Cultivating Our Inner Osteen
Our Southern Baptist seminaries do a fine job of teaching students how to prepare and deliver expository sermons. The same could be said about any number of evangelical seminaries and Bible colleges. Still, I never cease to be amazed at the number of Southern Baptist pastors who refuse to explain and apply a given text of Scripture, let alone preach consecutively through a lengthy section or book of the Bible. This is true even in some of our most conservative churches. The reasons are no doubt legion, but one reason is that at least some pastors are buying into a kinder, gentler model of preaching that makes people feel good about themselves but clouds or changes the gospel of Jesus Christ. In short, some pastors are cultivating their inner Osteen.
A few weeks back Leah and I found ourselves in a hotel room in another city. It was Sunday morning, about 8:00 or 8:30, and I was preparing to preach at a Baptist church in the area. As we were getting dressed, we were channel-surfing, hunting for a television preacher we could listen to. We found Joel Osteen, whose warm smile and saccharine preaching always provides us with a warm, fuzzy and spiritually vacuous feeling. After about five minutes of Mr. Osteen, we found a Southern Baptist pastor on another channel. We were excited to find a "real preacher" to listen to instead of Mr. Osteen's Texas-fried rehashing of Harry Emerson Fosdick or Norman Vincent Peale.
The Southern Baptist pastor we listened to is well-known in SBC circles. He pastors a large church in a metropolitan area. I have watched his television ministry on a number of occasions and have heard him preach in person several times. He is a good preacher. But on this particular morning, something just didn't sound right. After five or ten minutes, Leah looked over at me and remarked, "he doesn't sound much different than Osteen, does he?" Unfortunately, I had to agree. There is no doubt in my mind that the pastor in question was simply having a bad day in the pulpit, as all preachers do sometimes. But I have heard many other Southern Baptist pastors, sometimes in large and influential churches, who consistently preach homiletical tripe that is both shallow in its content and ambiguous (or worse) in its theology.
Just recently I was in a large SBC church where I heard a sermon that was textbook Osteen. The pastor smiled. He talked a lot about hope, joy, victory and happiness. He pulled half-texts from all over the Bible to try and prove his point. It was the best internet sermon that money could buy, but it was totally devoid of the gospel. Like too many other sermons, this sermon fell into the trap (which I have written about elsewhere) of offering an invitation to respond to the gospel without actually explaining the gospel. The pastor invited people to "come to Christ," but he never explained what it means to come to Christ, what one must do to come to Christ or why one ought to come to Christ. And somewhere Mr. Osteen was grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
I'm afraid this scenario is being played out weekly in many Southern Baptist pulpits. Pastors do not make the gospel clear, and they sound more like Joel Osteen or Robert Schuller than R. G. Lee or Jerry Vines. These men believe the Bible is inerrant. These men believe in evangelism and missions. These men believe that the Christian faith has implications for the wider culture. But sometimes you would never know this by their preaching.
In our therapeutic culture where even many Christians prefer Precious Moments to the Lion of Judah it is imperative that every Southern Baptist pastor resist the urge to succumb to their inner Osteen. Mr. Osteen and his ilk will always be popular–something about scratching the ears of the spiritually-itchy. But those who buy into the power of positive thinking, the prosperity gospel, culturally-driven pragmatism or even numbers-driven revivalism will always obscure, redefine or totally ignore the gospel, no matter how big their churches may be. It is not worth losing the gospel to gain a following, even if you can do it with a Texas-sized grin on your face.
So if you are reading this post and you are a regular pastor or teacher of God's Word, don't sell out the gospel in your efforts to reach more people. Don't warm their hearts with homespun tales and topical hooey. Don't give in to your inner Osteen (or any other gospel-deficient model). Preach the whole counsel of God's Word, make the gospel of Jesus Christ clear and call upon all men to repent of their sins and trust in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.
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Great article. Recently J. Osteen spoke in our area (Raleigh, NC) and he was quoted in the local newspaper saying he would not preach on Hell because that was too negative. His, and many others, white washed gospel is incomplete. The world does need to hear the wonderful blessing that come from God but the world also need to understand the gravity of what it means to accept or reject God.
The Gospel is that Jesus saved us but we need to understand what we were saved from to have a complete understanding and appreciation of what Christ has done.
http://www.pastordennis.blog.com
Amen to that. Not to toot my own horn, but when is the last time you heard a sermon series through Isiaiah 36-39? ok, thats a definite toot.
So I have to stop telling young people that God's purpose for them is not happiness but holiness? Man, there goes my semon I was about to preach in Texas this weekend…back to the drawing board…oh wait I am goingto be in Texas, so when in Rome…
I knew Joel's dad, had a meal with him. He had been SB before moving a little away from us…and now Joel has really moved to the Q-Tip church mindset (speaking to those with itching ears). I think I will try to be more like the prophet Joel than the Tony Robbins version :-).
The night I accepted Christ as a 20 yaer-old college student God's Word made me uncomfortable. I was in my dorm room reading my bible and was convicted of my sin. Praise the Lord for the convicting power of the Holy Spirit and how He uses His Word to do just that.
I am in my 3rd year of pastoring a church in NC. Their "beloved pastor" of years gone by was here for 17 years and was a "I shouldn't talk about the wrath of God" kind of preacher. It shows. The lack of discipleship and Biblical understanding in this place is awful.
May I continue to preach God's Word in it's fullness…even the unpleasant parts!
jon-the-pastor.blogspot.com
I grew up on a farm in Kentucky and thus I know a little about cultivation - it almost always involves manure - just a thought.Â
In Christ,
Jeremy L. Green
I'm curious–there seem to me to be two different issues in discussion here, and I wonder if you see them as a single issue. On the one hand, there is a method of preaching (expository or otherwise). On the other, there is the content of preaching (the full gospel or only a portion of it). Are you disparaging Osteen's method, his content, or both? From where you sit, does his method drive his content, or does his content drive his method?
From my perspective, it is possible to preach the whole gospel using methods other than word-by-word, verse-by-verse exposition.
Daniel,
I am criticizing both his content and his message. I agree that there is more than one way to preach the gospel, but in terms of the teaching/preaching ministry of a local church, a high view of Scripture and a mandate to preach "the whole counsel of God" seem to indicate that whatever method needs to be quite heavy on exposition, even if it is not expository preaching per se. I would hasten to add, however, that there is more than one method of expository preaching; I am ultimately unconcerned with how a pastor does it, so long as he does it.
As for whether or not the method drives Mr. Osteen's content or vice versa, the honest answer is that I don't know. I am not in a position to discern another man's motives in terms of either content or message. It does seem, at least in my experience, that regardless of which tail is wagging which dog, in most cases method and message are connected. And the results are often biblically-illiterate Christians and doctrinally (and often evangelistically) soft churches.
NAFÂ Â
Thanks for the reply, Nathan. I agree that method and content can be closely connected, but I think a historically sensitive survey of Christian preaching shows that one can preach a biblically formed gospel without relying exclusively upon contemporary expository methodologies.
Your comment, "There is more than one method of expository preaching" strikes me as interesting. I have always assumed that expository preaching was equivalent to preaching word-by-word and verse-by-verse through a particular passage of Scripture. Are there methods that fall under the genre of expository without relying upon this kind of systematic exposition?
Daniel,
The short answer is that there are certain genres of Scripture, like didactic passages, that more often than not necessitate verse-by-verse, passage-by-passage exposition. There are other genres, like narrative or prophetic literature, in which the point of exposition is to explain and apply the main theme of a passage, which may or may not necessitate verse-by-verse exposition. It is also possible to do exposition on a telescopic level (as oppose to a microscopic level) and focus on large sections of Scripture (even whole books) rather than every word of every verse. Expository preaching is flexible in style, but the goal remains the same: to explain what a passage meant, what it means and what that means for us!
Thanks for your comment and question.
NAF
Thank you, Nathan.