Darrin is the Lead Pastor of The Journey in St. Louis and Vice President of The Acts 29 Network. He recently completed degree work for a Doctor of Ministry from Covenant Seminary with a focus in preaching to contemporary culture.
Rethink Mission: What makes a sermon or talk “missional?”
Darrin Patrick: I think a missional sermon is comprehendible to the people that the sermon is being preached to. Comprehendible meaning not just clear but that the metaphors used, even if they are Biblical metaphors, are explained in a way that people can understand them. The illustrations evoke memory… it’s stuff that’s in their common thought processes and culture. They get it. It connects them. It elucidates the sermon so that they can get handles to grab onto the text, the concept, or point.
RM: Is it helpful to talk about sermons this way? Why can we not simply be content with a thoroughly “biblical” sermon?
DP: Two reasons: the nature of the Bible and the sermons in the Bible. The Bible itself is quite possibly the greatest work of contextualization, because every book written was written to a specific people at a certain time in a certain place. The bible utilizes cultural raw materials to teach unchanging truth. You get into the New Testament and you see clearly that Matthew was written to Jews so that they could understand the gospel. Mark [was written] to Romans, Luke to Gentiles, John to Greeks. And then you get into the epistles and all of those are written to a specific situation that the church is dealing with. The biblical theology is brought through the specific context. The nature of the Bible itself is missional, it’s contextual.
But also, the preaching, the sermons in the Bible; the prophets were always appealing to cultural milieu in their sermons. Jesus would appeal to common metaphors: plants and seeds and mountains and rivers. He wouldn’t say mountains and rivers and plants and seeds if there were not mountains, rivers, plants and seeds in the culture. He’s appealing to that which was around him. It wasn’t that he was just using abstract cultural references, he was using specific cultural references from the culture he was trying to preach in.
You get into Paul’s sermons – he does the same thing. He changes his sermon to meet his different hearers. In Acts 13, he uses scripture to preach to the Jews. In Acts 14, he uses agrarian metaphors to preach to the pagans. In Acts 17, he uses philosophy to preach to the intellectuals.
RM: Does missional preaching clash with biblical preaching – meaning are those two things at odds?
DP: I think they can be. The whole issue is: what is the authority base? Is the authority base culture or scripture? When the authority base becomes culture, we simply use the Bible to back up what the culture is saying. That is the slippery slope away from trusting the sufficiency of scripture. But if the scripture is the authority base, then all we’re doing with cultural references and missional preaching and contextualization is simply helping people understand through common experiences, common understanding, common ideas what the scripture is saying. It’s an on-ramp to understand the scripture.
On the other side you can be so “biblical” that you simply say, “We’re going to preach the truth; I’m going to preach the word, and I’m not going to worry about culture. People are going to have to understand it.” And I think that is patently unbiblical. Sounds very pious and very biblical, but I think it’s patently unbiblical. Because that’s not the way the sermons in the Bible are. Period. And in church history, when we look at good preaching, revivalistic preaching, we look at the Great Awakenings, we look at the Puritans, we look at Spurgeon, and church fathers – they all alluded to cultural issues. Whether it was heresy and they were trying to fight that – that’s a cultural issue – whether they appealed to the theater and used that. Down through the ages the church has always done that. To think that we exist in a culture where we can just be amissional because we’re preaching the Bible, betrays the Bible and church history.
RM: How important would you say a knowledge of culture is to your own preaching?
DP: I think there are degrees to it. The line between using culture to inform your preaching and using culture to entertain and distract yourself is thin. A lot of preachers in the name of, “I want to be culturally relevant,” are way more informed by culture than the scripture and they spend a lot more time watching movies and listening to music. You look at their blogs and it’s always about the new band and the new whatever, but you don’t hear a lot of biblical insight. I think it’s very dangerous; to try to be aware of culture is a very dangerous thing.
But, for me, I try to read. I’m interested in sports for instance; I don’t have to work at that one. I don’t really ever have to watch another sporting event to be able to use sports; I’ve got that. But other issues, I don’t know – so I have to read on those things. I think the most important thing is not to watch everything and go to everything but to be well read and know what’s going on. That protects you from getting sucked in to entertainment and escapism and distraction from the gospel.
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Part 2 on contextualization is here.
Part 3 on people is here.
The heart of this website are the Missional Q&A Interviews, updated weekly, where church leaders like you talk about the issues they face on a daily basis.
Tags: preaching
I like your site design and enjoyed reading this interview. I agree that the key is to be in the world – meaning be aware of what is going on in the culture and use examples that relate to people’s everyday lives – but not of it. Too many pastors either ignore cultural realities totally and focus exclusively on the Bible without teaching how to apply it to situations in modern life, or focus on entertaining people and only telling them what they want to hear (i.e. God wants you to be rich, which is clearly NOT biblical) while avoiding texts that make people uncomfortable by challenging them to help the poor, love their enemies, etc.
Anyway, good luck with your site and your ministry. Readers who are pastors may also want to check out my website for clergy, http://www.betruetoyourself.com, and subscribe to my free newsletter.
Great post! Like so many areas of Christian life, balance is critical. Everything must come from the authority of the Word, but it must be translated and lived out so that people can hear and see it.
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