Thursday, April 10, 2008

Where's the Preaching of God's Word?

We have purposefully designed Olga's "Survey of Denominations" course to identify and evaluate various facets of present-day 'man-centered' theology and worship. One of those is the diminishing of preaching God's Word--we note the time devoted to every facet of the worship services we attend, and we note the content of every facet to determine the church's focus and emphasis.
"...the pragmatic and “seeker-sensitive” approaches to contemporary worship because they tend to diminish the proper place of preaching and replace it with quasi-spiritual forms of sheer entertainment (music, comedy, drama, and whatnot). Any trend that threatens the centrality of God’s Word in our corporate worship is a dangerous trend." ~John MacArthur (emphasis mine)

5 comments:

Shawn Abigail said...

I guess the related question is, "Where is the power in the pulpit?" Unfortunately many people assume that the preaching is powerful if it is loud, glib, funny, emotional and dogmatic.

Connie said...

shawn: You can bet we've seen and heard 'all of the above' during our "Survey" visits--just one of the many reasons we're doing this. On several occassions Olga has commented that she had a heard time 'following' the preacher--mostly because they did not stay with the text and/or interact with it.

K T Cat said...

Hi! I blog tagged you. I hope you'll play along. Check out the tag rules here.

All the best,
K T Cat

Shawn Abigail said...

Ah yes... the text is merely an anchor for me to express my own thoughts, and allows me to claim that my own thoughts are Biblical.

Connie said...

k t cat: Thanks for the tag, I'll do my best--I'm more left-brained!!! BTW, I have a black and white tuxedo cat, too!