‘Application’ is an old word, and ‘contextualization’ and ‘philosophy of ministry’ and ‘strategic plan’ are new ones, but I think they all mean the same thing.

What makes a good sermon? It must be clearly based on the Bible. If it doesn’t, it may have a lot of practical wisdom in it, but there won’t be a connect with God’s Word and a connect with God himself. But the right application to people’s hearts and lives has to be there too. If the sermon is pointed at the wrong congregation it’s worthless or even counter-productive.

I learned that from Jay Adams many years ago. If the preacher is new in town, he said, he has six months to get to know his people. In the meantime he can preach old sermons. But after six months he has to preach to his people.

Sometimes I fantasize about going back to my home town to help plant a church there. What do they need to hear right now? Sixty years ago it was in the last dry county in Iowa, and I could have built on that: without Jesus, staying away from booze really isn’t enough. But now it has its own liquor store and the pastor of the big Presbyterian church there supports homosexual marriage and nobody minds; what would my message be today?

‘Application’ is an old word, and ‘contextualization’ and ‘philosophy of ministry’ and ‘strategic plan’ are new ones, but I think they all mean the same thing. How shall we bring the Word of God most effectively to our county or culture?

It seems that there is little unity in our PCA about this. A strategic plan adopted by a narrow margin whose ‘application’ is that people think about it, just doesn’t impress me. Was that a dozen years ago, when a bunch of us met in Atlanta to craft a PCA ‘statement of identity?’ I found that a very exciting time. But for a group of people without denominational support to do that was ‘irregular’ and it all died a quick death. We don’t seem to have moved a lot since then.

In our PCA we have a great measure of theological unity, and that’s the Lord’s great kindness to us. We think we understand the Bible God’s way and that brings us together. But what if my sermon wouldn’t really work in your church? How important is that?

The Bible is so big, and so is our Reformed faith. We think we understand more than others do. We know we are saved by the death of Christ, but also by his resurrection. We know Jesus is our priest, but our king and prophet too. The Gospel is about propitiation and justification, but about reconciliation and adoption too.

Dwight L. Moody reached out in Chicago to the lonely farm boys from Nebraska. When they went to church in the big city, no one ever invited them home to dinner, and that confused them. Moody told them about coming Home to Jesus, and said the best hymn ever written was ‘Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling,’ with the chorus, ‘Come Home, Come Home, Ye Who Are Weary Come Home.’ In theology-talk, he moved on from the opener in justification to an opener in adoption. He got to justification later, but he started somewhere else. But maybe the old way still worked back in Nebraska?

I wonder now. Our PCA is all over the place, in so many cities and towns with very different ways of looking at things. We’re all busy figuring out how to connect where we are, and maybe it’s just distracting to think about how it would work somewhere else? When I taught at Westminster Seminary, we bragged how we had students from 40 different countries and 80 different denominations. We had two grand things going for us: God’s Bible pulled us together, and we learned from each other about different ways of connecting. We were more geared to thinking than acting, but we expected our community to make a difference someday.

This would be my plan. The PCA denomination and its GA is a good gift of the Lord and we appreciate it. But why are we expecting from it help with interaction with our culture? Isn’t that much more a local or regional thing? Does Montana really look like South Carolina?

Let’s move on in that direction, not cynically but realistically. Let’s move on to talking to the other churches in our town, folks who wrestle with the same issues we do. There is The Church of Arkadelphia just as much as there was The Church of Ephesus. I think we could learn much and bring our help there too. One of my favorite students is now an MTW missionary in Latin America, where the dynamic growing church is Pentecostal. A pastor says to him, my church is growing, God is blessing, but I need more than three sermons. Can you help me, he asks? I wonder, could that sound like your town?

Let’s move on to serious learning from our Reformed University Fellowship (RUF). They are learning right now how to reach the people that are the future of the PCA. How about one presbytery meeting a year, where we hear from them everything they can teach us?

Let’s move on to the really big picture, the global one. I enjoy the World Reformed Fellowship. Can somebody volunteer to monitor the website for presbytery? There is indeed a global Reformed community, and we can learn from people all over the world.

That’s how I think we should move on. We all want the same thing, to know how to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a lost and dying world. We need to help each other do that, and we need to be creative. We can’t be weary in well-doing, and now we need to move on and get it done.
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D. Clair Davis, former Professor of Church History at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, Penn., now teaches at Redeemer Seminary in Dallas, Texas.