This video is doing the rounds and it is too bad for me not to post. A yoof leader explains sin by playing with his pet python in his bubble bath. There is no innuendo in that sentence. He literally has a snake in the bath.
Category: Christianity
Preach the gospel without words – by the power of mime…
I had no idea, until today, that gospel mime was even a ministry category. And then two things happened. First, I discovered K&K.
Watch this amazing intro video first.
And then see them at work.
Then, somewhat serendipitously, Jesus Needs New PR featured this little video from a mime artist named Broadway.
Now. These guys might be a bit too literally into Sir Francis of Assisi. Who is famous for saying (though he probably didn’t) “Always preach the gospel, where necessary use words…”
There is a “Gospel Mime Worldwide Workshop” coming up if you’re interested.
But this is just borderline interpretive dance isn’t it?
These guys should wear these shirts when performing.
Should Christians speak out in the political process?
My answer to the question posed above is “yes”… what’s yours?
Following on from my so called “open letter” about school chaplaincy funding from last week,* I’d like to address one of the comments that made its way back to me via a third party. I won’t name names, lest I betray any confidences…
“[I] wondered if he was too hasty in ruling out involvement of Christians in public discourse in an arena like education”
This isn’t what I’m trying to do at all. I’m actually trying to open a more helpful variety of engaging with the political realm, and those in opposition to Christianity, by hearing their criticisms and concerns, and weighing them up against these five starting assumptions. I’m not advocating that Christians acquiesce to any change in the law that will bring us one step closer to the lion’s den. I don’t have a martyr complex, figuratively or literally.
I don’t know if people have followed along on any of the now quite numerous debates I’ve had online regarding a Christian stance on gay marriage. There have been a few. Here, and elsewhere, and again…
Much smarter people than I have disagreed with my position on the relationship between church and state in each of those threads. But because I tend to see my own position in overwhelming clarity, while at least imagining that I have a good grasp of my interlocutor’s arguments, I still haven’t budged.
I think I’d describe my approach to politics as revolving around five poles, or starting assumptions. Perhaps you don’t share them. But at least you’ll understand where I’m coming from.
1. Jesus is the true ruler of the world (Philippians 2). Governments are appointed by God (Romans 13). As Christians our job is to proclaim the gospel to people (Matthew 28), and live such lives among the pagans that our proclamation has some appeal (1 Peter 2).
2. While the earth is the Lord’s, and while he has established guidelines for living lives pleasing to him, and while what the Bible says is sin is sinful… We can not seek to impose Christian morality onto people who don’t have the Holy Spirit, nor should we necessarily try to do that, it is ultimately a bandaid solution if point 1 is not taken into account.
3. Separation of church and state is a good thing, that should be upheld by both church and state – for the sake of clarity on both sides.
4. The nature of a democracy is such that all members of society have equal say about how society is governed, and ultimately it means that the will of the majority will become the law of the land. All parties in a democracy have the right to speak out in favour of their positions, but from a government’s perspective, elected representatives are elected to represent their constituency not to be the puppet of special interest groups (including Christian special interest groups). Special interest groups, or organised lobby groups, aren’t necessarily a bad thing, unless their clout outweighs their supporter base through graft, corruption, or manipulation.
5. Liberal democracies are also focused on providing individual liberties – which are valuable for Christians, especially as they pertain to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of public assembly.
Given those points, if you want to speak out like Danny Naliah, Family First, Australian Christian Lobby, or even somebody more moderate – that’s great. You can’t necessarily claim to be speaking for God, or for Christians, though – you’re simply participating in the democratic process. And arguments starting with “The Bible says” or “God says” in a secular society aren’t going to get a long way when we’re increasingly not just secular, but non-religious. But you should feel free to do it. I’m not, in the words of No Doubt, saying “don’t speak” – it’s not my place to suggest that. I’d just love to see Christians thinking before they speak – about why we feel entitled to be able to impose our views on the majority.
I’d love more Christians to be entering into political discourse – even if they disagree with me, perhaps especially then. I don’t think that means starting our own party, or putting together an Australian Christian Lobby that acts just like any other self-interest group with a powerful supporters base. I’d love more Christians to join real parties (and even better, The Greens). That would be a great witness to our love for the world, and would help out with point 1 from above.
I’d especially love more Christians to be speaking out in favour of 3, recognising 2, and being wary of falling foul of point 4. Which is the approach I’m trying to advocate when it comes to both gay marriage and school chaplaincy, and indeed, politics in general.
I’m not saying “don’t say anything” – I don’t know where the notion that I was suggesting this in the chaplaincy post comes from. I’m not about acquiescence – I’d actually rather hear Christians speaking out against government handouts (which was the position I was trying to articulate) rather than just speaking out in favour of them. The truth, so far as I can figure it out, in the chaplaincy debate – is that we don’t really want the government’s money if it means compromising our position in the schools (where we enjoy the ability to teach children about Christianity). We also don’t want chaplains and religious education lumped together so they can be thrown out together. But even if both are, all is not lost. I haven’t really heard many people saying that in this debate – certainly not on Facebook.
Is it possible that our most positive witness is if we argue that God has given us all an amount of liberty (see point 5), but that we hope people use that liberty to live lives pleasing to him, through submitting to the lordship of Jesus? But if they don’t, we don’t want to force them. We don’t want to spoil the time they have on this earth. And we want the right to disagree with them, respectfully, in honouring our own beliefs and traditions.
Is there a danger of losing more than we’re bargaining for because of the way we’re so dogmatically trying to shoehorn everybody into Christian behaviour by organising lobby groups and political parties and not engaging with the world? Family First is never going to be a legitimate political force in Australia. They’re simply a mouthpiece for people who may not admit it but would like to legislate Christian values, or the Danny Naliah types.
The more we appear to be on the fringes, the more we appear to be relying on some sort of special pleading for our own personal point of view in an increasingly diverse nation, and the more we appear to be condemning other people’s exercising of liberties based on our “imaginary friend” and our “2000 year old book”, the less appealing Jesus is… why not let God, through the Holy Spirit, and the Bible, convict people of their sin, and then judge them accordingly – rather than trying to play judge, jury, and executioner ourselves (or at least legislature, judiciary, and executive…).
I’m going to spend the next few days reading through Andrew Cameron’s material (alongside K-Rudd and John Anderson’s material) from the 2005 New College Lectures on Church & State.
*Where, if you care to, you can read how I engage with a couple of atheist Facebook commenters from the platform I’ve outlined above…
Tyndale v More: Men, seasons and the KJV
Sir Thomas More was an interesting chap – lauded for his philosophical writing (like Utopia) and his ability to speak truth to power (see A Man For All Seasons).
But, on the whole, he wasn’t a nice chap. Especially so far as bible translator William Tyndale was concerned.
This piece by atheist polemicist Christopher Hitchens on the literary merit of the King James Version is fascinating (on a number of levels). Here’s a snippet:
“Until the early middle years of the 16th century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It’s a long and stirring story, and its crux is the head-to-head battle between Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale (whose name in early life, I am proud to say, was William Hychyns).
Their combat fully merits the term “fundamental.” Infuriating More, Tyndale whenever possible was loyal to the Protestant spirit by correctly translating the word ecclesia to mean “the congregation” as an autonomous body, rather than “the church” as a sacrosanct institution above human law. In English churches, state-selected priests would merely incant the liturgy. Upon hearing the words “Hoc” and “corpus” (in the “For this is my body” passage), newly literate and impatient artisans in the pews would mockingly whisper, “Hocus-pocus,” finding a tough slang term for the religious obfuscation at which they were beginning to chafe.
The cold and righteous More, backed by his “Big Brother” the Pope and leading an inner party of spies and inquisitors, watched the Channel ports for smugglers risking everything to import sheets produced by Tyndale, who was forced to do his translating and printing from exile. The rack and the rope were not stinted with dissenters, and eventually Tyndale himself was tracked down, strangled, and publicly burned.”
Tyndale’s work was a precursor to the KJV. Hitchens waxes lyrical about the literary benefits of the KJV in this article, which you should read, and be ready to quote, the next time somebody tells you that religion poisons everything.
“Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940, faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words “but if not … ” All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his sacred idol they will be flung into a “burning fiery furnace.” They made him an answer: “If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, o King. / But if not, be it known unto thee, o king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”
A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.”
Puppets sing “I can see clearly now the sin has gone”
Church concerts should be kept behind closed doors and not posted on YouTube.
Robbed of context most things performed at such events look even stupider.
Via Christian Nightmares.
A very sandy easter – incredible Easter videos drawn in sand
My very talented friend Tim, and his very talented brother, have put together these sand art Bible stories. You should get a hold of them if you’re looking for a bit of multimedia for your easter service.
Sunday: Two days after Friday – a Christian parody video
Well. Call me (and Gary) a prophet.
It’s finally here. The day song you’ve been waiting for. Sunday. Better than Friday
I must warn you, I haven’t watched this. It popped up in my feed just now, and I’m in a lecture. But I promise you it will be bad.
An open letter to my Christian Facebook Friends about School Chaplaincy
My Facebook newsfeed is jammed full of articles, cause invites and petitions suggesting that the Christian sky will fall down if I don’t voice my support for the government funding of school chaplains.
For some background – the Australian government provides some funding for schools to employ chaplains (after consultation with the P&C and support from the local community (which means churches). This funding is generous and has allowed for many chaplains to be hired around the country. In Queensland these services are generally provided through Scripture Union (SU) who are an umbrella body, and a Christian organisation. Chaplains roles are limited because they offer services to people of all faiths, beliefs, lack of faiths, etc. An atheist from Toowoomba doesn’t like that government money is going to what is arguably a religious service, that arguably enshrines Christianity as a state religion (though the legislation is all very clear that chaplains don’t have to be Christian). This is the website for the High Court Challenge. Here’s a few paragraphs from a news story from September last year:
“Mr Williams said that while the rules of the program prohibited chaplains from proselytising, the Queensland provider, the biblical literalist Scripture Union, has as its aim ”to encourage people of all ages to meet God daily through the Bible and prayer”.
”It’s absolutely, totally out of control here. You can’t prevent your children being exposed to chaplaincy,” Mr Williams said.
In Victoria, state school chaplains are employed by ACCESS Ministries, the same group that provides non-compulsory religious education. Chaplains in Victoria are better qualified than in other states, and are required to have at least one degree in teaching, theology or counselling, as well as further training in another of those fields.”
I won’t be joining said causes, signing said petitions, (though I will read the articles).
I think government funding for chaplains is actually borderline a bad thing, for a number of reasons. I wrote something along these lines back in 2006 when federal funding was first announced, and nothing I have seen since has changed my mind.
In case you’re sitting there thinking “oh no, all the chaplains I know are lovely people, and should totally keep their jobs” – I agree. Entirely. One of my best friends really is a chaplain, several other close friends are too. Chaplains, on the whole, have had an incredibly positive impact on the lives of children at school – and somebody in the school community should be doing the job they’re doing, I’m glad the people currently doing the job are Christians. I really am.
I have a couple of problems with the scaremongering going on around this issue.
1. There’s an assumption that government funding of chaplains is a good thing.
2. There’s an assumption that this money is free.
3. There’s an assumption that chaplains would disappear if the funding was pulled.
4. There’s an assumption that chaplaincy, in its present form, is good for the spread of the gospel.
I’d challenge the first three, and suggest that in the case of the third this is no axiom, but reflects the exception, not the rule (indeed, I’d say for chaplains to be spreading the gospel they’d have to be putting their federal funding and positions in danger).
It’s this kind of approach to the interaction with church and state that I think characterises much of what is wrong with the church – we assume we have some sort of entitlement to special access.
Around the same time in 2006 that I wrote that post linked above, I wrote another post, suggesting that because of Christianity’s place in Australia’s heritage we do have a place in the educational spectrum. Particularly in modern history. And I think RE is appropriate – because all students have equal access to religious instruction, and religion is a huge part of life outside of school, and I recognise that there is a spiritual aspect to one’s development as a person that is rightly addressed in an RE program.
But chaplains aren’t even allowed to teach RE. What’s the point of having a Christian voice in a school if they’re not allowed to teach Christian things?
“While exercising their roles from within a Christian framework and promoting positive Christian values, SU Qld Chaplains will be sensitive to and respectful of people who hold beliefs and values different from their own. SU Qld Chaplains will be available to all students, staff and parents within their schools, regardless of religious affiliation.” – From the SU Chaplaincy site
As is their position on what chaplains can do as part of their role…
Whilst personally modeling and owning their own faith positions or belief, chaplains avoid any implications that any one religion, denomination or other set of beliefs is advantageous or superior to any other denomination, religion or belief.
Chaplaincy programs are compatible with policies and practices that apply to delivery of any service in a multi-faith and multicultural state school community. A chaplaincy program is inclusive of and shows respect for all religious and non-religious beliefs and other stances represented in the school community. All activities and events provided within a chaplaincy program are non-discriminatory and equitably available to students of all beliefs who choose to participate.
That earlier link spells this out a little further when it comes to the subject of teaching RE…
Teachers and chaplains are not to teach religious instruction. It is not part of their work duties. However, if a chaplain or a teacher works part-time, they may choose to teach religious instruction in their own time, outside of work hours.
Accepting government money, in a nation where church and state are separate (which is a good thing), creates a relationship of dependency and shifts the power dynamic in this separation to the person giving the money (I suspect this will eventually become a problem with regards to the tax benefits churches enjoy).
The “Save Our Chaplains” campaign is making this a do or die issue for school chaplaincy (and if you disagree with me, go there and sign the pledge – this post then becomes “awareness raising” so everybody wins). I think we can all acknowledge some truth to this campaign, an overturning of the federal funding may well see a bunch of chaplains out of a job – which is not the outcome we want. But if the church, as a whole, believes chaplains are worth keeping – then we should be paying for them ourselves. It’s great that the government wants to recognise the role that these guys play – but as soon as we take their money, they take control. And suddenly there’s a bunch of truths we can’t speak. Can a chaplain, funded by the government, be known to believe that homosexuality is a sin? Can a chaplain explain to a troubled child that Jesus is the only way to God? Can we make any claim that offends any other taxpayer? I don’t know. I’m not a chaplain – but I’ve been to a couple of SU Supporters nights and noticed that it’s all about “having positive impacts on children’s lives” and “being there” – and there’s almost never a mention of God at these nights at all. I once offered to pay $100 per year for every mention of God at one of these dinners, and it didn’t cost me a cent. And this is when they’re preaching to the converted. It’s not even “Scripture Union” anymore. It’s SU. Which is one of those branding decisions that’s made when you’ve moved away from the core product but want to keep your history… SU’s aims and working principles document is still thoroughly Christian, and commendable.
The guy launching the court action against government funding seems to be a bit of a jerk. But he’s a jerk with principles that are actually based in reality – church and state are separate. And we want them to be. Because we can’t afford to have the government controlling our message – look what happens to state churches in European (especially Scandinavian) countries. For a perspective on the issue from the other side (the atheist side) of the equation read this article – it’s long, and it makes some sound points, and some points from a “religious teaching is child abuse” kind of perspective.
Figuring out how to maintain the distinction between being on school grounds teaching Christianity as part of a religious education program and government funded positions for religious workers who can’t teach religions is tricky. One of the other spin-offs of this court challenge against chaplaincy in schools, and the introduction of ethics classes in NSW, and a host of other campaigns being driven by opponents of the gospel who conflate the two into one issue, is this attack on the teaching of RE in schools, or CRE, or RI, or whatever “scripture lessons” are called in your states. This is a period of time allocated for volunteers to come into a school to preach. There’s a campaign on Facebook that wants to keep RE taught in Victorian schools, which is a cause I’d support (not least because the guy running the Facebook cause is a friend of mine).
I won’t be signing anything to keep chaplaincy in its current guise in schools. I love my chaplain friends dearly. And I’d love to continue financially supporting them in the future so that they can get into schools and preach the gospel to kids without the shackles of government funding tying them down.
That is all.
John Piper in Brisbane…
Everybody’s favourite tweed jacket wearing preacher – John Piper – is coming to Brisbane. August 25. The Brisbane Entertainment Centre. Don’t waste this opportunity. You should totally book now. I’ll be there.
Here is the page to watch, book, register, and tell your friends about.
Do it.
Who is John Piper? John Piper has written about a million books. Good books. About what he calls Christian hedonism. He is a minister and scholar in the states. He looks like this:
Pretty awesome and grandfatherly.
He runs a great website called Desiring God where you can get billions of free resources.
He seems like a lovely guy, and I’m really looking forward to being in the same room as him.
Here’s a video.
Vintage Christian Marketing: How not to a tract people to Jesus
Get it. These are “tracts”… I’ll be here all day. These are from a blog dedicated to such ethereal ephemera called Old Time Religion. They remind me that I should finally start my “bad Christian books” blog – I’ve got about thirty books on my shelf that I haven’t blogged yet, and I still haven’t finished reviewing Help Lord the Devil Made me Fat.
Jump up (over cars) for Jesus
Image Credit: Daily Telegraph
Because it’s not the proclamation of the gospel alongside a life of love that is going to win people to the gospel (not to mention the work of the Holy Spirit, and God’s sovereign will)… it’s jumping over stuff on motorbikes.
Meet The Jesus Team.
“Jumping for the King was founded by Aaron Ramsey, a Christian minister, in May 1999. In obediance (fully sic) with the great commission,
Matthew 28:18-20, JFK stages motorcycle stunt shows along with other high energy activities as a vehicle for sharing the messege of the saving grace of Jesus Christ with large numbers of people simultaneously.”
Read more about this ministry in an article in the Augusta paper, the Jesus Team’s local rag…
This is a different group – but I assume they’re similarly impressive:
Gary Millar on Preaching OT Narrative (Liveblog)
Gary Millar is back at QTC, and he’s talking us through preaching OT narrative in our preaching lecture today. He’s cool because he knows U2. Well, he knows the Edge’s parents.
Four Obstacles to preaching OT
1. Familiarity – we all think we know what the Old Testament narratives mean – because we’ve been through Sunday School and learnt about the characters and the “moral” lessons of the stories. We’re not so good with the theology of the OT narratives.
For example – Joshua 2 – what is it about?
The majority would say that it’s about the miraculous way in which God saved Rahab, which is an element of the passage – but it’s almost a footnote when compared with the disobedience and ungodliness of the spies – who when entering the promised land head straight to a prostitute, and when given an opportunity to speak about God ask “are you going to save our lives”… the main thrust of the chapter isn’t Rahab, it’s on the spies.
When we come to this narrative, and we realise people know this story, we need to remember that their main focus is going to be on Rahab – because that’s what they’ve been taught.
People already think they know what the Old Testament means.
2. Perceived irrelevance
People think the Old Testament is obscure and obsolete. The only Bible reading that ever got a round of applause at the end of it was Nehemiah chapter 3. It’s a long and boring list of insignificant names. In the context of Nehemiah it’s a crucial chapter. Some people, the nobles, thought they were above the rebuilding of the wall. It has huge implications for the book. But we read it and say “this has got nothing to do with me”… sometimes that can work well, sometimes people sit back and say “there’s no way he can connect this to us today” – which gives us an opportunity.
3. Genre – we don’t know what to do with stories
We treat all these stories like they’re one of Paul’s epistles. The problem is that often OT Narrative is one story – like the book of Ruth – not a series of messages. But when we’re preaching the narrative we break it up into pieces. Chapter 1 of Ruth becomes a story about sad women. Which has nothing to do with the point of the book, which at the end of the book is about preparing for the coming of a Messiah.
4. Time – limited time to prepare, limited time to talk
So what do you do with a story that is really long? The Samuel narrative – from Israel asking for a king, to Saul becoming king, is really long. How do we cover it all? There are two problems – we’re probably not familiar with all the details of the story – how many commentaries are you going to read? Two or three. If you engage with that many, that’s a good week. That’s ok if you’re engaging with a short pericope in the New Testament. You go to 1 Samuel 8-11, and you’ve got sixty pages to read through, and the text is huge. Simply to read it in English takes forever. Handling it from the pulpit is difficult. You could just read it. And your time would be up.
If we followed Haddon Robinson’s approach to preaching narrative, working out the characters etc, not only would we have no time to do anything but preparing our sermons, ministry wise, we’d also never see our families.
So…
Five Simple Rules for Preaching
1. Read what it says, not what you always thought it said.
Example – Daniel 1 – is really not about vegetables. They have a purpose in this story, but they aren’t the purpose. Daniel 1 is about setting up Daniel in the king’s court.
2. Learn to feel with the story
Gary quotes from this article by Roy Clements.
“In this respect we must listen humbly to the criticism that expository preaching has been too wedded to rationalistic modes of interpretation. The intention of God in Scripture is certainly to impart objective knowledge of himself but it goes far beyond that. In addition to informing the mind, God seeks to address the will and the feelings. He may wish to encourage or to warn, to praise or to challenge; he may wish to make us weep, or laugh or frown. The purpose of the imperative ‘rejoice!’ is not just to impart objective knowledge about joy but to make the reader feel joyful!
Any Bible exposition will have failed if it locates the intellectual content of the text, but neglects to communicate the emotional texture in which that content is embedded. Good exposition invites the listener to feel with the text as well as to think about it.”
Look for hints, pregnant pauses, what’s left out, the unexpected, mood markers…
You’ve got to get people into the text. Standing beside Daniel as he prays in Daniel 9. Get them to feel with Daniel. Don’t take them away from the text to make them feel by analogy. We don’t want to manipulate people. How does Daniel feel at the end of the prayer? Desparate. It’s not a model prayer, it’s Daniel’s emotional response to learning that spiritual exile doesn’t end with the physical exile.
The best way to help people to read the Bible properly is to read the Bible properly, and to preach it.
The hardest narrative books to deal with are the longest.
Understand the way stories work – Neb isn’t described as a pompous king, but the way chapter 3 of the book unfolds it’s clear that he’s pretty full of himself just by how many people he surrounds himself with in court. We don’t need subtitles in movies to spell out “this is a pompous man” (Me: we do, however, have musical cues to frame a narrative – perhaps we should put music to the passages in our heads as we work through the story…).
Remember just because something is described doesn’t mean it’s prescribed – so when Nehemiah pulls out everybody’s hair we’re not to make an ethical judgment about hair pulling, we’re to understand the frustration that is driving his actions.
3. Zoom out as far as you need to
Get the whole story – don’t make a sermon out of Joshua 1:6-9 where the young men are told to be courageous. See it as part of the broader story. We underestimate the death of Moses. Joshua’s need to be strong and courageous isn’t about entering the land, so much as dealing with his own people.
Don’t be afraid to preach really big chunks. Genesis 38-50. It’s a long story spelling out one basic principle. That God used the evil acts of Joseph’s brothers for his purposes.
Question:What would you say about drawing ethical principles from the text?
Answer: I don’t have a problem with that. Because they are there. Sometimes they are made very clear from the story. But they’re always the minor point – but we get into problems when we focus on the minor thing rather than the major flow. This is the last resort for busy preachers, minor points are better than no point…
Big picture is important. Understand the driving force behind the narrative.
Question: Isn’t there a problem of reductionism if we reduce a book to a big idea and ignore all the other bits – aren’t we ignoring divine revelation by summing everything up in a big idea and preaching it
I would say that understanding the big idea is paying attention to, and respecting revelation. Which we’ll cover in point 4.
Understand the point of the details that seem odd – like the Levitical laws – where the point might be – it’s really important to take God seriously.
4. Make sure you keep pace with the story
There’s a lot of stuff going on at the start of 2 Samuel, and then you come to 2 Samuel 7. The story has been rolling on, and then bang. You get a massive event. And then you’re back into the chronological “this happened, then this happened” rolling out of the text. We should move at the pace the story does. See how the threads of 1-6 move, preach them. Then because chapter 7 makes a big deal about one event, make it important.
5. Preach the story, not the detail
The message of the text should be the message of the sermon. Get the message of the text right, don’t bring your own agenda or favourite parts of the text into the spotlight. Daniel’s prayer life isn’t the focus of the book of Daniel, it’s about the sovereignty of God and the transition out of exile.
The story of Deborah in Judges isn’t about women in leadership. We have to make sure the main message of the talk is the main message of the narrative.
Question: How much Bible do you read on the Sunday morning?
Answer: We’ll focus on the key “jump out” section, or extracts, with somebody giving the flow of events before and afterwards.
Party like a Presbyterian
If there’s one thing Presbyterians like it’s a party.
So if you’re a Presbyterian who likes to party you should get a hold of this slightly awful Christian rap…
Here’s a promo video. This is all the sample I needed.
Thus says the beard: Women wearing pants, pyjamas, an abomination
Ladies you need to be subjective to your husband or you’re a witch.
Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger. Shoot this guy instead (though he looks armed and dangerous).