The Context of Spiritual Formation: A Cultural Shift

There may be an impending crisis for the future of the evangelical Church in the West. The western Church is grappling with the effects of the major cultural shift in popular culture from a modernist worldview to a postmodern one. We use the term “postmodern” to describe the predominant, contemporary worldview in the West, which has arisen in the collapse of the “modern” worldview since the mid-twentieth century. As contemporary pastors, congregations, and denominations grapple with the radical impacts of postmodernism on western culture, a new generation of pastors is reinventing church life and practice. This reinvention may include a growing abandonment of the exposition of the Scriptures as a central aspect of Spiritual formation. 

Roy Clements writes, “Evidence is mounting of a growing disillusionment with expository preaching.” David Hilborn claims that expository preaching was merely a product of the modernist Enlightenment age. He writes of several “contemporary evangelical leaders who are convinced the expository age is coming to an end.” One young Christian leader told me, “I hate preaching.” He went on to say that he especially hates the performance that typically takes place in his church-going experience, wherein a pastor gets in front of his congregation, puts on his “preaching voice,” and prattles on about “religious” ideas that have little to do with the “real world” where we passionately live. This leader loves God, and he desires to personally know the Lord and his will. But he is voicing a common sentiment towards what the word “preaching” has come to mean in the postmodern age.

In contemporary western culture, the word “preaching” can have the reputation of being long, boring, and rationalistic. Doug Pagitt calls this modernist style of preaching, “speaching”. Contemporary church leaders are engaging a culture that sees little value in listening to the Scriptures presented in this manner. Hadden Robinson’s book Expository Preaching is being used today as the textbook for teaching authentic church practice “in 120 seminaries and Bible Colleges” and has recently been re-released for a new generation of Christians with the only real update being an exploration of “narrative preaching.” There is an apparent disconnect between what church leaders are being taught as important in 120 seminaries in America, and what is being perceived as important in these postmodern, emergent churches.

Dan Kimball states, “Even people’s view of preachers has changed. What once was a respectable role in society is now unfavorably stereotyped. Even the word, preach, is now a negative one.” John Stott, lamenting the decline of expository preaching, observes that in the late 20th century, the “tide of preaching ebbed, and the ebb is still low today. At least in the western world the decline of preaching is a symptom of the decline of the Church.” Stott also writes, “The prophets of doom in today’s Church are confidently predicting that the day of preaching is over. It is a dying art, they say, an outmoded form of communication, an echo from an abandoned past.” Stott, along with many others would argue that there is a fundamental approach to receiving and transmitting God’s Word, which is the essence of authentic Christian Spiritual formation and which transcends any generational context. 

The instructive Word of God has been the essential instrument of individual and corporate Spiritual formation for the entire history of the faith community of God. But, in this postmodern age, “instruction” itself is in disrepute. Biblical preaching has had a central role in the life of the Evangelical Church for centuries. During the modernist era, however, the sermon may have taken on some of the enculturation of the times, often being rationalistic, deductive, lecture oriented, propositional, authoritarian, and analytical. For some, the notion of the “sermon” (and “evangelicalism” as well) has become synonymous with the modernist paradigm, and so, they would argue, it must be abandoned, or, at least, so radically reoriented that it becomes something quite different.

Some would argue that this has had a detrimental effect on the life of the Church in the West. D.M. Lloyd-Jones writes, “Is it not clear as you take a bird’s-eye view of Church history, that the decadent periods and eras in the history of the Church have always been those periods when preaching had declined? What is it that always heralds the dawn of a Reformation or of a Revival? It is renewed preaching.”

One can also see that preaching is in crisis for the contemporary western Church when T.D. Jakes is called “America’s Best Preacher” on the cover of Time Magazine. Inside the magazine he is quoted as saying, “The rules are, Get (sic) the message over any way you can. The more tools you have, the better it is.” Unfortunately, Jakes may have more “tools” than “message.” The article includes a transcript of part of Jakes’ sermon on Genesis 1. It is encouraging that he uses a biblical text. But one can quickly see that he misuses the actual text to teach his own ideas of self-awareness and self-actualization, and even his own version of modalist heresy.

Is Jakes any kind of authentic model for Christian preaching? His passion is evident. He seems to be touching a popular nerve in his particular audience. But, if he is teaching modalism and eisogeting rather than exegeting the Scriptures, it can be argued that he is not actually communicating God’s Word. Meanwhile, 23 percent of responding subscribers of Leadership Weekly voted Jakes (tied with Chuck Swindoll) as “The number one effective preacher today.” One must ask: “effective” at what? The vital question that needs to be asked of any Christian leader, in any culture, in every generation, is: Does he effectively expose his people to the true Word of God?