In part one of this post I wrote:

For many parishioners  how their pastor gets his sermons has an aura of wonder. How does he, week after week, come up with sermons that speak directly do them? Where do these sermons come from? How are they prepared?

Many Christian sects, and certainly every evangelical/fundamentalist sect, believes that pastors are called by God to preach the gospel. Pastors are ordained by the particular church or denomination they are a part of. Ordination is the church or denomination saying “we recognize God’s calling in your life.” 

The Bible is a supernatural book, given to humankind by a supernatural God. God called men read and study the supernatural book given to them by a supernatural God and then stand before the people they pastor and proclaim “thus saith the Lord.”  The pastor is viewed as a person who has a direct line to God.

Most evangelicals/fundamentalists believe in the priesthood of the believer. They believe that every Christian has direct access to God.  As with many things in the Christian church the stated beliefs are often contradicted by what actually goes on week by week in the local church.  Instead of directly accessing God many Christians  expect the pastor to be their go-between. They are very much like the Israelites who feared God and told Moses they wanted him to go to God on their behalf.

This supposed intimate connection with God plays a big part in how the average parishioner views the pastor’s sermons. In their eyes the sermon is a direct message from God. The pastor is just God’s mouthpiece. God could have used an ass but he used the Pastor. (until the pastor upsets them then they are an ass)

When the pastor stands before the church body the people have an expectation that they are going to hear from God. The pastor expects God to use his sermon to speak to the heart of every person. He desires God to use his sermon to reclaim the backslidden and save the lost.

Preaching is not just an intellectual exercise. There is a huge  emotional component in preaching, not only with the pastor but also with those who are listening to the sermon.  Emotion is often ascribed to God moving, God working, God calling.

I have preached in countless services where it was evident God was in the midst. The emotional level was high. People were weeping. People were coming down the aisle to the altar to pray. It was evident to everyone that God was using my sermon to bring repentance, renewal, and revival.

Any cursory reading about the First and Second Great Awakening  will reveal that emotions played a huge part in the success of the awakenings.  The evangelical/fundamentalist movement can trace its lineage, to some degree, back to the First and Second Great Awakenings.

Emotions have always played a significant part in any significant move of God. (as revivals, awakenings and movements are called)  This should not be surprising since  we are, by nature, emotional beings. It is sad that emotions are downplayed in many evangelical circles and treated as having the potential to lead a person astray. The more some sects and churches focus on “this we believe” the less they believe emotion has an important part in the Christian experience.

What we have here is a perfect  storm.  A supernatural God, a supernatural book, a God called, church ordained pastor, and a congregation of emotional  human beings. If the pastor is good at his craft he knows how to use emotions to his advantage.

The pastor is not necessarily manipulating the emotions of the congregation on purpose. Most pastors grew up in the Church. By the time they start preaching they have sat in countless church services, and heard hundreds of sermons. Their understanding is how to preach is shaped by the church environment they grew up in.

The longer a pastor is in the ministry the more he is keenly aware of what “works”. He becomes more discerning about what his congregation “needs”. What “works” is coupled with what the congregation “needs” and the result is often described by parishioners as God speaking to their heart.

The fundamental problem here is that it is impossible to know whether or not the “feeling” a person has is God. The deeply affected person BELIEVES it is God but they must accept such a claim by faith.

A recent commenter  on a different post wrote:

I don’t believe in Jesus because of arguments for the trustworthiness of the Bible. I believe in Him because I have a relationship with Him- I have heard His voice and I feel His presence. And I am aware that sounds vague and illogical, but I also know that no one can invalidate my experience.

This comment goes to the heart of the difficulty in trying to present an alternative viewpoint to Christians. They know what they have experienced. They were were there when Jesus saved them and they know that their experience is real.  It is impossible to move a person off their subjective experience. Faith can not be disproved by facts.

As I look back on the many years I spent in the ministry I have come to see that I used my sermons to manipulate people. (and I am not using the word manipulate in a negative sense) Spend enough time with a group of people and you will learn their strengths and weaknesses. Eat meals with them, pray with them, visit in their homes, educated their children and you will certainly know a lot about the people you pastor.

With this knowledge at hand sermons can be crafted to “help” the congregation.(sermons are never preached in a vacuum) It should come as no surprise that people  think that the pastor is preaching right to them. This is not God speaking to the particular parishioner as much as it is a human being that has good discernment skills, skills finely tuned by interacting with thousands of  people over the course of many years, speaking to them.

Do I think God was using me to speak to people? At the time I did. However, I now know that what people were responding to was a well crafted sermon preached by a sincere man who knew the needs of his congregation well. I knew the power of emotions and used them to God’s my advantage. I heard preacher after preacher do the same thing. I was not an anomaly. I was a young man raised in an environment that put a premium on powerful preaching.  I was encouraged to study the great preachers of the faith, Charles Spurgeon, DL Moody, Billy Sunday,John Wesley and Charles Finney. When I became a Calvinist I studied the great Calvinist preachers, men like Jonathan Edwards, Martyn Lloyd Jones, George Whitefield, and Rolfe Barnard.  The way I preached  was a result of the environment I grew up in and the men I considered my role models.

Because of the power ascribed to sermons there is a real danger of abuse. The sincere pastor can turn into a huckster who desires to advance his own agenda. Even well meaning pastors can do this. Have problems in the church? Have people upset with a decision you made? Preach on pastoral authority. Offerings down? Preach on tithing.  Want a raise? Preach on the laborer being worthy of his hire, or an elder being worthy of double the salary. Better yet, get an Evangelist to come in and preach on these things. That way you can blame the Evangelist if people are upset about the sermon subject matter.

Liberal or mainline pastors find discussions like this quite amusing. For the most part they see the ministry as a profession, one used by God, but not in the way Evangelicals/Fundamentalists think it is.  Most liberal/mainline pastors have far more education than their evangelical/fundamentalist counterparts. And, as a rule their sermons reflect it. Dry, boring, meaningless exercises in intellectual nothingness. What happened to their passion, their emotions? If you sit in a liberal/mainline church and your pastor preaches with passion you have a special person as your pastor.

Preaching without emotion, without passion is not worth listening to.  A preacher ought to give 100% of himself to the sermon. I can appreciate a person’s passion without necessarily agreeing with their message. I don’t believe God exists but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a well crafted, passionately delivered sermon.

I have visited a number of churches over the past eight years. Most of the sermons I heard were forgettable and sadly a lot of them were downright awful.  I did hear a few pastors preach that took their calling seriously. It was evident that they  worked very hard to deliver a good sermon. Regardless of what I believe about Christianity, I admire any person who works hard at their craft. I may despise the message but I can still appreciate the way the message is delivered.

For many parishioners  how their pastor gets his sermons has an aura of wonder. How does he, week after week, come up with sermons that speak directly do them? Where do these sermons come from? How are they prepared?

The focus of this post  is on pastor’s who prepare their own sermons. I have little respect for lazy-ass preacher’s who rarely, if ever ,spend any time crafting their own sermons. Week after week they rip off someone else’s sermon and pass it off for their own. They scour the internet for sermons to preach. They subscribe to sermon clubs that provide them with new sermon material. They buy sermon outline books or lectionaries and use them to prepare sermons that they then pass off as their own.  In any other profession they would be considered a thief.

A few years back my family and I visited for a number of weeks a local nondenominational church. On our second visit I began to sense something was not right about the pastor’s sermons. He quoted a lot of Scripture but his quotations were from various Bible translations. Lots of them. I thought “hmm……there is something about this that seems familiar.” I went home and consulted the mind of God (aka the internet) and my suspicions were clearly confirmed. The pastor was ripping off the sermons of Rick Warren and preaching them as his own word for word.  We visited this church half a dozen times and the pastor never preached a sermon of his own. Ironically, one Sunday they asked for testimonies and several people stood up and praised Jesus for how wonderful the pastor’s sermons were. I thought “if they only knew.”

We visited the Episcopal Church numerous times over the past 5 years. When the parish priest was there the sermons, as a rule, were excellent. However there were many Sundays that the priest was not there and on those weeks the sermons ranged from Ok to absolutely dreadful. The worst ones were the sermons that were taken from books, magazines, or lectionaries and read to the congregation. (reminded me of some of the worthless college classes I took where the professor read the textbook to us)  The justification for the reading sermon was “hey, it is better than nothing.” No, it wasn’t. 

In 1984 I had a pastor I knew come to the church I was pastoring to hold a week of special meetings. He asked me what I wanted him to preach. He then proceeded to list off numerous sermons of other preachers he had memorized. Famous sermons by noted preachers. I was shocked by his willingness to rip off the sermons of others and pass them off as his own. I told him I would rather he preach his own material. Little did I know this was a common practice.

Many pastors recycle their sermons. The average Baptist pastor changes churches every 2-3 years. No need to craft new sermons. Just reuse the sermons you preached before.  If they worked well in Ohio surely they will work well in Texas.

I remember one well known, Bob Jones associated, evangelist who kept long silver cases filled with recordings of his previous sermons. After doing this for many, many years he would just pick a recording to re-familiarize himself with the sermon and then preach it that night. Rarely did he preach “new” material.

One more story. Years ago I  was a manger of a Christian bookstore. Over the course of my employment I came into contact with dozens od pastors from a variety of denominations. I was astounded by how many pastors bought sermon outline books or lectionaries.  I was beginning to wonder if any preacher crafted his own sermons?

Now, I don’t necessarily blame the pastor for using  bought sermon outlines or reading verbatim from a lectionary. Truth is, there are a lot of pastors who lack good communication skills and, in many cases, they received little training in proper sermon construction and delivery.

In college I took a speech class and a homiletics class.The speech class was pretty much a waste of time and very little of the instruction transferred to the art of  preaching a sermon. In fact, my homiletics teacher told us on day one that we needed to forget everything we were taught in speech class. (good advice BTW) Preaching a sermon was all about the text and the pastor’s ability to passionately preach the text. Outlines and illustrations were key to successfully delivering a sermon. (or any public oration)

Years ago I was acquainted with a pastor who had horrible preaching skills. I mean horrible. He was a Bible college graduate and didn’t even know how to make a sermon outline. I tried to show him how to do so but he had a hard time understanding the whole process. His approach was simple: read the text, chase the rabbits, bring it back to Jesus. pray, and give an altar call.

There are a lot of preachers like the man mentioned above. Poorly trained or lacking the requisite skills necessary to effectively communicate with others through a preached sermon, they go from church to church killing everything they touch. They may be great a “people person” but if they can not preach passionately and effectively they will do more harm than good.

Far too many men end up in the ministry because someone told them that their gift of gab made them a great candidate for the ministry. Truth is, running on at the mouth is not a gift at all, especially in the pastorate. All of us have heard those sermons that drone on and on and on. Don’t blame the preacher. Blame the person who told him he would make a great preacher.

BTW, what I have said here also applies to other functions in the church like Sunday School teacher or bible study leader. I have had to sit through more aimless, heresy ridden, ill-prepared Sunday School classes than I care to remember. I remember, years ago, one Sunday School teacher telling me that he studied his Sunday School lesson on Saturday night while he was sitting in the bath tub. 

Here’s my point. The ability to preach and teach is a gift (not in a supernatural sense)  just like the ability to do virtually anything else humans do. Each of us have things we do that come easily to us. We enjoy it. And if we are smart we will further develop the things we enjoy. Far too many people spend their lifetime trying to become things they will never be good at. (yes grandma  ended the sentence with an at)   It is a lie to tell  everyone they can be anything they want to be. The sky is not the limit and no not everyone can become President. A lot of men enter the ministry lacking the requisite skills necessary to be a good pastor. They simply are in the wrong profession BUT since they believe GOD called them to the ministry they refuse to admit that maybe they are in the wrong profession.

Many pastors would have you believe that their sermons  come directly from God. I know I believed this for many years. I was certain God was leading and directing me to preach on a particular text. I believed that God was guiding me through the delivery of the sermon all the way to the altar call.  I was simply a mouthpiece for God.

As I look back over the thousands of God inspired sermons I preached I can now see who it was that was guiding me. It wasn’t God. It wasn’t the Holy Spirit. It was me. Through my own thought process I decided what the church needed to hear. Sometimes I had an agenda that I wanted to advance and what better way to do so than to couch my agenda in “thus saith the Lord.”

Preaching came easy for me. I loved the intellectual aspect of preparing the sermon. I loved to read and study, preparing my mind for delivering the sermon. I devoted hours of study to virtually every sermon I  preached. (though I was quite comfortable preaching extemporaneously) I loved the focus and the attention that preaching brought. (and it is no surprise that most preachers are narcissistic to one degree or another)

My preaching is one the things that makes my defection from the Christian faith troubling for so many former parishioners. As Baptists we believed……once saved, always saved. (eternal security, perseverance of the saints) So here I am……….now an atheist. What do they do with me? Either I am still saved but backslidden or I never was saved.

More and more people are inclined to think that I was never saved to start with. Of course this leaves them with another dilemma to deal with. My sermons.

You see, I have been criticized for a lot of things, and justly so, I did as a pastor. I was arrogant, narrow minded, and rarely put up with dissent. As I have stated many times before, I ran off a lot of good people. That said, few people have ever criticized my preaching. For the most part the people I pastored found my sermons well crafted, worth listening to, and, at times, quite entertaining.

Hundreds of people made public professions of faith as a result of one of my sermons. Lives were “changed”  and people were “delivered”. If I was never saved what does that say about all the “fruit” I gathered over the course of 25 years in the ministry? If by their fruits ye shall know them, surely I “proved” that I was a great fruit grower?

I have no doubt that I could, even as an atheist, go to a church and preach sermon that everyone would marvel in. They would think GOD was speaking through me or using me to speak to their heart. What if I then told them I was an atheist? How would they explain their response to my oratorical gem?

Truth is good preaching, as with all public speaking, is a learned skill. Good speakers are generally gifted in this area. Our two latest presidents are case in point. Forget the party affiliation or platform  for a moment. Who would you rather listen to? Barack Obama or George W Bush? Only Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh would dare say Bush.

Good preaching  moves people to go beyond themselves. Good preaching inspires and motivates. (i.e. Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream speech) 

And this is why preachers who excel at their craft are so dangerous. The potential for abuse and manipulation is great. Far too often parishioners check their mind at the church door. When the pastor preaches they soak up his words like a sponge. If they are not careful and cognizant of the potential of manipulation they can easily be led astray.

I still like hearing a well crafted sermon. I respect people who attempt to excel at what they do. Sadly, I have heard more sorry, pathetic, poorly crafted, rabbit trail sermons than any one person should ever have to hear.  I feel  sad for church members who have to sit under this kind of preaching week after week.  In fact, they sit under it long enough that they begin to think that their preacher’s pathetic sermons are the norm.

Why I am being so hard of preachers? Why should I, a card-carrying atheist, give a rat’s ass, over the quality of sermons in the Christian church.?

First, preaching is what I did for so many years and I still like to talk about it.

Second, I think people should do what they do well. I hate half-assed wherever I find it, whether it be in the pulpit or the local fast food restaurant.

Third, I realize that the world is always going to be predominantly religious. If so,  I think people of faith should have leaders that thoughtfully and honestly teach them the dogma of their particular religion.They deserve to have leaders who are passionate about what they do. (sadly, in many denominations, the higher up a man goes in the denominational hierarchy the more worthless he becomes. Does anyone consider any of the popes a great orator?)

I know this post is pretty pointed. I am of the general opinion that America is awash in mediocrity. It seems everything has been turned into an audition for American Idol. People are told told they can be what ever they want to be and so they become what they want to be rather than what they ought to be. Result?  School teachers who can’t teach. Retail workers without basic people skills.  Porn stars without the appropriate skills to do what porn stars do. and Yes, preachers who can’t preach.