The one thing we really need to be doing in our preaching is offering Christ, unadulterated. He came to get us. He is the King of the cosmos. He became nothing, stooped low enough to scoop even us up and lift us to the heavens. 

We’re at the confluence of a few different currents in our cultures that influence our preaching. We’re in a discipleship crisis, where many Christians don’t know the faith. The knowledge of Christianity in the wider world is diminishing, certainly younger people aren’t reacting against it they simply aren’t familiar with it. At the same time there’s this interesting rise of people, especially men, interested in church through having interacted with a constellation of intellectuals, many of whom aren’t Christians themselves.

The last one of those can be overblown; I’ve seen it called a ‘revival,’ it certainly isn’t. It’s probably quite a small phenomenon, but anecdotally lots of churches I know report one or two men interested in exploring Christianity from these beginnings. They want to take it seriously and they want to read the Bible. They seem to be most likely to turn up in more ‘liturgical’ churches, and especially those that look like churches on the outside.

At the same time, especially in the charismatic world, we’ve been making our preaching simpler and more accessible for decades now. This probably started in an effort to help those from the outside understand, compounded by the lack of training for many preachers, we’ve ended up with what I’m going to call froth. Now, this is a little unfair of me, and I’m trying to capture a few different things in one word, but by froth I mean preaching that is primarily about us rather than God, preaching that turns each passage into ‘God loves you’ (he does!) without looking at the contours of the text, preaching that ignores the difficult or more confrontational things the Bible has to say, and preaching that has little relation to the Bible at all.

It would be unfair to say all charismatic preaching is like this. It clearly isn’t. I’m not even sure I’d be accurate in saying ‘most,’ but I hope we can all agree it exists. It’s also true that other sectors of UK evangelicalism have different challenges. ‘Conservative evangelical’ circles—always a confusing name since you can be theologically conservative and evangelical without fitting in this group, it’s more a vibe than a theology, though they might dispute this—tend to have more serious preaching. Their crime is more likely to be that it’s dull, but I’m not sure I can speak to that with such knowledge.

Here’s my point: those who come into your churches who are exploring faith don’t want froth. They expect it to be weird, they certainly don’t expect to understand it easily, but they are curious. Again, I’m generalising about huge swathes of people, but unbelievers don’t want froth. Some Christians might.

Add to that our increasingly post-Christian context: Andrew Wilson argues that post-Christians have very similar questions to most Christians today. That’s because Christians live in the same cultural milieu as everyone else, and it’s because we haven’t been that well catechised, but almost whyever we find ourselves here and however much we lament it, there is a gift in the middle of it; everyone you’re preaching to has the same questions. Answer them.

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