The Eucharist: ceremony, doctrine, and the real presence

Following up on my previous reflection on finding Christ in the church—which is to say, in the Eucharist—I want to ask four questions in this post:

1. Is every attempt at celebrating the Eucharist valid—that is, just in virtue of making the attempt?

2. If not, then what constitutes eucharistic validity?

3. What is the relationship between the ritual ceremonial features of eucharistic celebration and a given tradition’s eucharistic doctrine?

4. Is it in any way wrong—offensive, unkind, or uncharitable—to suggest that those traditions and churches that deny the real presence in their celebrations of the Eucharist are in fact correct about their own celebrations, if not about others’?

The first question is easily answered: No. That is, merely the desire to celebrate the Eucharist is not and could never be sufficient as a criterion for valid celebration. I am not aware of any Christian tradition that says so; it is ecumenical and perhaps unanimous in church history that more is required than the sheer intention to do it right. You’ve also got to, you know, do it right.

How to do it right, though? This second question raises a whole host of further questions. I like to put these questions to my ministry majors, most of whom come from non-denominational Evangelical backgrounds. They include but are not limited to:

• Who can celebrate, that is, preside at the Supper?

• Is ordination a condition of celebrating? Is baptism? Is belief in Christ?

• What elements must be used?

• What prayers, if any, must be prayed?

• What Scriptures, if any, must be read?

• What petitions, if any, must be made?

• What invocations, if any, must be uttered?

I have students who, on first blush, are willing to say that anyone may preside, any elements may be used, and no prayers or Scriptures or other ritual prescriptions are either necessary or sufficient for the meal to be validly celebrated. I know adult Christians and pastors who agree. (Above I said I knew of no Christian traditions that claimed such a thing; I know plenty of individuals who do!) Let’s say that such a position is one pole on the continuum.

The other pole is high catholic ecclesial traditions. For these, a valid Eucharist must be celebrated by a validly ordained priest—ordained, that is, by a bishop in succession from the apostles—using only precise elements (fermented wine and either leavened or unleavened bread) and following specific liturgical ritual rubrics, which require certain Scriptures, prayers, and invocations to be performed as components of a larger ritual complex, wherein symbolic deeds are just as important as the words spoken.

Naturally, a number of approaches to eucharistic celebration lie along the spectrum between these poles. You will notice, on a moment’s reflection, that the “higher” a tradition’s doctrine of what occurs in the Eucharist, the “higher” its ritual celebration of the meal. That is, the closer you are to affirming the real presence or transubstantiation, the more likely you are to seeing ordination, liturgical rubrics, and carefully orchestrated rituals as the most fitting (and, indeed, necessary) manner of celebrating the Supper. And vice versa: the further you are from affirming the real presence, the less ceremony attending your celebration of the ritual—as well as, in literal terms, the frequency with which you celebrate it, and the amount of time you set aside in public worship in order to do so.

To my third question, then, consider the following image:

This is my rough-and-ready plot graph meant to illustrate the trend I have in mind, namely, that eucharistic doctrine and ceremony are yoked together: the more of one, the more of the other; the less of one, the less of the other.

Notice that I’ve created four quadrants, and that two of them are empty. There simply aren’t large-scale Christian denominations or ecclesial traditions marked by (#1) high eucharistic ceremony wedded to low eucharistic doctrine or (#3) high eucharistic doctrine wedded to low eucharistic ceremony. It’s easy to understand why. If you believe that in this sacramental meal the living Christ, risen from the dead and reigning from heaven, is bodily present under the sign of bread and wine, then as a matter of course you will restrict its celebration to certain people (and not others), under certain conditions (and not others), by means of certain specified rituals (and not others).

On the other hand, if you believe that nothing happens to the elements—indeed, if you believe that the meal, while instituted by Jesus and important to observe, neither communicates grace to participants nor, in terms of divine action or presence, serves as the site of anything unique by comparison to other Christian practices like prayer, singing, and reading Scripture—then you will be less anxious to prescribe the who, the what, and the how of the meal’s celebration. At the outer limits, a populist form of public worship underwritten by a democratized priesthood of all believers will ultimately result in no rituals, conditions, or criteria whatsoever for the celebration of the Supper. Not only can anyone do it; they can do it whenever and wherever and however they please.

As I wrote in my first post, this is neither caricature nor slander. I’ve known people and churches that use cupcakes and soda or Cheez-its and apple juice. As I noted in the spring of 2020, the great question facing “low” churches—not all churches, mind you, for the majority of churches require at least an ordained pastor and a gathering of believers in person—was whether to encourage or discourage believers from self-administering Communion under lockdown. Alas, nearly all such congregations not only encouraged self-administration and “private celebration” (sine populo!) but presupposed without question that to do so was both possible and salutary.

For this reason, among others, my students (including the future ministers among them) take for granted that I, a layperson alone at home, streaming Sunday worship from my couch or bed, may and ought to rummage around in my pantry for plausibly suitable elements to administer to myself while the people on my laptop screen celebrate the Supper. Perhaps this strikes you as a beautiful adaptation of God’s people to the digital age, whether in extremis (under conditions of a global pandemic) or in ordinary circumstances. Either way, that is not how it strikes me, nor how it would have struck any premodern Christian, including Protestants.

Be that as it may, the point here is that “low” eucharistic doctrine underlies this “low” approach to celebration. And that doctrine teaches: nothing happens. That is, there is no eucharistic miracle, there is no consecration, there is no real presence, there is no transubstantiation. These are symbols; not less, but also not more. God instituted these symbols and therefore they are important in the life of the church. But they are not sacramental in the superstitious sense; they are not (eyes roll, hands wave) the body and blood of Christ; they are not changed. They are food and drink and remain so. Hence the relaxed approach to their observance.

We come, then, to the last of my four questions. Is it unbecoming to agree with churches that deny the real presence that their celebrations of the Lord’s Supper are merely symbolic? I do not see how it is. It is an odd sort of imposition to inform Christian traditions that explicitly reject the doctrine of eucharistic change that God, in spite of their states belief and practice, changes the elements anyway. They don’t ask him to, and they don’t believe he does it. Even if God were willing to grant their petition, surely they have to ask?

I hope my tone doesn’t sound facetious. It’s anything but. When I talk about the theology of the Eucharist with low-church folks a few things tend to occur, usually in conjunction:

1. General reaffirmed agreement about the propriety of “low” eucharistic ceremony, i.e., approval of few or no restrictions on who can celebrate or how.

2. General openness toward a “higher” view of eucharistic doctrine, up to and including a full-bore Lutheran or Orthodox or Catholic view of the real presence. (John 6 all by itself does a lot of work here.)

3. A wary sense of unease or offense at the notion that #1 and #2 don’t or can’t go together, especially the implication (logically entailed) that churches whose teaching and practice overtly repudiate the real presence do not enjoy the real presence in their eucharistic celebrations.

4. A vague and sometimes debilitating anxiety that a believer in quadrant #4 who wants the real presence may need to join a tradition in quadrant #2 to find it.

To be clear, the first two of these come joined at the hip, and then the next two become options at a kind of ecclesial-spiritual-doctrinal fork in the road. Because the fourth option is so existentially threatening, the third is more common; but then, most people, being honest with themselves, can admit the discrepancy that lies at its heart. Which leaves them stuck if number four is a nonstarter.

The upshot of all this, for my purposes in this post, is fourfold.

First, not everyone believes in the real presence. It is therefore not an unkindness, either from a “low” or from a “high” perspective, to suggest that (at a minimum) certain attempts at celebrating the Lord’s Supper do not enjoy or realize the real presence. Once, years ago, I was attending a church in which the Supper was being celebrated. Something was said about the body and blood of Christ. A child near me (not mine) asked a minister near him whether the bread and cup really were Jesus’s body and blood. She laughed and told him, “No, it’s just crackers and grape juice.”

(Old Flannery is turning over in her grave.)

Second, doctrine and practice go together. Both theologically and practically, “high” doctrine (=real presence) requires “high” ceremony (=ordination, rubrics, prayers, etc.). Likewise “low” doctrine always and everywhere involves “low” ceremony. This is a matter of description and prescription alike: the one because the other. Christian division makes the connection here crystal clear; no one is in disagreement about the meta-point, only about which quadrant is the right one.

Third, low-church traditions cannot bootstrap themselves into “high” eucharistic doctrine. It can’t be done. To move from memorialism to real presence necessitates massive doctrinal, liturgical, pastoral, and ecclesiological transformation: in effect, a comprehensive reversal of the many Christian revolutions initiated in the sixteenth century. To do so would mean moving wholesale from quadrant #4 to quadrant #2. But that would be to “revert” from low to high, from biblicist to confessional, from congregationalist to episcopal, from evangelical to catholic. It would be to change traditions. Traditions don’t change in that way, though. Either they die or they (their members) join some other, preexisting tradition. There’s no third way here.

Fourth, subjective desire alone cannot change the elements. I’ve known more than a few folks, whether friends or students, who accept what I’ve laid out here yet who remain dissatisfied—stuck in the third “option” I outlined above. What they resolve to do is cut the Gordian knot through sheer force of will. That is, they choose to believe, in spite of their church’s teaching and practice, that the elements of the Supper in which they partake are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Even though no rituals are observed, even though relevant prayers are not offered, even though anyone at all might be presiding, even though the person presiding might say out loud that these are nothing more than symbols—nevertheless, the individual in question chooses to believe that, at least for him or her, the elements have been consecrated; that they communicate grace; that in them Christ himself is really and truly present: body, blood, soul, divinity.

There is a grave irony in this posture, understandable though it may be at the emotional level. It is a kind of private magic. It turns the old Protestant accusation against the Mass (“hocus pocus,” hoc est corpus meum) on its head. I alone, in the confines of my own skull, have the power, through nothing but mental intention, to make (an attempt at observing) the Lord’s Supper into a valid celebration of the blessed sacrament of Christ’s real presence—at least for me, the individual communicant.

Surely I am not alone in wanting to avoid this posture at all costs. No such power exists. Either God in Christ instituted the Eucharist to be the perpetual sacrament of his real presence, his body and blood, or he did not. Either the meal rightly celebrated makes Christ available in that way or it does not. Either we celebrate it accordingly or we do not.

Regardless of one’s answer (or the answer), as the illustration earlier showed, there really isn’t a middle ground. The church is the locus of this marriage of doctrine and practice, not the individual. Which is why, in my original post, I framed the whole matter with a single question phrased in two ways: Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the Eucharist? Each of which turns out to be synonymous and therefore convertible with a third question that, for so many pilgrims of faith, governs both: Where can I find the church, the body and bride of Christ?

As I insisted there, so I repeat now: It’s a worthwhile question, one of the most important you can ever ask in this life. Even in the confusions of ecclesial division and brokenness, it’s worth pursuing with the utmost seriousness.

Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the Eucharist?

I take these two questions to be (a) the most urgent theological questions one can ask and (b) synonymous. They came to mind as I read Jeff Reimer’s essay published in Comment last year, titled “How Not to Be a Schismatic.”

That was more than eight months ago, and for eight months I’ve been working up the nerve to read the essay. I expected it to be painful, and it was. It was like looking in a mirror. I knew Jeff’s wilderness wanderings would be similar to my own, and I frankly didn’t want to put myself through the ringer.

I did, though, and the first thing to say is that the essay is beautiful. I can’t wait to assign it to students and share it with friends. It puts into words so much that so many people I know have gone through or are currently going through. It’s a melancholy story of genuine spiritual suffering, even if he wouldn’t want to put it that way. It is a special kind of mental and emotional torture not to know where you are meant to be and to feel ecclesially homeless as a result.

The essay is also self-critical and mordantly funny; the opening bit is pitch perfect. How many young (now approaching middle age) men with a dash of theological education does Jeff speak for? Sometimes it feels like most of us, though I know that can’t be true.

Here’s the one and only critical or unpersuaded question I want to put to the essay, sourced in the one and only unsatisfied reaction I had to it.

Jeff and I agree about the blessed sacrament. The Eucharist not only communicates grace to the baptized, it is the fount and apex of the faith. It is the heart of the liturgy. It is where Christ meets us, body and soul, in the flesh and blood of his real presence.

Jeff’s journey, like so many others, was about “finding the right church.” He ended up arriving at an uncomfortable Protestant position: in this life, there is no “right” church to find; that’s a matter of hope for the next life. So he comes round full circle, remaining in an evangelical Protestant congregation/tradition because, in the end, he just wants Jesus, and he can’t expect a historical institution run by human beings to be perfect.

Jeff is right to want Jesus. The question is where to find him. And the turn in the final part of the essay seems to me to beg the relevant question. This question is put one of two ways, as the title of this post has it: Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the sacrament of his body and blood? No Christian believes the answer is “anywhere you want.” Jeff doesn’t think that, nor do I. The answer also can’t be “wherever people say they have Jesus.” There are communities that truly believe they are a church but aren’t. Indeed, and by the same token, there are communities that sincerely mean to celebrate the Lord’s Supper but fail to do so.

Don’t suppose that I’m representing either sectarian or Catholic views here. This is a matter of ecumenical consensus. Ask yourself: What constitutes a faithful or successful celebration of the Eucharist? Are there any minimum conditions to be met? If there are—and it should go without saying that there are—I can point you to communities that call themselves churches that fail to meet them. Communities that celebrate without wine, or without unleavened bread, or without bread at all, or without any thought at all about the elements, or without an ordained celebrant, or without prayers, or without Scriptures, or without any ritual component whatsoever. Convert the disjunctives to conjunctions: I know of a mainstream church that invited an unbaptized non-Christian to “lead” the Supper. I’ve been present for one in which the name of Jesus wasn’t spoken, the cross went unmentioned, Scripture wasn’t read, and no prayer was offered. In all of these occasions, it hardly needs adding, the notion of the real presence was and is explicitly rejected, even laughed at and mocked.

Am I really supposed to believe that a “cupcake and Mountain Dew” Lord’s Supper, administered by oneself to oneself while home alone streaming Hillsong, is the genuine article? The question answers itself. There are failed attempts at Holy Communion. There are false churches. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

I know that Jeff agrees with me on this. But I find that most of us—friends, colleagues, pastors, theologians—need the reminder. To say “I’ll stay where I am, because all I want is Jesus, to be fed by his body and blood” is already to presume that Jesus can be found “where I am” and that “his body and blood” are there with him, too. But for many, perhaps most, wayfarers today, that is the very question they are wondering: they don’t know the answer prior to investigating it. They aren’t trying to find the perfect church or even the “one true” church to the exclusion of all others. They just want Jesus. They therefore want to be confident that the meal they are joining is in fact the Eucharist, not a failed attempt—and since we’ve established that attempting the meal is not the same as successfully celebrating it, this is a legitimate desire that should not only be affirmed but should be able, in principle, to be fulfilled. Not with eschatological rest, but with a lack of simmering anxiety, a measure of peace that puts one’s pestering worries to bed for good.

In other words, the ecclesial journey narrated by Jeff is not an integralist fever dream, not limited to shouting commenters on Protestant apologists’ YouTube videos or to Orthodox theo bros convinced that Saint Luke was the first iconographer. Nor is it the purview merely of guys like us, theologically trained eggheads and liturgical devotees. It’s the journey of every single Christian on earth. Not to find the heavenly Jerusalem here below. Not to rest serenely in the arms of Mother Church, spotless and faultless and utterly pure and benign in all her ministrations and dogmas. Jeff is right to spurn such quests as bound to result in failure, denial, or a schismatic, sectarian spirit—wherever one lands.

No, the proper and faithful quest is to find, in one’s actual neighborhood or town, a gathering of the living body of the living Christ. You can’t have one without the other; you must have both. And since there are plenty of dead ecclesial bodies around pretending to a vitality they lack—corpses posing as Christ’s body when they have no life in them—the quest is at once necessary and universal. It belongs to all of us. Granted, it may sow doubt where there was none before: wondering, now, whether one’s church is legitimate, whether its Eucharist is valid. But it’s better than living in ignorance of the truth.

I for one want an answer to that question. I don’t expect to rest until I find it.

My latest: on lights and liturgy, in CT

Yesterday Christianity Today published an article of mine called “All Hail the Power of … Stage Lighting?” It opens with an anecdote taken verbatim from one of my freshmen. (Out of the mouths of babes…) You sort of have to read it to believe it.

Here are four paragraphs from later on in the piece:

To afford, maintain, and operate professional lighting of the sort my student had in mind, a church would have to be far above the 90th percentile of American congregational size, which is 250 regular attendees. Yet for my student, as for so many others, this size and its hallmarks are paradigmatic rather than exceptional. They’re just “what church is today,” what one would reasonably expect visiting a random church in a strange city.

This trend is both cause and consequence of churches investing in technologies that make Sunday morning a high-production offering, whether for in-person crowds or for folks who stream from home. Long before COVID-19 but exacerbated by lockdown, many churches have been competing in a kind of techno-liturgical arms race to draw seekers, especially young families and professionals, to the “Sunday morning experience” of high-tech public worship.

For many seasoned evangelicals among the millennial and Zoomer generations, the result—state-of-the-art, high-definition, professional video and audio and music, with smooth transitions and fancy lighting, all frictionless and ready-made for the internet—is simply becoming the norm. It’s what church, or worship, means.

At best, the gospel retains the power to cut through all the noise. At worst, believers receive neither the Lord’s Word nor his body and blood. Instead, they get a cut-rate TED Talk, spiritual but not religious, sandwiched between long sessions of a soft rock concert.

Click here to read the rest. And keep your eyes on CT in the next week; they’ll have my review of John Mark Comer’s new book up soon as well.

Coda: what is a CoC?

Based on feedback, a few more “family marks” to add to the original list of ten:

11. Anti-clericalism, i.e., no priestly caste set apart by holy orders or a white collar who alone can administer the Word and Supper of the Lord. (This is the obverse of egalitarianism, but more apt to historic CoC self-understanding, given egalitarianism’s range of meanings).

12. Cessationism, i.e., no charismatic gifts of the Spirit such as tongues, healings, visions, and exorcisms.

13. Amillennialism, i.e., no end-times speculation, no grand theories of Revelation, no in-case-of-Rapture church basements, no geopolitical dominoes to line up before the Parousia, no wedding of church and state to facilitate the time, times, and half a time.

14. Apoliticism, i.e., no stump speeches from the pulpit, no “how to vote” cards in the pews, no flags in the sanctuary, no mention of hot social topics in sermons, no sense that “America” is a “Christian nation” (after all, aren’t Baptists and Presbyterians and Catholics running the show?), no sense that government or military or elite institutions are where the highest Christian vocations are found.

15. Arminianism, i.e., an absolute principled rejection of Calvinism in all its forms, an allergy to predestination, a maximal commitment to and reiteration of personal individual free will and its necessity for salvation—so that a person past the age of accountability must choose Christ for him- or herself; absent this free choice, salvation is impossible.

Now take these in reverse order, as I did in the previous post:

15. Like congregationalism and weekly celebration of Communion, Arminianism is here to stay. In this Churches of Christ are most like their American evangelical cousins, and have been from the beginning. The difference is that, historically at least, one’s choice of Christ found public and saving expression in baptism; the choice itself was a prelude, a necessary condition for the salvation found in baptism’s waters, whereas for wider evangelicalism the choice that is faith is itself both necessary and sufficient condition for salvation. Having said that, evangelicalism’s influence on CoC practice can be found in (a) de-emphasizing baptism’s salvific efficacy, (b) lowering the age at which children can be baptized (from, say, mid-teens to mid-elementary), and (c) emphasizing the importance of children’s faith at very young ages.

14. From anecdotal conversations with elders and ministers, the newfound presence of politicization in Churches of Christ is a shock to the system. Whether that means Trumpism in the pews, saying Black Lives Matter from the podium, the polarization around masking and church closures, or hot-button topics like abortion, gender, and sexuality rising to the surface, politics are present in CoC-dom in a way they’ve never been before. It turns out that Facebook and Fox News have been running their own parallel catechesis programs this whole time. They work.

13. The elements of CoC life that my evangelical friends have always found most bewildering are these: high sacraments, low politics, and no end times. From what I can tell, the amillennialism is still present, aside from the occasional lay member who claims to have cracked Revelation’s nut. As a distinguishing mark, though, this one’s pretty weak; there are plenty of churches out there (low church and high) that lack Rapture basements and dispensation-charts and hell houses. Plus, I’m always surprised by the obvious latent interest in “end times” questions that students and peers pose to me, sotto voce, after a class or before service. Millennialism we will always have with us.

12. On one hand, there aren’t exactly hundreds of hyper-charismatic Churches of Christ out there, with flags and dancing and Spirit-slain tongues-speakers running in between the pews. On the other hand, the doctrine of cessationism is quite weak among CoC-ers under 50, in terms of its “givenness” as biblical teaching, and most folks my age and younger are either outright charismatic or at least spooky-curious. I predict that, in another generation, this one’ll be a dead letter.

11. Stone-Campbellite egalitarianism is an odd duck. In its ideal form it radicalizes the priesthood of all believers to include, quite literally, any and every baptized adult. In practice it has usually meant that the church should be led by well-spoken, biblically literate, and gainfully employed married fathers—a station in life to which all young boys without exception should aspire. (No shade; I’m a product of “Timothy Class.”) Some of these men would be preachers and evangelists and teachers; more would be elders; all would, or could, preside at the Lord’s Supper. Every one of the baptized, though, stood on an “equal footing” before the Lord, and was equally capable of reading the clear word of God in Scripture. No special class of seminary-trained priests could tell you what God would tell you himself; as in Luther’s day, the schoolmen were the enemy, sent to complicate and obstruct the sound doctrine of the apostles, unlettered men that they were.
–So where do things stand on this front today? Strangely, in my view.
–Some churches have unfolded the egalitarian impulse to its logical conclusion: not just men but women, not just adults but children, not just the baptized but any and all who report faith in Christ are full members and participants and may, given the occasion, lead, preach, teach, or preside. This is of a piece with wider cultural trends, a one-by-one relaxation or elimination of obstacles and conditions meant to exclude some from what is seen to be the prerogative of all.
–At the same time, there has been a concurrent professionalization of formal ministry, church leadership, and public worship that belies the apparent democratizating trends just outlined. Anyone at all can “preside” at the Supper—but music is in the hands of the professionals. Churches tend to prefer ministry hires to have degrees in Bible or related disciplines and often an MDiv as well. And while Churches of Christ have always placed a premium on preaching, they have not been immune from the impact of the internet. Podcasts, YouTube, and social media have made the best preaching in the world immediately accessible to anyone with a smartphone, even as they have shaped the sermon’s form into something less like proclamation and more like a TED Talk, delivered by well-coiffed preachers in skinny jeans and replete with slickly produced slides and reams of asides and jokes and stories. (All, naturally, live-streamed to the world. And, if you’ve got someone on staff to do it, quickly re-packaged into bite-size videos and disseminated onto social media platforms, fingers crossed for the next viral hit. I call this the tech-church show.)
–In a word, Churches of Christ are simultaneously highly professionalized and extremely egalitarian. So while the anti-clericalism persists at the doctrinal level—no one stands between me and my Bible—it’s far less powerful at the ecclesial level. This trend is exacerbated by the fact that, while most churches are small and getting smaller, the few big churches that remain are only getting bigger. The result is an optical illusion. “Successful” churches look huge, and with huge-ness comes a fleet of well-trained staff members. The message is clear: If you build it, the professionals will come. And when they come, they will run the show. Accordingly, churches we would be tempted to call “mid-size” (I believe, for example, that a church with 350 members is in the ninetieth percentile for congregational size in America) spy this trend and feel the need to professionalize themselves, too, lest they be left behind (like that 90-member church around the block). In this way a certain egalitarianism works in tandem to produce more, not less, professionalization—which is itself a kind of clericalism, albeit in the guise of a kind of corporate management expertise.
–I trust the irony is clear enough: Historically, both Catholic and Protestant traditions ordained pastors who alone could administer the sacraments and proclaim God’s word. The anti-clerical American evangelical genius is to repudiate ordination in light of the priesthood of all believers. So anyone can baptize; anyone can preside. But there arises a new priesthood in the wake of the old: charismatic speakers and talented musicians. Yet such a priesthood appears to be marked by native talent, which in turn comes to function like nothing so much as ordination by genetic lottery. So we have holy orders by other means, rather than its elimination, even as the celebration of the sacraments is moved farther and farther from center stage. (Its nadir being Covid-era at-home self-serve with “whatever’s in the pantry.” This, not from lack of catechesis, but from successful catechesis.)

So. Taking stock. The point of these descriptions, following the previous post, is to wonder (a) how Churches of Christ have changed over the last three or four generations, especially since the turn of the century; and in light of those changes, to ask (b) what if anything continues to mark Churches of Christ as distinct from American evangelicalism. It seems clear to me that the additional five historic “family marks” above do not alter my original verdict. Either they have evolved into alignment with evangelicals or they never distinguished Churches of Christ from evangelicalism in the first place. The absorption, in other words, continues unabated—if it isn’t already complete.

A loosening

Churches of Christ are evangelical-adjacent; sometimes trends in the CoC world reflect wider evangelical trends, sometimes not. In the following case I think they do.

It seems to me there has been, in the past twenty years, what I’m going to call a “loosening” in low-church American Protestant contexts. And the phenomenon appears to be widespread, not limited regionally or denominationally. Here’s what I mean.

For multiple generations—I’d say at least five, probably more—the following things were true of the sort of churches (I like to call them “baptist” with a lower-case “b”) I have in mind:

1. Alcohol was off limits.

2. Ditto for tattoos.

3. Ditto for gambling of any kind.

4. Cessationism was a given.

5. Salvation was sectarian.

6. Feast days were suspicious.

7. Sacraments were epiphenomenal at best, optional at worst.

8. Sunday morning worship was only one of many weekly congregational gatherings.

In my observation, most or all of these features have been forgotten, reversed, or weakened in recent years. Moreover, this loosening has occurred not only among Millennials and Gen Z believers; it has occurred also among Gen X and Boomer believers at the same time. In other words, the very same people who once shared in the “old way” have transitioned along with their children and grandchildren into the “new way.” The divide is not between parents and children; to the extent that the divide still exists, it’s located elsewhere.

This is important to note for two reasons. First, the battle is not cross-generational so much as cross-epochal. Second, the battle isn’t perennial, since this profound social, moral, and liturgical transformation hasn’t happened with each new generation of low-church believers. The old faith was handed down, generation to generation, until the last two decades or so. And then all at once “everybody” changed. (Not everybody—but a lot of them.)

Here’s how those eight markers play out today, in my experience:

1. Most low-church Protestants I know (from twentysomethings to grandparents) now drink alcohol, including those who for decades did not. In fact, all of a sudden it seems taken for granted that alcohol is not even a question for Christians to consider.

2. Tattoos abound in this Christian sub-culture!

3. Gambling gambling is still off limits. But every church I’ve been a part of as an adult has had men’s poker groups or similar gatherings where money is bet and exchanged. And nobody seems to talk about gambling online or on sporting events as a serious or pressing moral question.

4. Whether at church (with folks from their 30s to their 70s) or in the classroom, the Christians I talk to are either outright spooky, meaning unapologetically affirming of charismatic gifts, or agnostic. I regularly poll both crowds, and just about no one wants to defend cessationism as a doctrine. I actually can’t recall the last time I met someone who was willing, even casually, to argue the view that signs and wonders (“miracles”) no longer occur. This shift may be the most seismic on the list!

5. By “sectarian salvation” I mean, minimally, confessional-doctrinal-ecclesial boundaries on who can and cannot be saved. Historically capital-B Baptists in this country have readily admitted that, for example, Catholics are not Christians, or at least usually lack saving faith. For a century Baptists and CoC-ers did fierce battle over the necessity and efficacy of baptism for this very reason: it drew lines around who would and would not be saved! And yet today I find in almost every corner an enormous ecumenical tent beneath which just about any self-identified Christian is counted as “in.” Certainly nothing so archaic as a denominational line would count somebody out.

6. Until recently, Churches of Christ wouldn’t even acknowledge Christmas or Easter. Other churches would celebrate those, but not Advent or Epiphany or Pentecost or Lent. Those were for Catholics. And yet now Advent and Lent and the liturgical calendar are all the rage.

7. In my normie evangelical students, I spy sacramental minimalism as a default setting, but the moment we start talking and reading, their innate charismatic spookiness starts nudging them up the sacramental ladder. They see both the importance of the sacraments and the lack of any self-evident reason why sacraments must be purely symbolic, cordoned off from the grace they mediate as signs thereof. The more liturgical and charismatic this generation gets, the more sacramental they seem to become. They’re certainly far more open to it; they don’t share previous generations’ firm biblical and doctrinal priors on communion and baptism as non-efficacious.

8. Once upon a time, what it meant to be faithful in churches of Christ was to attend Sunday morning Bible class, followed by public worship, followed by Sunday evening worship, followed by Wednesday evening Bible class. Other churches have had similar arrangements. From what I can tell, both Sunday and Wednesday evening gatherings are dying. The trend lines are all pointing down. Some congregations, especially larger ones, and especially more conservative ones, are maintaining the meetings. But across the board they are less and less frequent; the social norm that this is what it means to be a member in good standing is no longer widespread. Naturally, this is of a piece with, and in turn creates a feedback loop with, decreasing biblical literacy and biblical study. The less “being a knowledgeable Bible reader” is convertible with “being a serious disciple of Christ,” the less “additional meetings” will seem necessary to the Christian life.

This is all anecdotal, I admit. Am I wrong? Do others see the same trends? Am I missing some? Is it right to call this a kind of “loosening”? I’m not looking for causes, only the effects (or symptoms) themselves. I welcome correction and addition.

My latest: on holy orders

I’ve got an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Christian Studies. The theme of the issue is “Ministry and Ordination.” The editor, Keith Stanglin (a mensch, if you don’t know him), commissioned pieces from scholars that represent or argue for a position not found in, or at least exemplified by, their own tradition. So, for example, the article after mine is by a Roman Catholic on the priesthood of all believers. Whereas mine is called “The Fittingness of Holy Orders.” It presents just that.

The article was a pleasure to write. It scratched an itch I didn’t know I had. Its guiding lights are Robert Jenson and Michael Ramsey. And it opens with twenty theses—I call them “escalating propositions”— on the sacrament of holy orders that ramp up from the basic notion of some formal leadership in the church all the way to full episcopal-dogmatic-eucharistic-apostolic succession.

Subscribe to the journal (or ask your library to). If you want a PDF of my article, email me and I’ll send you a copy.

I’m in Mere O on streaming worship

Three weeks after Tom Hanks and Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid, Mere Orthodoxy published an essay of mine titled “Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic.” It’s a long exploration of the nature of Christian liturgy and the questions posed to it by an emergency like a global pandemic. It uses Neil Postman and Robert Jenson to place a question mark next to the seeming self-evident answer to the question, To stream or not to stream? In particular, it makes the case that, if churches are going to stream worship, they should not include the sacraments. That is, they should fast from the Eucharist while separated in the body; they should not encourage individual believers to “self-administer” communion at home.

Nearly three years later, I’m back in Mere O with another essay on the same topic, this time titled “Stream Off.” It’s about the lingering questions posed by the emergency measures implemented during lockdown and the broader crisis phase of Covid. Namely: Granting that nearly every church did turn to streaming worship online, should they continue to do so? Moreover, should they actively seek to “expand their reach” through live-streaming? Should they invite people to “join us online”? to “be a member of church from afar”? to “worship from home,” if and as they please?

You know my answer. This essay, long burbling in the back of my mind, makes the case.

Update (January 12): LOL. Apparently a full year ago Tish Harrison Warren wrote about this in the NYT, followed by some responses from readers. Twelve months ago! Obviously it’s kosher to write about the same topic, especially one that’s continuing in the way streaming is, but I’m not sure how I overlooked it. As they say, I regret the error.

CoC: evangelical, not catholic

I’ve had a number of readers reach out to me about my reflection on the churches of Christ as catholic rather than evangelical. I’m gratified to learn that what I was trying to put my finger on is something others resonate with. Some wrote as still-CoCers to say that it helped them articulate “the difference” they had always felt but had never been able to name; others wrote to say that, yes, indeed, they were raised CoC but were now a part of one of the three great episcopal branches of catholic tradition: Anglican, Eastern, or Roman.

So that’s the good news: what I identified is real and recognized as such by others. More good news: CoC theology of the church and her sacraments is both good on the merits and in line with patristic and medieval teaching, rather than merely a recent innovation. Best of all, at least for some: We’re not evangelicals, like we’ve been saying all along!

Now for the bad news.

The bad news comes in two forms, one about CoC past and one about CoC future.

Regarding the former, the thing about CoC virtues, which broadly overlap with catholic tradition, is that they are the flip side of CoC vices. These vices likewise sometimes overlap with catholic vices. A high ecclesiology all too often trades on a sectarian ecclesiology: no one outside this church (rather than the church) will be saved. Hence the CoC’s justly earned reputation for supposing all other Christians to be damned, or at least very unlikely to be saved. The same goes for sacramental practice, which can verge on the obsessive, the mechanical, or both. If it’s even thinkable for a well-formed member of your ecclesial tradition to wonder seriously whether a person who died in a car accident on the way to being baptized would, as a result of thus not being baptized, go to hell, then you can be sure that something has gone terribly wrong. Doubly so if your catechesis generates rather than relieves this anxiety. (My students are shocked to learn how open-handed actual Catholic doctrine is on this question: not only are unbaptized martyrs saved, but any person with the sincere intention to be baptized, who for reasons outside her control is kept from being baptized, is received by the Lord in death as though she had been baptized.) The same obsessive-compulsive severity can be found in “re”-baptizing someone whose hand or foot didn’t go all the way under during the first try—taking to a literal extreme the understanding of baptism as total immersion, and just thereby undermining the very point of once-for-all believers baptism.

I could go on: the granular scholasticism of kitchens in church buildings, church buildings in general, instruments in worship, paid parish preachers, and the rest. Anyone who was raised in churches of Christ or who grew up in an area with one on every corner knows what I’m talking about.

No church is perfect, however, nor any church tradition. The wheat and the tares grow together, as do the virtues and vices of any particular movement. That’s to be expected.

The second element of the bad news, though, is related to the first, which is why I mentioned it. It is true to say, as I did in my original post, that the CoC is more catholic than evangelical. That catholic sensibility still lingers on in some congregations, especially in members over 50. But it is dissipating, and fast. As I wrote, churches of Christ are currently in process of being absorbed into American evangelicalism, a process that, if not already finished, will be completed in the next decade or two. It’s a fait accompli; the only question is the timing.

This CoC future is a function of CoC past. There is a reason why churches of Christ are becoming indistinguishable from non-denominational churches. Well, there are many reasons, but here’s one big one: The oldest three generations of CoC-ers finally got fed up with the sectarian fundamentalism in which they were raised. They saw that they were not the only Christians; that church history was not misery and darkness until 1801; that Stone-Campbell tradition was just that, a tradition, one like many others; that “being right” was not synonymous with “doing what we’ve always done”; and that “what we’ve always done” was not sufficient as a reason to keep on doing it.

Those are all true insights, and their fruit, across the last thirty years, has been lifting up mainstream churches of Christ from the sectarian muck in which it had been mired. Many experienced that lifting-up as a deliverance, even a liberation. They were in the light, having been in shadow and twilight for so long. They were grateful for the tradition they’d received; they were willing to remain in it; but they would contribute to its healthy evolution: from sect to tradition, from exclusivism to ecumenism, from dogma to generous orthodoxy. This would, in a way, honor the Stone-Campbell roots of churches of Christ, since those roots were about prioritizing Christian unity above all else.

Many welcomed, and continue to welcome, the resulting changes. But there were unintended consequences. Chief among them was the loss, on one hand, of the features that made churches of Christ distinctive in the larger ecclesial landscape; and, on the other, of the practical means of maintaining and handing on those very features to the next generation.

Here is the great irony. The upshot of rescuing the CoC from its worst vices was the loss of its greatest virtues—of what made it it in the first place.

Hence the CoC’s absorption into evangelicalism. And try as some might, there’s no arresting this process. Why? For the following reasons.

First, the CoC began as an anti-tradition tradition. This means there are no organs of authority for any one congregation besides the Bible, its elders, and its ministry staff. There is, in a sense, no tradition to which such a congregation might be faithful. It doesn’t exist. There’s no “there” there.

Second, even granting that, in one sense, there obviously is a “there” there—after all, churches of Christ have a history and founders and influential leaders—there are no reasons, internal to the tradition, why anyone should care. In a theological debate between two Orthodox theologians, it is valid and weighty to assert that St. Irenaeus, St. Basil, and St. Maximus are on one’s side. They’re not quite Scripture, but they’re close. Not so in a CoC context. If someone in a local congregation says, “I hear what you’re saying, but Stone-Campbell Movement Leader X once wrote Y,” the only reply necessary is, “So?” Moreover, the very point of “moving” the CoC beyond its sectarian postwar malaise was for it to be changed. But if such change is both possible and desirable, then crying “Halt!” because Proposed Change Z doesn’t accord with CoC tradition is nonsensical. You can’t sit on the branch you’ve already sawed off yourself.

Third, there is only one way of being anti-tradition (indeed, anti-creedal) with a congregationalist polity in America: it’s called evangelicalism. By definition you do not belong to a larger ecclesiastical body. By definition you have no larger set of authoritative canons or confessions or doctrines. By definition you are making it up as you go. We have a name for that in this here frontier land. It’s the E-word, God help us all. American evangelicalism is DIY religion through and through, and that’s the only route available to a tradition without a history, a church without a creed, a polity without authority—that is, authority beyond the Bible as read by a local group of staff and elders.

This is why flagship and even normie churches of Christ today look like carbon copies of their next-door-neighbor non-denom churches. (It’s why some of them have dropped the “…of Christ” from their buildings and websites, and why others are soon to follow.) Increasingly they’re ditching a cappella singing for CCM praise music; they’re placing far less of an emphasis on baptism as restricted to adults or as a sacrament of divine action, much less as necessary for salvation; and I’d be willing to wager that weekly communion, already felt to be gumming up the liturgical works, will be the last domino to fall in the coming years. What’s holding all of this together, anyway, is the oldest two generations. Once they pass away, and once younger people start asking (as they already are), “Why does this have to be weekly? Won’t it be more meaningful if we make it monthly instead?” you can set a timer for the eventual change. Remember, “we’ve always done it this way” no longer holds water as an answer.

For CoC leaders who don’t like the look of this trajectory, there are limited options. You can’t bootstrap an ecclesiastical hierarchy into existence ex nihilo. Nor can you DIY yourself out of DIY-ness. That’s the DIY trap. If you make yourself just-a-little-progressive-mainline, you’re not mainline, you’re just progressive evangelical—the worst of all possible worlds. Besides, if the point was to avoid being evangelical, you’ve failed. If, by contrast, you make yourself just-a-little-traditional-catholic, you’re not catholic, you’re just traditional—but what does that mean? You can’t be “traditional” as an optional extra chosen by lay vote or ministerial preference; tradition either is or is not authoritative. And if it just happens to be a congregation’s preference today, who’s to say it will remain their preference tomorrow?

In short, the question isn’t whether churches of Christ already are, or soon will be, one more tributary in the great evangelical delta. They are and they will be. It’s whether they will even exist once the process of absorption is complete. For many congregations are closing their doors, as the CoC rolls in the U.S. decline; many others are dropping the name; others still are dropping the distinctives that make them CoC (whether or not they still claim the name). Doubtless a few will remain, repping the old line. But they won’t amount to a statistically significant number in the scene of American Christianity. At that point—2045? 2060?—this whole conversation will be moot. Mostly there won’t be churches of Christ around anymore; and those that exist won’t look like they once did, a century prior. The transmutation to evangelicalism will be total.

I know plenty of folks in churches of Christ who see this as either a good thing or, at most, neutral. Their CoC catechesis was weaker on the catholic stuff and stronger on low-church ecumenism, marked by things like missionary flexibility, freedom from the authority of tradition, aversion to creeds and confessions, openness to change, inattention to history, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a high priority on spiritual unity and personal faith. American evangelicalism has all these in spades. This helps to explain the curious fact that, for most CoC congregations, the shift from catholic to evangelical has been so swift, so striking, yet so smooth, devoid (for the most part) of dispute and strife. Arguments have centered on culture-war flashpoints like gender rather than creedal doctrine or sacramental theology.

Yet this shift leaves the decidedly non-evangelical folks who remain in churches of Christ more or less homeless, exiles in their own spiritual household. But because the writing’s on the wall—because there’s no putting the evangelical cat back in the catholic bag—there’s nothing, really, to do. You can accept the trend lines, hunker down, and grin and bear it. Or, as I concluded in the previous post, you can leave.

As I see it, by and large those who stay will be those who resonate with evangelicalism, and those who leave will be those who long for catholic doctrine and practice. The sorting has already been happening, quietly, the last twenty years; it should be done, I’d say, in the next twenty. Some will leave who’d prefer to stay, and vice versa. But for the most part, that’s how it’ll shake out.

CoC: catholic, not evangelical

For the whole of my academic career, it has been difficult to explain to friends and colleagues who have no prior knowledge of the Stone-Campbell Movement why churches of Christ are not best understood as “evangelical,” that is to say, as part of that rambunctious and dysfunctional family called “American evangelicalism.” Even, for a time, it was hard for me to understand it myself. But I knew it at a gut level and at the level of anecdotal experience. Regarding the latter, for example, I never once heard the term “evangelical” growing up in church; the way evangelical friends would describe their theological assumptions and church practices sounded bizarre and alien to me; and even at the level of guest speakers, popular books, websites, music, and the like, there was usually slim overlap, if any at all.

The difficulty in explanation is made the harder by the fact that, beginning a couple decades ago, mainstream churches of Christ began to be absorbed into American evangelicalism, a process that will reach completion in another decade or two. Walk into a local CoC congregation today, that is, and likely as not you won’t be able to tell much of a difference between it and the neighboring non-denominational or otherwise evangelical church. (The most probable oddity would be a cappella singing or weekly communion, the first of which is already on the wane, the second of which, I fear, is not far behind it.) But the very fact that this registers as a jarring change, that sociologists and historians of American religion see it as a dramatic shift, tells you that once upon a time, and for most of their history, churches of Christ were set apart from evangelicalism as a whole, and thus poorly understood as a subset thereof.

When I was in seminary, surrounded by mainline liberals, I quickly realized that the simplest way to explain the CoC sensibility is to describe it as catholic, not evangelical. Indeed, of those I know who were raised in the churches of Christ who have earned degrees in graduate theological education, not one (of whom I’m aware) has “gone evangelical,” or even magisterial Protestant. They have either remained CoC, or left the faith, or joined a high-church tradition: whether swimming the Thames, the Bosporus, or the Tiber. And no one “in house” is surprised by such a move.

Why is that? Why would going from the lowest-of-low congregationalist, non-creedal, primitivist traditions to the highest-of-high episcopal-creedal traditions make a kind of intuitive, not to say theological, sense? Why would I call the CoC DNA catholic and not evangelical, even though the Stone-Campbell tradition has its origins in frontier revivalism and nineteenth-century American restorationism?

For the following reasons. Each of these is fundamental conviction either taught explicitly or imbibed like mother’s milk from pulpit and classroom in historic churches of Christ (prior to the ongoing evangelical takeover); taken together, they form a kind of unofficial catholic catechesis:

1. The founding of the church is the climax and telos of the biblical story. The church is the point, not an incidental or accidental or epiphenomenal feature of both the Christian life and the good news of the gospel.

2. It is impossible for an individual to be saved alone, by herself, apart from the ministerial intervention and interposition of Christ’s church. In other words, the church is herself the corporate sacrament of salvation.

3. The church is therefore necessary for salvation: extra ecclesiam nulla salus. To be saved is to belong to the body of Jesus Christ, which is the bride for whom he died.

4. “Faith alone” apart from baptism, which is to say, apart from the sacramental administration of the church, is insufficient for salvation.

5. Baptism, in short, is necessary for salvation. Why? Because by its instrumentality God himself acts to cleanse you from sin, unite you to Christ, knit you to his body, and fill you with his Spirit.

6. “An unbaptized Christian” is an oxymoron. To be Christian is to be baptized; to be baptized is to be Christian. The two are synonymous.

7. Public worship in the assembly on Sunday morning without the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is a self-contradiction in terms. When the church gathers on the Lord’s day, she administers the sacrament of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. If she fails to do so, she has failed to worship in the Spirit as the Lord commanded.

8. In a word, communion is to be celebrated each and every Sunday, where two or three are gathered in Jesus’s name. (And if you missed it on Sunday morning, when everybody gathers again for another service that evening, you step out at a fitting time with others who missed it in order to partake now: better late than never.)

9. It is possible, by apostasy or moral failure, to fall from grace, that is, to lose one’s salvation. In traditional terms, mortal sin is a live possibility.

10. The moral, the spiritual, and the liturgical are utterly intertwined, so much so that they are inseparable. On one hand, nothing is more important than the worship of Christ in and with his body on Sunday morning; on the other, a life of Sunday worship apart from daily discipleship would be an act of self-condemnation. Following Christ is a comprehensive task, demanding one’s all. Everything else is secondary. But it is found in and made possible by thick membership in the Christian community—and only there. Christianity is impossible without the church, for the church simply is Christianity as God instituted it on earth.

11. The life of the early church, for all its faults, is the paradigm of moral, spiritual, and sacramental faithfulness. It is there to be imitated by the saints for all time.

12. The canon within the canon is not, as heirs of Luther and Calvin suppose, Galatians and Romans. Instead, it is the book of Acts together with the Pastoral Epistles. There we see the blueprint for ecclesiology, God’s vision for a lasting society on earth that exists for the praise of his glory in the midst of a fallen world. The leadership structure and overall organization of God’s church is therefore of paramount importance, as is her unity, being the chief object of the Spirit’s will and work, not to mention the high priestly prayer of Jesus himself.

I could go on, but that covers the main themes in broad strokes. I trust these convictions make legible, first, why churches of Christ have always been out of step with evangelicals; second, why those raised in the CoC don’t find themselves, their beliefs, or their practices reflected in American evangelicalism; third, why it’s not unfitting (however odd it may sound) to describe CoC-ers as more catholic than evangelical; and fourth, why it is that folks with CoC backgrounds who go to seminary or pursue doctoral studies in theological disciplines so often find themselves drawn to capitalizing the “c” in “catholic”—i.e., seeing little appeal in the churches on offer between their own movement (on one pole of the continuum) and the great episcopal-creedal traditions (on the other pole). Go big or go home, you know?

Besides, if what you’re after is an authoritative community that makes the church and her sacraments central, both to God’s salvific purposes revealed in the Bible and to the daily lives of the faithful, while giving doctrinal, liturgical, and moral priority to “the early church,” then it makes all the sense in the world that exposure to the church fathers—from St. Ignatius to St. Irenaeus, St. Justin Martyr to St. Cyprian, St. Athanasius to St. Basil, St. Augustine to St. Cyril, St. Ephrem to St. Leo, and so on—would have the simple but logical effect of expanding the meaning of “the early church” to more than the initial apostolic generation(s). That particular marker in time is somewhat arbitrary, anyway, given that the first Christian assemblies were terribly imperfect (hello, Corinth) and that the very notion of a neatly pristine, bow-tied “apostolic age” is possible to conceive only in retrospect, following centuries of debate regarding, among other things, the boundaries of the canon. And since we know that such debate was itself normed by the Rule of faith, which was transmitted orally, and by the authority of bishops, who were ordained in succession from the time of the apostles, then we have no clear (non-question-begging) demarcation between “early” and “late” or “developed” doctrine and practice in the first half millennium of the church. Only consider Lutheran and other modern Protestant disdain for the Pastorals, along with the rest of the “catholic” epistles. They spy “development” already within the canonical New Testament, so they relegate it to “later,” “secondary” status by the slander term “catholic.”

But that just won’t do for a proper doctrine of Scripture or of the church. And if it won’t do, then there are only so many alternatives. One alternative is to remain. Another is to go. The middle options are small beer by comparison.

Sermon length

A friend mentioned that there was recently (is currently?) a vigorous conversation on Twitter about the ideal, or proper, or fitting, sermon length. Since I’m off Twitter I barely have access to people’s most recent two or three tweets; I definitely can’t go perusing anyone’s account for extended back-and-forth replies and RTs. But the mention piqued my interest.

I could have sworn I’d written about this—and I have, briefly, in this long essay on preaching—but it turns out what I was thinking of was the webinar I did back in April for pastors and preachers. Starting around the 28-minute mark I share a personal anecdote and then some remarks on the question of how long a sermon should be.

But since it’s not in print, let me say something here. To start, consider what I wrote in that 2019 essay:

Method [as in, homiletical method] is a matter of prudence, native talent, gifts of the Spirit, audience, context, training, and many more largely uncontrollable variables. A faithful sermon can be 20, 40, or 60 minutes long (or more); it can be done from memory, with a basic outline, or with a manuscript; it can involve gestures and movements and animation or minimal intonation and emotion; it can encompass the whole spectrum of human passions and virtues; there is no platonic ideal of Faithful Proclamation. (Nor, by the way, is there The Biblical Model of it.) Method depends; don’t be a slave to method; don’t be a disciple of methodologists.

This remains right. Sermon length is entirely a prudential question. And the factors involved have everything to do with the preacher in question, the congregation, the occasion, and the larger social, cultural, and ecclesial context. It’s true that a sermon is not a “lesson” (as I also say in the essay). Worship is a setting not for doctrina but for kerygma. But who says kerygma should be brief? That expectation, in my experience, is rooted in presuppositions about brief attention spans, poor listening skills, and logistical convenience. The implication is not that a sermon shouldn’t be on the shorter side. A “longer” (but it’s hard to use comparative language here, since we have no “average” sermon length by which to measure) sermon has to justify its length by the very same criteria. The point is that there is no platonic ideal. The length of a sermon is not one of the substantive features by which we may judge it. A 10-minute sermon could be faithful; a 2-hour sermon could be equally faithful. And both could be unfaithful. I’ve been in rural African contexts where sermons and “words from the Lord” lasted, in themselves and in sequence, hours on end. American frontier revival preaching was similar. Were/are they too long? It depends! We’d have to hear the sermons in question.

For these reasons I’m skeptical of generic advice on this front, that is, generic at the national or even denominational level. There are certainly principles that should inform a sermon’s length: clarity, substance, exegesis, saturation in the rhetoric of the scriptures, a commitment to announce the gospel (and not some personal advice or cultural commentary), a prayerful intention to be an instrument of the living Christ to his people, etc.

But here’s one anecdote that makes me wary of any broad push to keep sermons “shorter” (not just “standard” 18-22 minutes but even less than that). There’s a church here in town that draws many college students to it whose sermons are 45-60 minutes each week. Some peers wonder how that can be possible. I outline a theory in the webinar linked above. The theory is this.

Twentysomethings who make the decision to come to church today, even in west Texas, are doing something they simply do not have to do. No one’s making them. They’re coming because they believe it’s important or, at least, because they imagine it might be important. They’re already committed or open to becoming committed. At the same time, as I’ve written elsewhere, they’re illiterate—biblically and literally. They don’t read, and they certainly don’t read the Bible. How then are they supposed to be inducted, invited, drawn into the life and story and protagonists and plots and subplots and diction and style and majesty of the holy scriptures? This local congregation’s answer, one I’m inclined to endorse, is: through preaching. Note that the preaching is still proclamation; it hasn’t yet become teaching. But it’s doing what itinerant and revival preaching did centuries ago in a similarly illiterate age: namely, providing a means of access to and a rhetorical formation in both the letter and the spirit of the Bible. Precisely in the middle of the liturgy, as it should be.

Yes, don’t use long sermons as an excuse for poor preaching. Yes, don’t make sermons load-bearing for all the church’s pastoral work. Yes, don’t so hog the liturgical attention that the Eucharist—the climax of worship!—is sidelined, minimized, or forgotten. Yes, avoid the TED Talk–ification of preaching. Yes, yes, yes and amen to all this and more.

The upshot, though, is not that sermons ought to be shorter. The upshot is that the question of sermon length is downstream of the genuinely important questions. The length will follow from answering these. Once they’re answered, and answered well, the length will take care of itself.

Church for normies

In his book Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction, Nicholas Healy raises an objection with Hauerwas’s ecclesiology. He argues that Hauerwas’s rhetoric and sometimes his arguments present the reader with a church fit only for faithful Christians—that is, for heroes and saints, for super-disciples, for the extraordinarily obedient, the successful, the satisfactory. By contrast, Healy argues that the church ought to be a home and a haven for “unsatisfactory Christians,” and that our doctrine of the church ought to reflect that.

That phrase, “unsatisfactory Christians,” has stuck with me ever since I first read it. It’s often what I have in mind when I refer to “normie” Christians: ordinary believers most of whose days are filled with the mundane tasks of remaining decent while doing what’s necessary to survive in a hard world: working a boring job, feeding the kids, getting enough sleep, paying the bills, not getting too much into debt, occasionally seeing friends, fixing household or familial problems, maybe taking an annual vacation. Into this all-hands-on-deck eking-out-a-survival life, “being a Christian” is somehow supposed to fit, not only seamlessly but in a transformative way. So you go to church, share in the sacraments, say your prayers, raise your kids in the faith, and generally try to fulfill the duties and roles to which you understand God to have called you.

I used to be Hauerwasian (or Yoderian, before that moniker assumed other connotations) in my ecclesiology, but over the years I’ve come to think of that style of construing Christian discipleship as a well-intended error, though an error all the same. To be clear, I’m not talking about Hauerwas himself—who defends himself against Healy’s critique in a later book—but about the sort of ecclesiology associated with him and with those who have developed his thought over the decades. I’m thinking, that is, of an approach to church that sees it as a small band of deeply committed disciples whose life together is aptly described as an “intentional community.” These are people who know their Bibles, who have strong and well-informed theological opinions, who are readers and thinkers, who have college degrees, who are white collar and/or middle-/upper-middle class, who make common cause to found or form or join a local community defined by a Rule of Life and thick expectations and rich, shared daily practices. Often as not they meet in homes or move into the same neighborhood or even purchase a plot of land for all to live on together.

I would never knock such communities. Extending the monastic vision to include lay people in all walks of life is a lovely development. Though I do worry that such communities are usually short-term arrangements lacking longevity, and that they are typically idealized and overly romantic, nonetheless they represent a healthy response to the vision of the church in the New Testament and sometimes even work out. Nothing but kudos and blessings upon them.

My disagreement is with the view that this vision of church just is what any and every church ought to be, as though all other versions of church must therefore be (1) pale imitations of the real thing, (2) tolerable but incomplete attempts at church, or even simply (3) failed churches. That’s wrong. It’s wrong for many reasons, including exegetical, historical, and theological reasons. But let me give one closer to the ground, rooted in human experience.

The radical church is not a church for normies. To use Healy’s terminology, it’s not a community meant for unsatisfactory Christians. It’s for Christians who have their you-know-what together: Christians who are both able and willing, given their background, education, financial status, temperament, moral and intellectual aptitude, and personal desire, to enter the monastic life, only here as laypersons. It’s certainly possible to make a case, based on the Gospels and the teaching of Christ, that the church exists solely for such Christians, since the condition for faith is discipleship to Christ, and discipleship to Christ is costly. I believe this to be a profound misunderstanding, however, not least because the rest of the New Testament exists. Just read St. Paul. He’ll disabuse you rather quickly of the notion that the church consists of satisfactory Christians. It turns out the church is nothing but unsatisfactory Christians. And if your Christian community is such that no normie would ever dream of visiting or joining it, because it’s clear that he or she is not and would never be up to snuff, then—allow me to suggest—you’re doing it wrong.

The church has to make room for the unsatisfactory, exactly in the manner I described above: the just-getting-by, the I’m-barely-paying-the-bills, the it-took-all-I-had-to-show-up-this-morning, the I’m-doing-my-best, the just-give-me-a-break folks. The holly-ivy Christians, who begrudgingly show up twice a year. The Kichijiros and Simon Peters and doubting Thomases. The addicts who relapse, the gamblers in debt, the porn-addled who can’t quit, the foreclosed-on and laid-off, the perennially fired and out of work, the ex-cons and adulterers and fathers of five kids by three different moms. Is the church not for such as these? “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.”

Our churches may not, must not, fall prey to the temptation that such people have no place in them, because if we believe that, then we will make them such places. Worse, we will inadvertently make them havens for a different kind of person: neither “the least of these” (whom Jesus loves) nor the radical types who flock to intentional communities, but the sort of credentialed professionals who want that sweet, sweet upper-middle-class life alongside others who look and talk and live just like them. Such folks are all unsatisfactory to a person—that’s just to say they’re human—but they present the opposite on the outside. Either way, the undisguised unsatisfactory have nowhere to lay their heads: the well-to-do don’t want them and the radicals can’t receive them.

Does this mean our churches should expect less of their members? Does it mean our churches should restructure their common life? Does it mean churches should function to permit and even welcome the straggler, the good-for-nothing, the failed disciple, the I’m-just-here-to-take-the-Eucharist-and-run type?

Yes. That is exactly what I’m saying. Radicals hate the medieval distinction between the evangelical counsels of perfection and the “lower” universal teachings of Jesus meant for all Christians. But the distinction arose for a reason, and it’s an essential one. Further, it’s why the church, especially in patristic and medieval periods, developed such a strong account of the sacraments as the heart of lay Christian life. The sacraments are pure reception, pure gift: grace upon grace. That’s what a sacrament is, the material sign and instrument of God’s grace, and it’s what the Blessed Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood enacts and encapsulates. God willing, the Spirit so moves in the regular, daily and weekly, reception of Holy Communion that a believer is drawn into a lifelong journey of sanctification, what is unsatisfactory (this plain and unimpressive water) being transformed into that which pleases the Lord and edifies his body (the miraculous wine saved best for last). But that’s up to God, and it begins, it does not end, with initiation into and partaking of the liturgical and sacramental life of God’s people.

We need churches that offer and embody and invite people to that, making clear all the while that the summons is for all—especially normies.

CCM

My friend and colleague Richard Beck, author of the best theology blog around, has been on fire lately with some stimulating reflections on church, ministry, preaching, and what it means to be faithful in the contemporary American context. If you’re not reading his Friday series on Jordan Peterson, get on it forthwith. His post this past Monday was a sort of follow-up to his latest Friday piece on Peterson. Both posts, along with many preceding ones, are about interpreting the state of the culture and what that interpretation tells us about how to respond with the gospel—not in 1950, not on an exotic mission field, but here, now, today, in the United States in 2022.

In particular, he points to three popular phenomena that wise Christian leaders should be learning from but, on the contrary, usually treat with disdain, if they engage them at all. Those three phenomena are (1) men like Peterson; (2) Joel Osteen; and (3) contemporary Christian music, or CCM. Beck isn’t interested in recommending any of these to us as samples of faithful Christian teaching or practice. Rather, he wants to draw the attention of snobby, Master’s degree–holding pastors and academics to persons and practices in which normies (Christian and non-Christian alike) find pleasure, meaning, and inspiration. Having drawn our attention there, he wants us (1) to stop being so condescending and (2) to learn something about where our culture finds itself today, what it might need, and therefore how that might inform the work of evangelism, catechesis, worship, etc.

Here’s how he concludes the second post (my emphases in bold):

I can't tell you how many times I've heard seminary-educated pastors and seminary professors sneer at Christian praise music. The music is castigated for being overly individualistic, therapeutic, and sentimental. We sneer and call it "Jesus is my boyfriend" music. You'll see the point if you listen to the lyrics of a song like Hillsong's "Oceans" (over 129 million YouTube views) or Lauren Daigle's "You Say" (over 242 million YouTube views), lyrics like "You are mine and I am yours" and "In You I find my worth, in You I find my identity."

Instead of sneering at the therapeutic individualism of these songs, their focus upon me and my feelings, take a second to listen to the songs as a missionary, as a cultural anthropologist. Instead of lol lol lol how about we think for a second? To what deep ache in the modern world are these songs appealing to?

This isn't rocket science. The reason praise songs centering therapeutic themes of God's intimate care and love are so popular is simple. As I recount in Hunting Magic Eels, anxiety, depression, suicide, loneliness, and addiction are all sky-rocketing. So the appeal of songs like "Oceans" or "You Say" are no mystery. These songs are hitting us right where we are hurting. Their appeal is blindingly obvious to any decent missionary.

But sadly, we're not very good missionaries. We've been too busy sneering at Hillsong, Osteen, and Peterson.

Now, am I suggesting that churches and pastors should follow their lead? Am I saying that we should ignore the theological content of praise music, preach the prosperity gospel, and hand Bible studies over to Jungian psychologists? No, I'm not saying any of that. What I'm saying is WIPE THE DAMNED SNEER OFF YOUR FACE AND LOOK AT THE CULTURE! If we took a moment to think like a missionary there are some things about Hillsong, Osteen and Peterson staring us in the face. Things we need to address, like any good missionary would, if we want to get a hearing for the gospel in this culture. But we can't see any of this because our seminary degrees have turned us all into elitist snobs. 

The modern would is suffering, staring into a void of meaninglessness where something true, beautiful and good once existed. Families are broken. Depression, anxiety, suicide, loneliness and addiction at high tide. And if you look out upon all that pain, with a compassionate heart and the mind of a missionary, there really is no mystery as to why Jordan Peterson, Joel Osteen or Hillsong are so popular. This, dear pastors, seminary professors, and church leaders, is our mission field. Let's stop sneering and get to work. 

In response to this all one can say is: Preach!

*

Well, maybe not all. I think Richard is dead right about Peterson and Osteen both. And he’s got all of us over-educated patronizing highbrow jerks dead to rights on CCM. The class divide both across and within denominations in the U.S. is rarely remarked upon yet staring us in the face. It may be, besides technology, the single greatest threat to the church’s spiritual, social, and moral health today. So preach on, I say.

Having said that, something in Richard’s comments about CCM hasn’t been able to work its way out of my mind, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. I don’t have a settled or confident counter to his claim, only questions I want to wonder about out loud. Perhaps he or you or someone else might provide me some clarity on the matter.

Here’s what I’m circling around.

It isn’t clear to me that the content or style of CCM reveals something important to us about our culture, perceiving that culture the way a missionary would—at least nothing revelatory on a par with Peterson and Osteen. Obviously anything with some level of popularity tells us something about a culture; it doesn’t come from nowhere. Nevertheless I wonder in this area. Part of my wonder has to do with the market, namely, the commercialization of “Christian music.” Pop culture critics often make this mistake. “The market” “has spoken” about this or that “popular” artifact or content, ergo we are entitled to analyze said content to death in search of a meaning that ostensibly reveals something deep about us.

I’m not so sure. Not least because “the market” largely delivers sedatives in the form of forgettable, bite-size entertainment whose primary effect is to numb us. Sure, in the aggregate the fact that we’re all looking to numb ourselves into oblivion is itself a datum that calls for analysis. (Though even then, Christians have a ready-made answer to why it is we do this: it’s called sin.) But often enough X-entertainment will substitute perfectly well for Y-entertainment. In fact, what often seems of world-sharking importance, given its popularity, is forgotten almost the moment it is finished. (Remember Game of Thrones?) Put differently, the species of numbing-fun isn’t especially important. It’s the genus—i.e., what Huxley called “soma” in Brave New World—that matters.

So back to CCM. What I want to suggest as a possibility is that CCM’s popularity as Sunday morning praise music might be an accident of relatively little significance. It might, for example, merely reflect people’s pleasure in singing in church what they sing in the car; and since CCM is what’s on the radio, that’s what we get at church. Perhaps you suppose what’s on the radio (or Spotify) is itself meaningful. For a moment, though, go in for a materialist rather than a market-demand analysis. Perhaps, after the success of CCM in the 1990s, the big corporations that stepped in and made CCM not only Big Business but Global Business were the ones who set the terms for what CCM could sound like and be about going forward. Perhaps they are the ones who are responsible for the sort of lyrics most CCM songs contain: minimal biblical allusion, imagery, and terms, few polysyllabic words, plenty of you-and-me generic love affairs, oodles of spare repetition. Call it the Hallmark-ification of CCM. Hallmark sells. But that doesn’t tell us much. It’s just a known quantity built to sell in a continuous, self-replacing fashion—i.e., in such a way that we forget the best songs from last year so that we stream the best songs from this year, so on and so forth, into capitalist eternity.

Is that an entirely implausible interpretation of CCM these last 30 years? If not, it suggests to me that the popularity, such as it is, of CCM in the worship assemblies of low-church traditions (i.e., non-denom, baptist, evangelical) may not mean that much. In other words, we don’t need to put on our missionary hats in order to learn from this particular phenomenon. We need only put on our economic—perhaps our Marxist—hats to do so.

In short, it is all too believable, in my view, that if other music were on the radio, that’s just what our churches would be playing. Or suppose we had replacement songs—songs quite different in content but that were equally singable, equally catchy, equally popular, even equally kitschy. Suppose that, without anyone’s knowing it, these songs were more or less seamlessly substituted for our current CCM worship. I submit that they would do the job, and people would enjoy them well enough.

I admit that these are hypothetical conjectures. Remember, I didn’t promise much by way of compelling argument, much less a confident thesis. Anyway, this is what Richard provoked in my thinking, for what it’s worth.

*

Two final thoughts, while I’m at it.

1. None of what I’ve said above should imply that, because CCM mostly comprises kitsch, it should be rejected. Though it is true that plenty of CCM isn’t very good, musically or theologically, such a judgment is not per se a judgment about its kitschiness, which in turn is not a judgment on its worthiness either to be used in worship or to be enjoyed by Christians. As Paul Griffiths has rightly written, kitsch is very near to the heart of the church. It is not the church’s primary business to make aesthetes of the baptized. It is to make them little Christs. It is, that is to say, to make them disciples, conformed over time to the holiness of the image of Christ. That may or may not involve aesthetic formation in genuine appreciation of the truly beautiful. (This is where Hans Boersma, in my view, went wrong in his reflection last summer on the role of beauty in the liturgy.) Some of the most faithful saints in church history wouldn’t know the difference between a Rembrandt and a Warner Sallman, or which is to be preferred, Bach or Michael W. Smith. Who cares? The beauty they know is the one that matters: Christ himself. He contains all the beauty they need. And if Christ, in his wisdom and mercy, uses kitsch as means of his grace—and he certainly does, every day of the week and twice on Sunday—then glory to God for one more illustration of his great love for us. In fact, the real miracle is that he loves us snobs.

2. Perhaps this is burying the lede, but the real liturgical phenomenon I want to subject to missionary analysis in modern low-church worship is not the style or content of the songs on offer. It’s the very fact that the songs are the star of the show. By which I mean that, outside of high liturgical traditions, in (very broadly speaking) evangelical Protestant churches, there are two and only two options for why one is there in the assembly on Sunday morning—what I have elsewhere called the inner rationale of worship. It’s either the sermon or the concert. Reformed and Baptist churches typically offer a version of the former: preaching that lasts 30, 40, 50 minutes, not in spite of but in service to both what the church and what its members want out of the sermon. Long, rich, deep saturation in the biblical text and the proclamation of the gospel. But if it’s not the sermon—and my anecdotal observation is that previously sermon-centric congregations and ecclesial traditions are in the midst of an enormous shift here—then it’s the concert.

As I tell my students, think of worship as a pie chart; slice it up by time allotment, and you’ll know pretty quickly what a church cares about, that is, what it thinks worship is all about, why people are there or want to be there or should be there. And in many churches today the majority of the liturgical pie chart is a concert performed by a band. The songs performed by that band are the very songs the faithful listened to on the radio or Spotify on the way to church that morning and on the way home afterward. The Lord’s Supper (if it happens, and if it isn’t optional self-serve in the back) takes little more than a few minutes. There are prayers. Some Bible. A modest sermon. But the main event is the stage. This is where “worship”—which is the word young evangelicals typically use to mean “praise and worship music in big church”—is performed by a group of four to ten individuals.

Of even greater theological interest: In such a church the once-normative priestly role of the pastor, whether he be an actual priest, formally ordained, or “just” the pulpit minister, has vanished completely. Even in the lowest of low churches, only a few decades ago, the priestly character of the preacher-minister-pastor was a given. He would call the church to order, open with a prayer, welcome newcomers, etc., and then serve in a continuously public role throughout the service. He would—again, whether he or his congregation thought of it this way—do what a priest does: represent Christ to the people and the people to Christ. For some Protestants this role might include the blessed sacrament, but for all and sundry it culminated in the preaching of the word. Now, for the communities I am thinking of, no longer. I actually can’t emphasize enough how epochal this change is. It is monumental. It is a wholesale shift from every form of liturgical practice in Christian history of which I am aware, outside of the rare Quaker or equally radical departures from the norm.

I said Richard got me thinking. He did. But I’m not thinking of the songs as such, nor their lyrics or style. I’m thinking of their overpowering centrality in worship, their outright displacement of both word and sacrament from the heart of the liturgy. That calls for comment. Let’s don our missionary hats and figure out what’s going on there. I’m all ears.

Needing Jesus

Start with a man.

A young man, to be more specific. He lives in a small but well-furnished apartment in a gentrified neighborhood of Austin (or Chicago, or Brooklyn, or Portland). He’s 26. He’s single, he’s got friends, and he works a reasonably well-paying job with a tech start-up, a consulting firm, or perhaps a non-profit. He eats good food, reads good books, listens to good music. In general he’s a nice guy. He’s not a jerk. He recycles. He has reliably soft-progressive opinions. He voted for Bernie then for Biden. You’d enjoy his presence if you spent an evening with him.

This young man is not opposed to religion. He’s open to spirituality, even mysticism. One or two friends have dabbled in witchcraft. Though he rolls his eyes at evangelicals, he doesn’t hate Christians. He’s known a few believers who checked the “rational” and “decent” and “not constantly proselytizing” boxes. That said, he’s not particularly drawn to Christian faith, though he doesn’t blame anyone for being so. His life is already in satisfactory order. He’s a nice person, a good person, who treats people well enough. He’s living his one life the best he can. Besides, it’s the churches that are off-putting. Who would volunteer to join one of those?

My impression is that there is a long-standing Christian response to our hypothetical young man. It’s that he’s not “really” happy. Or perhaps he’s not “really” nice/good. Because the only true happiness comes through knowing God, and no one—“not one”—is genuinely good in this life, at least apart from Christ.

Now there’s truth in that, certainly in its desire to change the terms of the discussion: e.g., what makes for happiness? what makes for virtue?

But I think, at least today, perhaps always, that this response is inadequate. Because the young man in question doesn’t live in accordance with Christian (much less Platonic or Buddhist or Marxist or . . .) teaching on the good life. He lives in accordance with a vision of the good to which he is, in fact, approximating quite closely. That vision has its source in late modern capitalist society, and it says that what makes for happiness is health, affluence, autonomy, entertainment, fun, friends, and city life with a decent job and correct opinions. Guess what? He’s got that. In spades. To boot, no one hates him, because he’s not a jerk. So he’s nice on top of having run the gamut—really, the gamble—of the happiness benchmarks. To say in reply, “nuh uh; meet Jesus,” is surely wrong as a strategy. It might be wrong on the merits.

Chesterton writes somewhere that it’s nonsense when Christians say a man can’t be happy in this life without faith. Of course he can. Natural happiness is available to all, at least in principle. What Christianity offers is supernatural and eternal happiness. There’s no doubting that the latter bears on the former. But the former is not obviated by the latter, that is to say, its possibility is not utterly erased either by grace or even by sin.

It seems to me that churches ought to imbibe this truth as deeply as they can. Why? And what would that mean? A few preliminary answers:

First, it would awaken churches from their non-dogmatic slumbers. In other words, churches would stop being scared to talk about—to clarify that so much of the faith comes down to—heaven, eternity, life after death, etc. In my experience many pastors see these and related ideas as very like the enemy, because they turn the eyes of believers to the great hereafter instead of to the here and now. I haven’t yet figured out what’s going on here, apart from a partial misreading of N. T. Wright.

Second, though, there’s a flip side. Because churches are antsy about emphasizing heaven, they focus almost entirely on earth. Sometimes that has some good consequences: social justice, serving the poor, partnering with other institutions to help ameliorate various social ills. But one unintended consequence is implying, at times quite strongly, that the main thing Christians are concerned with is this life, in particular making this life good. At that point you’re not far away from presumptively affirming middle- and upper-middle-class folks’ affluent lives of entertainment and consumption as just about the apex of what one can expect from this world. The marks of that apex include Netflix, exotic food, travel, funny podcasts, household amenities, and lightly held correct political opinions. A church doing its job would hold up a mirror to such persons—of whom this writer is the worst, to be clear, being the chief of sinners—and say, This is not the good life. The good life is the passion of Jesus Christ. Take up your cross and follow him. In following him, you will find death but, afterward, life eternal with God. If a church isn’t doing that, I hesitate to say whether it’s a church at all.

Third, part and parcel with affirming affluent Christians in their lives of leisure and pleasure is affirming as well that they are good people, just like everyone else they know. Bad people, if such there are, include murderers, thieves, rapists, and those neighbors with the wrong political sign in their yard. But that’s not you; how could it be? To which churches ought instead to respond with one great Barthian yelp: Nein! Not only are Christians not “good people” by Christian lights. Church is not about “being good people.” Church is AA for sinners. I go, stand up, and introduce myself by saying, “Hi, I’m Brad. I’m a sinner.” I keep on saying that till the day I die, hoping and trusting in God alone for the grace that might not only heal me, if in fits and starts in this life, but completely, body and soul, in the life of the world to come. That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame, y’all.

Which means, fourth, that we owe the proverbial young man a much better explanation of why he ought to go to church—of why, in short, he needs Jesus. He needs Jesus for the same reason you and I do. Not because we can’t find provisional contentment in daily life; not because can’t be nice people without the Bible. No, he and you and I need Jesus because we suffer from an unchosen, perhaps unconscious, but nonetheless unavoidable and universal condition. We are sinners. We are in bondage. We don’t need to learn how to be nice and we don’t need a dollop of affluence to nudge us toward earthly fulfillment. We are sinsick and we need the cure. The whole world does. For this world is sodden and weighed down with the burden of sin, sickness, suffering, injustice, idolatry, and death. An upper-middle-class life of money, entertainment, and pleasure has no power to relieve us of those things. They are masks and bandages hiding wounds and scars that are open and bleeding, even if—especially if—we don’t know it. And if what we need is Jesus, the church is the place to find him. He’s what you get there, whatever else you get. And he’s enough. The people around you? Every one is unimpressive. A bunch of boring normies. In the words of Nicholas Healy, the church is nothing if not full of unsatisfactory Christians. That’s the point. The church is a house of healing, and it’s full of the sick (even if some of them have convinced themselves they’re well). The thing to realize is that you’re one of them, whether you like it or not. Nor do you have to gin up the energy or emotion or feeling to receive Jesus, who alone is the fix, the chemo, the medicine of immortality for your mortal soul. The church gives him to you, whole and entire, in the blessed sacrament and in the public reading and proclamation of God’s word. Christ visible and audible is both sufficient and objective: he’s enough and he’s real. He’s the only thing worth going to church for; but then, he’s the one thing needful, as Mary knew and Martha learned.

We might not be able to persuade our 26-year old sociable Austinite of his sinsickness of soul; we might not be able, through mere conversation, to convince him of his need, of the dark spiritual cancer within that, if he’s honest, he sometimes feels and worries and wonders about. But at the very least, the church can stop pretending in two ways. It can stop pretending that his life is so very bad, humanly speaking, without Jesus: it’s actually pretty sweet, on the surface. But it can also stop reinforcing that surface, that superficial shallowness, in its own life. The church won’t make him happy; it might make him less happy, at least in one sense. It certainly can’t promise to make him any nicer. That’s not what it exists to do.

But in its sacramental and liturgical common life, the church can offer him Jesus, and through Jesus, hope for a happiness in comparison with which his present modest and unstable contentment is a trifle. That hope transfigures this life, shedding light on our lives as well as on those of our neighbors, uniting us in the knowledge of the singular condition of need and dependence in which we all share.

What Jesus offers, in a word, is truth, and the truth will set you free.

Anti-sacramentalism

[W]hile sacraments have precarious or penultimate status in religion by and large, it is a distinguishing mark of Christianity that it is decidedly and finally sacramental. If God is one thing humans have to communicate with one another, to the saying of which the word’s embodiment is essential, God is the one thing Christians cannot cease to communicate. Insofar as our communities remain faithful to the specific gospel, we are bound to embodied discourse. All anti-sacramentalism in the church is forgetfulness of which God we worship; it is idolatry. The gospel wants to be as visible as possible.

—Robert W. Jenson, Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (1978), 31-32

How the Eucharist effects salvation

Since [the Eucharist] is the sacrament of the Lord’s passion, it contains in itself the Christ who suffered. Thus whatever is an effect of our Lord’s passion is an effect of this sacrament. For this sacrament is nothing other than the application of our Lord’s passion to us. . . . Hence it is clear that the destruction of death, which Christ accomplished by his death, and the restoration of life, which he effected by his resurrection, are effects of this sacrament.

—St. Thomas Aquinas, In Ioannem 6:56, para. 963 (cited in Eugene Rogers Jr., Blood Theology [Cambridge UP, 2021], 192–93)

Digital ash

I'm on the record regarding "streaming" the sacraments, or otherwise digitally mediating the celebration of the Eucharist. With Lent approaching, the question occurred to me: Might churches "stream" Ash Wednesday? That is to say, would they endorse or facilitate the self-imposition of ashes?

Nonsense, was my initial thought. No way. Of course not. Who would suggest such a thing?

But that was naive. Surely, after almost a full year of administering the body and blood of Christ to oneself at home, the imposition of ashes upon one's own forehead at home is but a small leap; indeed, it is not so much a leap as a logical next step. If the blessed sacrament admits of auto-administration via digital consecration, how much more so the rites of Ash Wednesday?

I am prepared, therefore, for digital ash. Which is another way of saying that I am praying: Lord, deliver us from Covidtide.

Covid, church closures, and three rationales for worship

Why do people go to church? Why do churches gather for worship on Sunday morning?

I've been asking myself this question in light of the lockdown and subsequent church closures and shifts to online streaming. And the question isn't theological so much as sociological.

After all, ordinary Christians don't go to church according to highly technical doctrinal articulations of the sort offered by systematic theologians. They have much more banal or quotidian or subjective reasons.

That's not to say those reasons aren't theological. Only that we shouldn't resort to high-level dogmatic language to explain lay folks' behavior or reasoning—or even local congregations' or parishes'. (In the case of the latter, the question isn't so much what they say explicitly but what their organization and enactment of worship "says"; what unspoken logic is embedded, implicit, in their actual liturgical practices.)

Part of the motive for thinking about this concerns the other side of society-wide lockdowns: Why would or should churches reopen? How urgent is the need or desire to do so, at the objective or subjective level? What motivates individual members of churches to delay or hasten reopening?

Here's my answer. I think, broadly speaking, there are three inner rationales for American churches' gathering for worship: sacrament, fellowship, and experience. Let me unpack these briefly.

First is sacrament. This group comprises catholic and liturgical churches ordinarily led by priests: Anglican, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, perhaps Lutheran or even sometimes Methodist traditions. Why does one go to church? Why does the church gather? Among other reasons, to receive the holy sacrament. That is the thing, the sine qua non, of Christian worship. Moreover, one cannot partake of it anywhere else. To quarantine under lockdown is one and the same as to fast from the body and blood of Christ.

Second is fellowship. This group would likely cover every manner of church across nearly all denominations. I leave "fellowship" unqualified, since it can refer simultaneously to communion with God and with fellow believers. But the emphasis is on the fellow-feeling of being gathered together with sisters and brothers in the unity of the corporate body of Christ. Such fellow-feeling is far from a natural property or a mere subjective experience; it is a spiritual and communal fact: this body of believers, right here, assembled in this space, are the sign and site of God's presence in the world. Why gather, then? Among other reasons, to enact and participate in the fellowship that Christ's Spirit makes possible when disciples congregate to worship God and hear from his word.

Third is experience. This group includes those other Protestant and especially "low church" traditions that emphasize the subjective aspect of worship. Certainly these churches are going to trend charismatic and Pentecostal, but they also include decidedly non-charismatic evangelical and non-denominational churches that place a premium on the concert-level quality of the praise band's leading of Sunday morning worship. In many ways these churches put on a weekly performance, and what attendees come for is to experience that performance. (NB: The highest of high-church liturgy is also a kind of performance, indeed a kind of extended drama; so the term itself is neutral, not pejorative.) Believers in these traditions and congregations wake up on Sundays and gather with others in order to experience what can only be had then and there: the communal, emotional, and (sometimes) charismatic energy and power of the Holy Spirit at work in mighty ways to make known the promeity—the for-me-ness—of God's love in Christ.

Suppose this typology is near the mark. What then does it say about church closings and reopenings under Covid?

First, fellowship-churches have the least intrinsic urgency to reopen. Why? On the one hand, because however attenuated, worship from home is a possibility for such communities. On the other hand, because the very thing sought in assembled worship is supremely difficult to achieve in a pandemic; mandatory mask-wearing, social distancing, no hugging or coffee hour or any of the other common ways the body is built up—these all mitigate the possibility of fellowship, both horizontal and vertical, in the extreme.

Second, sacrament-churches have the strongest inner rationale to reopen, indeed never to have fully closed in the first place. Many priests have continued unceasingly to say Mass or lead the Divine Liturgy since March, sometimes alone, sometimes with deacons or assistants, sometimes with half a dozen or so parishioners. Why? Because God ought still to be worshiped in the appointed manner by his ordained servants who stand in for, which is to say represent, the people as a whole. And because there is no digital Eucharist, no streaming sacrament, no self-feeding or solo consecration available to believers at home. (Perhaps, in fact, they view from afar and receive the sanctified elements later that day, distributed by the priest to congregants in their homes.)

Third, experience-churches are in something of a bind. On the one hand, there is a sense in which church members can participate from home: if worship is akin to a musical (or didactic!) performance, then YouTube was made for such things. On the other hand, streaming a concert and attending one are two distinct experiences. So the longer the lockdown lasts, the stronger the desire to return to in-person worship. The question for leaders at such churches is fourfold, however. First, if you build it, will they come? That is, what if your people's cautions about Covid are greater than their subjective desire to have the experience? Second, what of health precautions in worship? It's difficult to have unfettered communal experience of the Spirit in accordance with CDC guidelines (a la fellowship-churches above). Should such precautions go to the wind, given the importance of worship, or no? Third, if a church's particular appeal is the quality of the experience it has to offer, what happens when (a) the experience is no longer there to be had and/or (b) onetime attendees do some digital church shopping and find superior experiences elsewhere? Relatedly, and last, what if such church-shoppers realize the experience isn't appreciably different at home, and that streaming worship from the comfort of one's home—at a time one chooses, in a medium one prefers, while eating a snack or wearing pajamas—is preferable to the analog rigors of actually getting up and going to a physical building with other people?

I know pastors, ministers, elders, and other church leaders are asking themselves these and many other questions. I don't envy them. But it's useful to realize that not all churches are the same; not every Christian or parish has the same inner rationale for gathering or regathering under ordinary, much less extraordinary, conditions. At the very least, it's going to be illuminating to see what the American church looks like on the other side of the pandemic.

New essay published: “Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic"

I've got a new piece published over at Mere Orthodoxy called "Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic." In it I use the work of Neil Postman and Robert Jenson to think about the meaning and "communicability" of sacramental liturgy via mass media and digital technology, then draw some conclusions for streaming worship online today, separated as we are from public gatherings of Christ's body. I also come down pretty hard against celebrating the Lord's Supper during this unusual time of "social distancing." I hope it's useful for others, even and especially those who disagree. Blessings, and stay safe out there y'all.

A clarification on streaming worship

Earlier today I wrote a post reflecting on the phenomenon of churches streaming worship to their members quarantined at home and the difference that catholic and evangelical traditions of worship make for what that means. My brother, who is a pastor, called me up and shared that he thought either that the post was in poor taste or that it was hastily and unclearly written, and might communicate the opposite of what I was intending. So I took it down, and I'll be thinking here in the next few days about whether there's a way to revise or rewrite what I had in mind. But let me say a few things about what I was attempting to articulate, especially for those who read the original post while it was up.

1. I wanted to think theologically about what is happening when Christians live-stream worship, whether that means a sermon, a praise band, mass, or the divine liturgy.

2. I wanted to observe how catholic traditions represent one rationale for streaming worship: the need for a priest and the consecration of the elements—which creates an irony, since those streaming at home cannot partake of the holy sacrament.

3. Whereas evangelical or non-sacramental traditions represent another rationale, lacking the need for an ordained person to preside at worship or consecrate the bread and wine. This suggests a different irony, namely, that such traditions permit households to conduct worship "all on their own," indeed they have long-standing histories of doing so. Which raises the question of why such churches might decide to live-stream worship, and why their members might tune in.

4. Constructively, then, I wanted to encourage these latter traditions to consider looking to their histories of "domestic devotion" and thinking about how to renew them in the minds and habits of their church members. Let a hundred thousand household churches bloom!

5. Critically, though, I wanted to express the concern that when "worship" means "a praise band leading believers in singing," and when live-streaming is mostly centered on that, then low-church traditions and their members have appeared to lose the muscle memory necessary to "do church" together in local, even household, contexts. Which can create, or might reflect, a kind of codependency that is worth recognizing for what it is, which then becomes the condition of the possibility for unlearning such codependency in the coming weeks or months of quarantine.

I hope that helps. Christians, churches, and ministers of every kind are doing all that they can in the face of an unprecedented crisis. Nothing but grace and gratitude to every one of them, including my own.

Theses on preaching

1. The principal subject matter for preaching, always and everywhere, is the triune God of Israel attested and revealed in the good news about Jesus, the Lord and Messiah of Israel. If a sermon could not plausibly be said to have been about that, it was not a sermon.

1.1. This is primarily a substantive point, that is, regarding what a sermon is "about," which doesn't mean that counting the number of times the words "God," "Lord," "Jesus," "Spirit," "Trinity," etc., are mentioned in a sermon is going to do the job. Throwing around those words isn't good enough; indeed, imagine an expertly crafted sermon on the book of Esther that somehow avoided such terms, just like the text in question, while nevertheless rendering God's providential, saving hand throughout.

1.2. Having said that, the point is secondarily grammatical. That is, months and months of sermons unpopulated by liberal use of the sentence structure, "God [verb]," would be deeply suspect. In most sermons God ought to be the grammatical subject as much as he is the subject matter. God is not passive—in Scripture, in the world, in the church, or in the sermon—and he shouldn't be implied to be by the rhetoric of preachers.

2. A sermon is the proclamation of the gospel by an authorized member of the church out of a specific text from Holy Scripture in the setting of public worship among, to, and for the sake of the gathered local assembly of the baptized.

2.1. Proclamation means announcement, attestation, verbal testimony, public witness, a herald's message from the royal throne. A sermon, therefore, is not a lesson. It is not (primarily) teaching, or didactic in tone or content. It is not a pep talk, an inspirational message, or personal sharing. It is not a comedy routine. It is not a TED Talk. It is solemn, joyful, awesome declaration of the gospel of the incarnate Lord.

2.2. The gospel is the good news about Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God become human, crucified, risen, and ascended. Jesus is Immanuel, God with us; the autobasileia, the kingdom himself in person; the God-man who takes away the sins of the world. He is the promised one of Israel, the grace of God enfleshed, the King and Ruler of the cosmos. His name means love, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption. A sermon is not a sermon that does not point, like the outstretched finger of John the Baptist, to this Christ, and to life in him, the life he makes possible.

2.2.1. That the sermon announces the gospel, and the gospel is the good news of friendship with God through the grace of Christ, does not mean that every sermon must be about or mention the name of Jesus. Most should, no doubt, and no sermon should fear mentioning Christ lest he be "imported" into or "imposed" on, say, a text that does not mention him by name. A Christian sermon should not fear to be a Christian sermon. But it is certainly possible to preach a faithful Christian sermon out of an Old Testament text without mentioning Jesus. Why? Because the good news about Jesus is the gospel of Israel's God, whose covenant with Abraham is the very covenant renewed in Christ and extended to the gentiles. God's grace, in other words, and God's identity and attributes, are one and the same across the covenants. To preach the one God just is to preach the gospel.

2.2.2. Having said that, reticence about preaching Jesus from Israel's scriptures is an inherited prejudice worth unlearning in most cases. Moses and David and Isaiah foretold Jesus, as Jesus himself taught. We should take him at his word, and God's people deserve to hear of it.

2.3. A sermon is and ought to be rooted in and an explication of some particular passage of the Christian Bible. This should go without saying. A sermon, however thematic, is not on a topic or theme first of all. The topic or theme arises from the text. A sermon series that does not follow the lectionary and is organized thematically should be very careful so as to commit itself to concrete texts each week.

2.3.1. Expository preaching may be done faithfully, but not all preaching need be expository. The danger of so-called non-expository preaching is that it become unmoored from the text. The alternative danger, however, is mistaking the sermon for a class lesson. But a sermon is not a lecture; the pulpit is not a lectern. A lecture's aim is understanding. A sermon's aim is faith. One can proclaim the gospel out of a text without parsing its every verb and explaining its every historical nuance. But one can do the latter without accomplishing the former. That's the error to avoid.

2.3.2. A sermon is not a book tour. It is not a personal testimony. It isn't time for church business (or, God forbid, budget talk). A sermon isn't practical advice, or suggestions for living your best life now, or ideas about how to parent. It is not electioneering and it is not political advocacy. If you hear attempted preachments that, for example, do not have a biblical text as their source or the living God as their subject or the gospel as the matter of their announcement: then you have not heard a sermon.

2.3.3. Texts preached on should be diverse in every way: narrative, epistle, Torah, psalms, wisdom, paraenesis, apocalypse, etc. For both lectionary and non-lectionary traditions, the harder texts should not be avoided (purity laws, money, war, nonviolence, gender, miracles, politics, justice—whatever challenges you or your audience's preconceptions or sacred cows).

2.4. Preaching is an item of Christian worship. It is an element of the liturgy, the word proclaimed in speech and sacrament. Preaching is not secular. It is not a species of human speech in general. It is the word of God communicated through human words. The preacher is an instrument of divine speech, a sanctified mediator of Christ's saving gospel. The Holy Spirit sanctifies the words of the sermon to be, in all their unworthiness, the medium of the eternal Word that slays and makes alive again.

2.4.1. Preachers and Christian hearers ought to approach the word proclaimed mindful of what is happening. Which is not to make the occasion a somber or rarefied event: a sermon's environment is and ought to be the lively reality of human community, which means nursing babies and fussing kids and coughs and tears and inarticulate moans (offered by, for example, profoundly intellectually disabled persons, who are welcomed by Christ himself to hear him speak). The sermon, in short, is not cordoned off from real life; the assembly need not resemble the silence of a monastery before God can begin to work. But precisely in the midst of and through all such common features of human life together, the Spirit of Christ is making his presence known in the speaking of his holy word.

2.4.2. The long-standing catholic practice of the church is for the proclaimed word to precede the celebration of the Eucharist, which is the climax of the liturgy. Churches descended from the Reformation tend to reverse the order, so that the service culminates in the sermon (sometimes tending, regrettably, to eliminate the meal altogether). The catholic sequence seems right to me, but in either case, there are dangers to be avoided.

2.4.3. Protestants must resist the temptation to make worship talky, so word-centered that it really does become like one long classroom experience, peppered with prayers and a bit of music. The word, moreover, must not swamp the sacrament. Far too many sermon-centered churches, even if they celebrate communion, downgrade its importance through a minimum of ritual, time, and emphasis. The sermon becomes the reason the people are gathered; and if the sermon, then the preacher; and if the preacher, then a mere minister has displaced Christ as the locus of the church's assembly. The gravest theological danger is that the sacramental principle of ex opere operato ceases to apply, practically, to the sermon, because its centrality highlights the need for technical quality, and preachers are no longer trusted to successfully proclaim God's gospel apart from their own worthiness or talents, for those very things become exactly the measure of their faithfulness, and thus their appeal.

2.4.4. Catholics (East and West) must resist the temptation to make the sermon, or homily, a mere prelude, preferably brief, to the Main Event. The gospel is proclaimed in word and sacrament; that need not imply equality in every respect, but it certainly requires a kind of parity, a recognition that each has its proper work to do, under God, for God's people. Ritual is good and liturgy is good, but proclamation of the gospel has the converting power of Christ himself through the Spirit (a sword in the hand of the servant of God, to mortify the flesh and vivify the soul), power to convict of sin, awaken faith, to work signs and miracles, to raise the dead. The centrality of the Eucharist does not logically entail, and must not become an excuse to enact, the liturgical devaluation of the proclaimed word.

2.5. A sermon is an ecclesial event; it exists by, in, and for the church of Christ. Preaching is a practice proper to the baptized. The proper context and principal audience for the word of God is the people of God. In this the sermon is no different than the Eucharist, whose natural home is the gathered community of faith.

2.5.1. The twofold telos of the sermon is the awakening of faith and the edification of the faithful. The sermon, then, is preached primarily to and for baptized believers, not to nonbelievers, visitors, seekers, or pagans. The sermon is not first of all evangelistic or apologetic. Doubtless there have been and are contexts in which sermons ought to be oriented to nonbelievers, but that is not ordinarily, not normatively, what the sermon is or is for. The word proclaimed is for the upbuilding of the saints in via, the (audible) manna alongside the (visible) manna that the Lord provides for the journey through the wilderness to the promised land.

2.5.2. Simplifying sermons so as to be intelligible, week in and week out, to people who know nothing about the Christian gospel or Holy Scripture is unwise and, though it may provide short-term results, in the long-term it is impracticable, ineffective, and damaging. The Lord's people require feeding. Refusing, on principle, never to move beyond milk for infants will leave the people famished and arrested in their spiritual maturity.

3. Preaching in a digital age presents challenges the church hasn't had to face in nearly its entire life. It's a genuinely new world, and the changes are still fresh, historically speaking. Microphones, video, images, projected text, recording, podcasts, broadcasting to multiple sites at once—I don't envy pastors who have to make decisions about such things in real time. But there are principles worth keeping in mind while navigating the new landscape.

3.1. Technology should serve the sermon and the sermon's ends, not the other way around. It should serve, in fact, every one of the theses above. If it does not—if it distracts, if it draws attention to itself, if it becomes an end in itself, if it is superficial, if it is flashy, if it is ugly, if it abets rather than subverts the hyper-technologizing tendencies already gnawing and corrupting the minds and souls of the faithful—then it should be resisted and rejected out of hand.

3.2. Preaching is an oral event. Considered as a natural occurrence, it is essentially a verbal communication spoken by one human being to the hearkening ears of a gathering of other human beings. Technology can aid this occurrence: by amplifying sound, for example, for the large size of an assembly; or, say, for the hard of hearing. It can even transmit the sermon to those unable, for medical or travel or other reasons, to attend the convocation of God's people in person. These are clear ways in which technology serves the orality of gospel proclamation.

3.2.1. Technology can also mitigate the spoken nature of the sermon. Such technology includes videos, extensive use of screen text, involved graphics and images and slide shows, and so on. The question is not whether these are absolutely forbidden in any and all cases. The question is whether they are subjected to rigorous theological inquiry as to their suitability to the essential form of churchly proclamation, rather than their merely instrumental capacities with respect to desired secondary ends (e.g., lack of boredom, capturing youths' attention, entertainment, laughs, viral videos). The medium is not neutral, not an instance of adiaphora; the medium is, literally, the message: the word of God for the people of God. If it isn't a word, if it isn't God's word, then it isn't the preaching of the gospel. And that's the whole ballgame.

3.3. Churches and preachers should be wary rather than eager to use new technologies. Technology takes on a life of its own. It masters its domain. Nor is it neutral: a social media app cannot reinforce good habits of sustained attention, for example, because by its very nature a social media app is meant to colonize your attention and destroy your ability to concentrate for sustained periods of time without interruption. Nor is technology master-less; it serves gods, rabid and hungry and insatiable. Those gods are the market and Silicon Valley. Technology doesn't descend ready-made from heaven. It comes from somewhere, and is made by human beings. Those human beings make what they sell and sell what they make for one reason: money. Letting what they make and sell into the church is a dangerous game to play, even if well-considered and well-intentioned. A pastor ought always to be suspicious rather than sanguine about the power of technology in the life of the church—and such suspicion should bear on its use in preaching.

4. Technique is, hands down, the least important thing about preaching. If a pastor has spent the week dwelling in the biblical text for that Sunday's sermon and, from the pulpit, strives, while petitioning for help from God's grace, to preach from Scripture the good news of God's grace in Jesus on behalf of and for the sake of the upbuilding of Christ's body—then the job is done. In a real sense that is the only criterion for any sermon: was that thing accomplished (even, was its accomplishment sought)? If so, then questions of delivery, eloquence, clarity, form, etc., are all secondary, and of little import. If not, if a truly Christian sermon was not even attempted, then all the good humor, articulateness, pathos, personal anecdotes, intelligence, powers of rhetoric, and the rest don't mean a damn thing.

4.1. Method is a matter of prudence, native talent, gifts of the Spirit, audience, context, training, and many more largely uncontrollable variables. A faithful sermon can be 20, 40, or 60 minutes long (or more); it can be done from memory, with a basic outline, or with a manuscript; it can involve gestures and movements and animation or minimal intonation and emotion; it can encompass the whole spectrum of human passions and virtues; there is no platonic ideal of Faithful Proclamation. (Nor, by the way, is there The Biblical Model of it.) Method depends; don't be a slave to method; don't be a disciple of methodologists.

4.2. Preaching should wear its study lightly while depending on it as the sermon's lifeblood. You can spot a preacher who doesn't study from a mile away. A preacher who doesn't read except for what is strictly necessary. A preacher who doesn't read widely, who doesn't read for pleasure, who doesn't read anything but commentaries (though, please, read the commentaries!). A preacher whose primary—or, God forbid, exclusive—allusions and references are to pop culture. A good preacher doesn't flaunt sources and drop names. But the research that informs a sermon should be discernible in the rich substance of it; should be there to be offered to anyone with further questions following the sermon. "Oh, you had a question about that line? Here are half a dozen books I'd recommend on the topic if you want to go deeper on it..."

4.2.1. Speaking of pop culture: steer clear of it. Nine times out of ten an explicit and/or drawn-out reference to pop culture is a distraction and undermines the aim of the reference. Lovers of pop culture vastly overestimate the universality of their pop culture darlings. Harry Potter may have millions of fans, but here's the truth: half of your church hasn't read the books or seen the films. Moreover, pop culture almost always skews young, and playing for the youth is a capitulation to market pressures. A sermon is catholic: it is meant for the one holy church of God—not some upwardly mobile demographic slice of it. Finally, pop culture references usually denigrate rather than elevate the material. What hath Hollywood to do with Jerusalem? Children's movies and science fiction are silly and insubstantial compared with the holy ever-living Trinity and the sacrifice of Jesus upon a Roman gallows. "When Jesus calls a man he bids him come and die—oh and that reminds me of this funny little anecdote from Finding Nemo..." The juxtaposition is absurd, and though congregants might chuckle or wink, in their hearts they know something great and weighty is being set alongside something weak and shallow. Don't do it.

4.2.2. The pop culture rule is a species of the greater genus of illustrations. (Another species is anecdotes.) Illustrations are certainly useful and have their place. But at least two dangers are worth addressing. One is the tendency for illustrations to swamp the text. Instead of the preacher's experience at the DMV illuminating the real matter at hand, which is the text from Scripture, the opposite happens: God's word becomes a bit player in the larger drama of the preacher's life. The other danger is related: illustrations, consistently used, can come to shape the people's minds in the following way. Instead of Scripture being the relevant, formative, immediate influence on their souls—their hearts, minds, morals, imaginations—Scripture is instead pictured as distant, alien, strange, ancient, foreign, irrelevant. And what illustrations do is bridge that gap, translate that language, assimilate that culture into ours, our time and context and culture and language being the dominant factors. Illustrations and stories and anecdotes and allusions need, rather, to serve the relevance and power and relatability and authority of the scriptural text, not reverse the terms and increase the alienation people (perhaps already) feel about the Bible.

5. All that the preacher does, all that the many facets of the sermon strive to achieve, must be in service of the one thing necessary: to speak human words, rooted in God's written word, that may, by the Spirit's grace, become a conduit for the living and eternal Word, Christ risen and reigning from heaven, to speak himself in person, in his saving presence, to his beloved people, that he might justify and sanctify, equip and encourage them in faith, hope, and love; and that they might, when the words are finished, give glory to God—and say Amen.