Adapted from Chapter 4 of Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna. Prior posts follow:
Introduction to Pagan Christianity
Traditions Passed Off as "Christian"
The Church Building is Pagan? - Part 1
The Church Building is Pagan? - Part 2
The Church Service is Pagan? - Part 1
The Church Service is Pagan? - Part 2
As you read this, be careful
not to read your modern-day practices back into the Scriptures.
The sermon is so central to
modern Protestant church services that the entire service is often judged by
the quality of the sermon. But, the
reality is that what we know of as today’s sermon has no root in
Scripture. Rather, it was borrowed from
pagan culture, nursed and adopted into the Christian faith. Not only that, but the sermon actually
detracts from the very purpose for which God designed the church
gathering. NOTE: There is a world of
difference between the Spirit-inspired preaching and teaching described in the
Bible and the contemporary sermon. Here
are some characteristics that make a sermon distinct:
- It is a regular, mechanical, planned, prescribed
occurrence.
- It is typically delivered by the same person
religiously.
- It is delivered to a passive audience as a
monologue.
- It has a specific structure, typically intro, 3
to 5 points and a conclusion.
Scriptural preaching and teaching has none of these characteristics. The New Testament shows that the ministry of God’s Word comes from the entire church in regular gatherings. (Yes, there were special meetings where certain individuals would give messages).
The concept of the sermon was
borrowed from Greek culture and became a standard practice among believers around
the 4th century. The sermon
is rhetoric (the art of persuasive speaking).
It uses emotional appeals, physical appearance and clever language to
“sell” arguments. The early adopters of
this art were heavy theorists that didn’t necessarily practice the truths they
spoke of in their own lives. They also
typically spoke for money and wore special clothing. Perhaps the most famous of these orators was
Aristotle, who gave rhetoric the three-point speech. The Greeks considered orators to be similar
to how Americans view movie stars and professional athletes. Consequently, Greco-Roman culture developed
an insatiable appetite for hearing someone give an eloquent oration.
By the 4th
century, the pagan notion of a trained professional speaker who delivers
orations for a fee moved straight into the Christian bloodstream. And only those who were trained in it were
allowed to address the assembly. The
sermon largely replaced prophesying, open sharing and Spirit-inspired
teaching. Today, even seminaries have
courses in Greek rhetoric to teach their students how to preach. Yet, most Christians never question the
sermon’s origin or its effectiveness.
The conventional sermon
negatively impacts the church in a number of ways:
- The sermon makes the preacher the virtuoso
performer of the regular church gathering, allowing them to dominate it
week after week without interruption, questioning or correcting. Congregational participation is turned
into a group of muted spectators who watch a performance, freezing and
imprisoning the functioning of the body of Christ.
- It stalemates spiritual growth by encouraging
passivity and suffocating mutual edification. It smothers open participation and
causes the spiritual growth of God’s people to take a nosedive.
- It preserves the unbiblical clergy mentality and
creates an excessive and pathological dependence on the clergy. Everyone else is treated as second-class
Christians.
- It deprives the pastor from receiving from the
church and the church from receiving from one another.
- It doesn’t equip the saints; it de-skills
them. In their practice of
disseminating information, many preachers speak as experts on that which
they have never experienced and essentially end up giving swimming lessons
on dry land.
Greco-Roman rhetoric was
bathed in abstraction. It “involved
forms designed to entertain and display genius rather than instruct or develop
talents in others.” (Norrington, To
Preach or Not) The sermon can warm
the heart, inspire the will, and stimulate the mind. But it rarely, if ever, shows the team how to
leave the huddle. In the end, it’s a
momentary stimulant that actually intensifies the impoverishment of the
church.
Christians who have heard
sermons all their lives are typically still babes in Christ. Transformation doesn’t come through
sermons. It comes through regular
encounters with Jesus Christ. Those who
preach are called to preach Christ and not information about Him. They are called not only to reveal Him, but
show their hearers how to experience, know, follow and serve Him. The Christian family needs a restoration of
mutual exhortation and ministry. The New
Testament hinges transformation upon this.
When your pastor mounts his
pulpit wearing his clerical robes to deliver his sacred sermon, he is
unknowingly playing out the role of the ancient Greek orator. It has become so entrenched in the Christian
mind that most Bible-believing pastors and laymen fail to see that they are
affirming and perpetuating an unscriptural practice out of sheer tradition.
Consider these questions: How
can a man preach a sermon on being faithful to the Word of God while he is
preaching a sermon? How can a Christian passively sit in a pew and affirm the
priesthood of all believers when he is passively sitting in a pew? How can you claim to uphold the Protestant
doctrine of sola scriptura (“by the Scripture only”) and still support the
pulpit sermon?
People preached in the New
Testament to equip the church and to build the community by bringing people to
Christ on special occasions. But, the
normative church gathering involved every member bringing his or her portion of
Christ. (I Corinthians 14:26)
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