David Anguish
We recently heard Alan Highers tell a story from his college days about the preaching of Gus Nichols. Able to attend only the last day of Freed-Hardeman's lectures one year, Highers chose Nichols' class on Ephesians. As he began, brother Nichols announced that they "would begin at 4." No, not chapter four, but chapter 1, verse 4. Such was the richness of his study that he had spent three lessons on just the first few verses of this wonderful epistle.
Brother Highers' reason for sharing this story was to focus on the depth of teaching and attention to plumbing the depths of the biblical text which characterized brother Nichols and others. In remarks prepared for his own series, "Christ, The Wisdom of God (1 Cor 1-2)," brother Highers wrote:
Paul's discussion about the nature of wisdom ought to tell us something about the function of preaching today. We must be careful to proclaim the wisdom of God, not our own wisdom.... More often than we would like, the lesson is based on some point the teacher would like to convey rather than the point that the text conveys. Many congregations are starving for genuine Bible proclamation. . . Nothing can take the place of communicating the word of God (in Hearing Wisdom's Voice: Proverbs at the Millennium [Freed-Hardeman University 1999 Lectures], 144-145).
His comment is just one of several we've read lately which question the desire of many for shallower lessons. We share them for your consideration.
Since 1950 the length of sermons and time allocated for preaching by the churches have been cut to 25 percent of what it was in the 1940's. Sunday morning sermons were once 50 to 60 minutes in length. Now nearly every church tells the preacher to preach for 20 to 25 minutes; very few get in as much as 30 minutes. Furthermore, in many places, the Sunday evening sermons have been cut in length, and the attendance at these services has been cut by one-third so that fewer people are hearing the message preached (Furman Kearley, "Preaching Changes Lives," Gospel Advocate, March 1999, 3).
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In one Bible class after another the diligent quest for an authoritative "book, chapter, and verse". . . has been replaced by banal discussion of books about the Bible or, worse yet, by the latest psycho-babble of everything from marriage and parenting to dieting and codependency. . . . [A]dult classes rarely rise above the level of Scripture proficiency once expected in junior high.
. . . Digging too deeply, or asking hard questions, making relevant application to our own lives seems almost forbidden. What teacher today dares demand homework, or background reading, or even critical thinking during the class time?
From top to bottom in congregation after congregation, Sunday fare is milk, not meat. Make that skim milk (F. LaGard Smith, Who Is My Brother? 52).
The point is not so much the length of sermons, or whether a class book is used as an aid for study, but what we are doing to ourselves by a shift away from lessons which challenge us with depth and personal confrontation. In the October 28, 1998 issue of the Reflector, we offered some observations on "Church Growth in Acts,"in which we noted the following:
There are at least eighteen uses of phrases like "the word of God" or the "word of the Lord" in Acts. Another six passages refer to "the word" in a way that can only mean God's word. The excitement sensed in reading through Luke's crisp account of those early days is tied to the presence of the word (Acts 4:31; 13:44). . . . "Those who were scattered went about preaching the word" (Acts 8:3, NASB; cf. 11:19). All manner of growth - whether numerical or spiritual (a distinction we make that Luke didn't) - is attributed to the presence of the word of the Lord (Acts 6:7; 12:24; 13:49; 19:10, 20).
Those who have studied the matter have told us about the rapid growth of the church during the 1940's and 50's. In view of what we find in Acts, the reason for that growth seems clear.