Christians Want Current Events, We Preach the Bible — Problem?
There’s a recent poll out from Lifeway that says this: “Four in 5 U.S. Protestant churchgoers (80%) believe a pastor must address current issues to be doing their job, according to a Lifeway Research study. Few (16%) disagree, and 4% aren’t sure.” Embedded in that definition of “current issues” is a range of topics from current elections to Supreme Court decisions to global conflict and cultural flashpoint moments.
Yet, if you come to Cross of Grace on Sundays you likely won’t find us doing a sermon series on a particular topic but instead walking through books of the Bible, methodically, passage after passage.
Is this a problem? Are we failing to serve our people by doing this?
No. And here are four reasons I think our pattern of preaching actually gets at the need Christians feel for being equipped to think well about current issues:
We believe in allowing God and His word to set the agenda in our church and lives. The last thing we want is for our culture or current headlines to determine what and how we preach. If we are to be useful and effective we must be primarily shaped by God and His Word. Christ is our Chief Shepherd (1 Peter 5) and we take our priorities and marching orders from Him and no one else.
We believe every passage is more useful in our current cultural moment than anything else. The Word of God breathed out by God and *useful* for life. The Bible is the most relevant text on human experience, life, politics, sexuality, conflict, etc. ever written because it was written by the God who made us and sees all. 2 Timothy 3:16–17 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
We believe in bold and unapologetic application of the word to our cultural moment. When the Word addresses matters in our culture, as uncomfortable or as unpopular as its words may be, we are committed to preaching them clearly and boldly. Timothy is charged to “preach the word” during a time when people will “not endure sound teaching” (2 Tim 4). So when topics like sexuality, justice, abortion, government, and gender arise we are committed to tackling them head on as the Bible does.
We believe we can create other contexts outside Sunday’s sermon for application and equipping. While the main agenda for Sunday will be set by the next passage we also want to create classes, groups, and other contexts to equip people to think biblically on a range of topics. In fact, our recent launch of COG Firepit Chats (where we talk about identity and work in episode one) is a place to do this. We want to create more. So the main direction and agenda is set through expository preaching but we want to supplement that helpfully in other places.
So is there a disconnect between people wanting their pastors to address current events and our pattern of preaching through books of the Bible? No, I don’t think so. And in fact, I think this way of doing it protects the church and sets it up to prosper long term.
Let me give one current illustration here. I’ve been pastoring at Cross of Grace here for 14 years now and one of the things I’ve learned is that I don’t have a great sense of what "current events” will ripple out for years. Some things I thought were incredible important ended up fizzling (anyone remember the “emerging church” back in the day??) . Other things that didn’t seem important at the time ended up becoming powerful cultural forces (when I studied critical theory in a dingy college classroom I never imagined it going mainstream!). I want to serve our church well but I have to admit that over the last 14 years I haven’t been able to guess very often what will be relevant 5-10 years from that day.
Yet, over those 14 years I’ve seen something else. Passages that I thought were distant and difficult to relate to for our church ended up resonating with surprising power. (Our most requested sermons and sermon series have been some of the strangest places in the Bible like 1 Cor 11 and Revelation.) I’ve also seen that as much as changes in culture there is “nothing new under the sun” as Ecclesiastes would say and human beings have temptations, needs, and challenges that cut across generations. And I’ve also seen that God’s Word just works. It goes forward in power. It changes hearts. It encourages. It confronts. And there is no irrelevant passage in Scripture.
So will we continue to preach the next passage in the Bible on Sunday? Yes. Will it be relevant to our cultural moment? Yes.
As it has been for the last 2,000 years of history. And as it will be until Christ returns.
Amen.