Proclaimer Blog
The sermon: a cultural oasis in a Christian’s week
This is from David Wells’ recently published God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-Love Reorients our World:
‘the rapidity with which the whole of the media-filtered, technology-delivered world is changing. It never stands still long enough for us to take our bearings on it. What is important and what is not, what is weighty and what is ephemeral, what is tragic and what is trivial, meet us with about the same intensity. It becomes hard, sometimes, to tell which is which. Our world blurs amid the rapid flow of facts, factoids, images, voices, laughter, entertainment, and vapid commentary. We slowly lose the capacity to see the connections between things. Life seems to have no shape. It looks like a sequence of fast-moving random experiences with no center and little meaning. Not only does a Christian worldview disappear; the very capacity for such a thing becomes tenuous. How then will we hear this other music from another place [i.e. the voice of God]? How will we hear the Drummer’s beat above the sounds of this world?’ (pp.184-85).
In this cultural context, simply to stand and proclaim Christ from the Scriptures every week uninterrupted for a stretch of time, relatively free of technological gimmick and change of image or topic every thirty seconds, will itself have a cultural impact. It will be an oasis in the week for the Christian, in which the blur of information-flow and entertainment-options is deliberately stopped, and in which that which is most significant in the world is relentlessly portrayed to them.
Indeed, if Wells is right that our world makes it especially difficult for people to give meaningful shape to their lives, then weekly preaching is likely also to be the crucial place in which, over the weeks and years, a coherent Christian worldview is built up in their minds and souls. And, at the risk of getting too grandiose, it may well increasingly be, as a result in part of such preaching, that young Christians find that they can articulate and defend a consistent worldview in a way that very few of their unconverted peers can.