the English word “ethic.” The credibility of the speaker is judged on his perceived character. It is used to mean the credibility of the conveyor of the message, but “ethos” will here be used more in the sense of his ability to connect with the “ethnicity” of the audience; their language, history, and culture.

In his book, 'The Unknown God', Alister McGrath examines the task of seeing how the Christian Church can communicate the gospel to this postmodern culture. His argument is that one must discover the common ground from which to start the proclamation of the gospel, and then couch it in the terms and interests of the hearers. This is precisely what the apostle Paul does in Athens on Mars Hill in Acts 17, where McGrath takes his title. McGrath demonstrates how one can see that there is a common spiritual hunger in every person, and he uses this archetypal longing to begin his exploration of the claims of the Christian faith. He uses Plato’s classical Greek metaphor of “The Cave” and postmodern sentiment to build a case for a hearing of the Christian worldview and the particulars of the historic, biblical message. 

            

With 'Reckless Hope', authors Todd Hahn and David Verhaagen do an excellent job of describing the ethos of this generation, drawing on some statistical research as well as some anecdotal evidence. They faithfully adhere to a desire to present the authentic Christian gospel found only in the Scriptures. They also make helpful and wise suggestions when challenging the local church to put this into practice. Their three-angled paradigm for presenting the gospel today is very helpful; creation, covenant, and community can communicate the message and connect with the interests of “Busters.” They also provide an excellent discussion of the dangers of the modernist approach to the Bible that treats God’s revelation as merely a “road map” or an encyclopedia of morality. 

In his 'Homiletic', David Buttrick argues for structuring sermons in the natural way of thinking and speaking of the postmodern setting. It is the best way to structure a sermon, because it is the best way of connecting with the ethos of this generation. Buttrick takes the ethos of his audience seriously, and the logos of the Word of God seriously. Putting these two elements (audience and message) together is the task of the authentic Christian proclaimer. The committed proclaimer of God’s Word in the postmodern setting will need to understand these two elements intimately.

Evaluating the logos - Part 2

Os Guinness observes, “the only thing that is always relevant is the gospel.” Meanwhile, Chad Myers is right to warn against “reducing (the Scriptures) to morality tales for private spirituality.” Myers also writes, “Fortunately, postmodernism has exposed the fallacy of claims to either doctrinal or historic-critical objectivity.” Hopefully he does not mean what others have taken to mean that there is no such thing as “objective truth”. He hopefully means that the claim that one can reach a perfect, objective understanding of any text is a fallacy. God is objectively true. He reveals himself through his logos, the Word. This revelation comes to us as truth. It is objectively true, but received subjectively. The preacher’s task is to listen, dig, mark, learn, meditate, argue, study, memorize, obey, and then proclaim, as best he can, what it meant and what it means.

Christian preachers must be especially careful when exegeting narrative. These parts of Scripture are given to us as “stories,” but they are also the historic records of God’s revealed salvation history events; his real, historic work in the real world, not just the experience of how these stories make us feel. These are not private oracles through which individuals are meant to have their own personal religious experience. These are the corporate “stories” of the Spiritual formation of the authentic, historic faith community that worships the God who has revealed himself in and through his personally breathed-out Word. As Peter Adam writes, “Christian gospel ministry involves explaining, preaching, applying and interpreting this sufficient Word so that people may be converted and congregations may be built up in faith, godliness and usefulness.”

Another contemporary compromise with postmodern culture is the rejection of expository preaching for greater spiritualist experientialism. Some have tried to link exegetically based “expository preaching” with modernist intellectualism, in contrast with more “Spirit-led,” spontaneous, postmodern, topical messages. John Woodhouse makes a convincing argument for the absurdity of this, stressing that the reasonable and clearly exegeted text and the Spirit are inseparable. He rejects the attempt to bring a “balance” between these two extremes as heretical. He demonstrates that the illumination of the text of God’s Word is the primary work and message of the Holy Spirit. He then calls for an embracing of the authentically Christian approach to interpreting and proclaiming the Word, which involves the dynamic synergy between the Spirit of God speaking and working through the Word of God read, exegeted, and taught.

Evaluating the logos - Part 1

The logos of the message can be evaluated on whether the messenger has correctly exegeted the text. This involves interpreting the message of the passage in its original contexts. These include its historical, cultural, and literary contexts. The text of the logos was written to a particular ethos at a particular time for a particular purpose. These contexts must be understood before one can apply its meaning for the contemporary ethos. The message cannot mean what it never meant. One danger is to take the text of Scripture and apply it directly to one’s contemporary ethos, as in this figure:

This accounts for many awkward applications of texts, written for culturally sensitive occasions, being applied inappropriately in contemporary settings, such as requiring women to cover their heads in churches. Brian Hebblethwaite warns, "It is not even possible for us to mean what the writers of the Bible and the creeds meant just by saying what they said. We have to embark on the process of interpretation, in the light of our recognition both of their presuppositions and of our own, and struggle to express the truth of God and of God’s acts for our own time."

An equally dangerous approach is when a preacher begins with his own contemporary ethos and approaches the biblical text, looking for material he can take out of context to have the Bible say what he thinks his ethos needs to hear, as in this figure: 

The Big Idea of Biblical Preaching is a helpful book for applying Haddon Robinson’s excellent concept of finding the one big idea in the biblical text passage and exposing it to the listeners through preaching. But the preacher must be most careful that his “one big idea” is not in fact his own “one small idea” eisogeted into the text, nor his own rendering of God’s dynamic presence reduced to a mere moral principle or a feel-good, pop-psychology nuance. Rather, what one must do is to listen to the biblical text (the logos) and interpret what its message was to the original audience (biblical ethos) in light of its original context. Then one must take that message and contextualize it for one’s own audience (contemporary ethos), as in this figure:

Communication and contextualization

Lesslie Newbigin returned home to England after serving as an Anglican missionary bishop in India. In his book, Foolishness to the Greeks, he laments the fact that the Church has fallen into one of two traps as it has sought to engage its surrounding culture. The Church has either fallen into “indigenization,” wherein the language, history, and culture of the surrounding ethos is compromised for the sake of preserving the peculiar culture of the Church, or into “adaptation,” wherein the peculiar message of the Church is compromised for the sake of relating to the contemporary ethos of the particular culture.

The weakness of the former was that it tended to relate the Christian message to the traditional cultural forms – forms that belonged to the past and from which young people were turning away under the pervasive influence of “modernization.” The effect was to identify the gospel with the conservative elements in society. The weakness of the latter term, "adaptation", was that it implied that what the missionary brought with him was the pure gospel, which had to be adapted to the receptor culture. It tended to obscure the fact that the gospel as embodied in the missionary’s preaching and practice was already an adapted gospel, shaped by his or her own culture.

Newbigin advocated the use of the term “contextualization” to help us understand the “culture of the moment” differentiating between the message of the gospel, the context of the culture of the Christian missionary, and the context of his contemporary cultural environment. Bruce J. Nicholls describes contextualization as “the translation of the unchanging content of the gospel of the kingdom into verbal form meaningful to the peoples in their separate cultures and within their particular existential situations.”

An adaptation of Aristotle’s three parts of persuasive speech (logos, ethos, and pathos) can be used to examine the effectiveness of the preaching act. The authentic logos (the content of God’s Word) must be given in the authentic ethos (the perceived ability of the conveyor of the logos to connect with the receptor language, history, and culture of the contemporary context) with authentic pathos (the perceived authenticity, authority, and integrity of the conveyor of the message).

  

Authentic Christian Spiritual formation has always connected the logos of God to the ethos of the contemporary audience through authentic pathos. With Newbigin’s warnings, one can evaluate whether a specific Christian proclaimer has committed “indigenization,” wherein the ethos is compromised for the sake of logos, or “adaptation,” wherein the logos is compromised for the sake of ethos. Rather, one must “contextualize” the unchanging logos to the contemporary ethos and speak with authentic pathos. Bruce Nicholls describes contextualization as “the translation of the unchanging content of the gospel of the kingdom into verbal form meaningful to the peoples in their separate culture and within their particular existential situations.”

Newbigin also warns against the absorption of the logos into the ethos of the conveyor of the message. One must observe the “culture of the moment,” differentiating between the cultural context of Spiritual formation and the context of the audience’s cultural environment. One must evaluate all three dimensions of authentic communication in the act of Christian Spiritual formation in the experience of a sermon. The picture below shows a simple scale of how one might evaluate the logos of the message being preached. One can appraise whether a sermon reaches a low, medium or high standard in the exposing of the actual  meaning of the text being exposed.

Three parts of communication transmission

I believe the transmission of any message involves the tri-focus of communication: the content of the message, the context of the message, and the conveyor of the message. In On Rhetoric, Aristotle argued that there are three parts to persuasive speech: pathos, ethos, and logos. We can borrow these terms to distinguish the three unique and essential parts of effective Christian spiritual formation through proclamation. Each of these parts of persuasive speech is essential to authentic communication. I would argue that if one of these parts of a sermon is ignored, no real hearing of the Word occurs, and therefore, no real Christian formation takes place. This paradigm can also be used to evaluate any sermon to determine its effectiveness as a true communication of the authentic logos of the Word of God in the authentic ethos of the hearing audience, with the authentic pathos of Church leaders.

Who's right?

After visiting a church service with two church colleagues, we were asked by our hosts to evaluate the sermon. One colleague (an American pastor) said that it was “excellent” because the preacher spoke with such passion. The other colleague (an African pastor who was working in Canada) rated the sermon only “fair” because, though it spoke in the language, history, and culture of the group present, it would not speak to his own context. I rated the sermon as “poor” because there were far too many exegetical flaws in the interpretation of the biblical text that was preached from. Which one of us was right? We could all agree that the preacher was passionate, but the crucial question is whether the people were actually exposed to God’s revelatory and formative Word that day. These are the questions that have driven me to pursue this exploration of authentic Christian preaching (the task I have before me) in this postmodern culture (the setting I find myself in).

How will the lifelong Spiritual formation of God’s people happen?

One Sunday, I was in a youth-oriented church service where cheers greeted the announcement that there would be no sermon that night. The members of the congregation seemed pleased to have no sermon during the evening because, as one young man later told me, “sermons wreck the flow of the night.” Many of the church attendees apparently see sermons, and the instructive reading of biblical texts during a worship service, as interruptions to an authentic “experience of God’s presence.” Meanwhile, the congregation leapt to their feet to engage in loud, postmodern choruses, some of which contained messages of questionable theological content.

At best, some of the postmodern Christians at this church dutifully accept sermons as an important part of the worship service, while they engage most enthusiastically with (what they believed to be) God through the worship music. Many describe sermons and worship singing as two distinct, and even conflicting, entities. When the above-mentioned service does have sermons, they are given in the contemporary language, history, and culture of the audience, but they often lack any real depth of exegetical respect for the actual texts of Scripture.


I have been a full-time evangelist through Young Life of Canada for over twenty years; for more than a decade, I have also been working as a teaching pastor with a church plant called ‘The Place’. This is an alternative congregation of Lambrick Park Church in Victoria, British Columbia, attracting over 300 college-aged young people to a weekly Sunday-night service. This is most remarkable for a Canadian church. The purpose of Young Life is to proclaim the basic gospel message to unchurched teenagers in their contemporary language, history, and culture. The purpose of ‘The Place’ is to be a church. The Church is an ancient institution, which, like the community of Israel before it, is the community of God’s people that gathers weekly to listen to the Word of God read, sung, prayed, and preached for corporate and individual Spiritual formation.


Many teenagers have been introduced to Christ through the Young Life ministry, and have subsequently joined ‘The Place’ as their church and as a place to grow in Christ. There is a difference between evangelism to those without any church involvement and the formative nurturing of Christians within churches. Some descriptions of what churches are doing, or are being encouraged to do, in our contemporary context are more akin to Young Life evangelism than a church. If emerging churches in the West are merely outreach vehicles, then where and how will the lifelong Spiritual formation of God’s people happen?

Is there is a way of spiritual transformation that God desires, but is rarely found in His churches?

This is the subject of my unpublished book, ‘Hear the Word: Listening to the Eternal Word in the Contemporary World’. This work is a popular version of my doctoral thesis: ‘Preaching to the Postmodern Congregation’ (Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, 2006).

The book consists of six chapters. Chapter one explores the three parts of persuasive communication: pathos, ethos, and logos. In Christian spiritual transformation, this is the authentic content of the Word of God (logos), spoken in the authentic context of the hearing audience (ethos), by the authentic Church conveyors (pathos).

Chapter two is a theological reflection exploring and defining a biblical paradigm for spiritual formation through the exposition of the biblical logos that crosses cultural and generational boundaries.

Chapter three discusses the cultural shift that has taken place in the ethos of western culture, from a modernist worldview to a postmodern one, and its impact on Christian life and ministry.

In chapter four, I describe the results of an exploratory study project investigating the pathos of a representative group of ten young, emerging Church conveyors, and how they understand and practice the function of spiritual formation within the context of their postmodern congregations.

Chapter five puts it all together with nine recommendations for contemporary, western conveyors of the authentic content of God’s Word in the language, culture and history of their actual hearer’s context.

A little about James

With over 30 years of ministry experience, James Prette has a passion to help people understand the Christian Faith. Having ministered primarily with youth, he has worked hard to communicate the eternal truth of the Gospel in the continually changing context and language of contemporary culture. James grew up in Victoria, obtaining a BFA in Visual Arts from UVic. In 1985 he joined the staff of Young Life of Canada, serving in Kelowna (1985-90), Vancouver (1990-95) and Victoria (1995-present). He is currently the Regional Coordinator of Young Life in Greater Victoria, the Director of Spiritual Foundations and the Director of Staff Education and Training for Young Life of Canada. In 1995 he obtained his Masters of Divinity from Regent College and his Doctor of Ministry through Gordon Conwell Seminary in 2006. In addition to being a teaching pastor at Lambrick Park Church, James has taught courses through Regent College, Fuller Seminary and the Victoria Christian Community College. But, his favorite thing is to dialogue with real people about real issues of life and faith. His current mantra is: The Gospel is all about GRACE and TRUTH. Buy him a Starbucks coffee and he'll tell you all about it. James is ordained with the Evangelical Church Alliance and lives with his wife (Liz) and three teen aged children.