Rethink Mission: Inspiring gospel-centered missional churches

Two weeks ago, we started a three part interview with Darrin Patrick on missional preaching. This week we conclude with a discussion on what groups of people in your church your preaching should address.

Rethink Mission: As you prepare, do you speak with a specific person or group of people in mind?
Darrin Patrick: First, I think about my own objections to what I’m saying. I think about my resistance to the text and how I try to avoid obeying this and my arguments.

I think about men. If you’re able to preach to men in a way that they can hear it, everybody’s going to hear it.

And then, with all the sexual abuse statistics, you have to think about people who are just sexually broken and abused and sinned against. When you look at the stats and you’re looking out there, every service there’s potentially hundreds of people who have been victims of sexual abuse.

And I think about all those people who didn’t experience that but had friends who experienced that. I think about the people who are going to take this message that I’m preaching to their friends. Is what I am saying transferrable? Is it downloadable? Can what I’m saying be passed on to people who are not there so we can make people in our church missionaries in that way.

RM: Talk to me about preaching to men. How do you do it?
DP: I think the direct piece is huge. If you look at what speaks to men, if you look at what guys are in to –  depending on their political persuasion, if they’re politic guys, they’re watching Keith Olbermann on the left, they’re watching Bill O’Reilly on the right, they’re listening to Rush Limbaugh on the right, they’re listening to Bill Maher. On the sports side, they’re watching Jim Rome; the polls show that’s what they like. What is the common thread with all those guys? Direct, kind of sarcastic, not afraid to offend, politically incorrect. I think there has to be an element of that in your preaching. You can say, “You’re just trying to go with the cultural current.” Well, those things are biblical. The prophets are sarcastic, Jesus was sarcastic, Paul was sarcastic; obviously they were all direct. Obviously they were all politically incorrect; they died martyrs’ deaths.

A self-deprecating use of humor is helpful, to get guys not to take themselves so seriously. To counter some of the macho pride issues, self-deprecating humor seems to help that. If they can laugh at me, they can laugh at themselves. If they can see that I’m not taking myself that seriously but I’m God’s word seriously, maybe they’ll do the same.

RM: You mentioned humor. Tell me about your use of humor in sermons.
DP: We’re not stand up comics as preachers. What people are often left with, more than the text, is the punch line. That bothers me. I get that on one level. In one sense, if it helps people connect to the text, I get that. But I hear a lot of sermons that are more like stand-up routines, and that concerns me. But on the other side of it, humor is the universal language. When you see people from other cultures, even other languages – the connection is made when humor is present and people are laughing, you let your guard down.

RM: As pastors are preparing sermons, what other groups of people do they need to be aware of?
DP: It’s no different than Jesus: who did Jesus preach to? He preached to the broken, people who were sexually confused, people who have been abused, people who are just undone one way or another.

But then he also preached to the Pharisees. In every church, you’re going to have people who lean that way, they’re going to try to use rules to reduce God; they’re going to be stricter than God about what he commands and permits. You’ll always have those folks.

You’re always going to have Sadducees who are going to want to blow off the authority of scripture and rewrite that and have their own agenda about trying to religious. So, you’re going to have the right, you’re going to have the left, and you’re going to have the hurting.

And then you’ve got leaders in your church, so you’ve got disciples. They’re in, they’ve bought in, they are for the church, they’re for you, and you’ve got to preach to them as well.

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Read part 1 and part 2 of the interview 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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 8:26 am and is filed under Missional Q&A. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.