I pastor a wonderful church. It is filled with great people who love Jesus and love each other. They respond well to my preaching and are a joy to lead. Our church is made up of contractors, teachers, military personnel and veterans, landscapers, loggers, timber-buyers, social workers, stay-at-home-moms, law enforcement officers, and small business owners.
We are a blue-collar church. In fact, even most of the folks in our church who do not work traditional blue-collar jobs still live with a sort of blue-collar attitude. There are few suits on Sundays and even though our congregation is more diverse today than in the past, the working-class mindset is the predominant vocational mindset of our people. Our parking lot is filled with trucks and SUVs and most Sunday mornings I can count the number of ties on one hand (mine included).
This is my church. These are the people God has called me to shepherd. When I step behind the pulpit (really more of a podium) on Sunday mornings, I’m preaching to the saints of Malvern Hill in Camden, SC. Try as I might, I will never succeed in making them into someone that they are not. Therefore, when I stand up to preach on Sunday mornings, I better preach to my people.
Many pastors have lost their influence and even their jobs because they preached to a fantasy congregation that existed in their heads rather than the real congregation to whom God had called them. They wanted a more educated congregation or a more successful congregation or a younger congregation, so they preached to the congregation they fantasized about. The sermon illustrations were Tim Keller when they should’ve been Tim Tebow and in the process, pastors like this have lost the opportunity to preach to the very real people to whom God had called him.
Writing to the churches of the dispersion, Peter urged the elders to shepherd “the flock of God that is among you” (1 Peter 5:2). In an age of internet stardom, it can be tempting to preach with an eye toward a wider audience or a different congregation, but faithful preaching begins at home. If you neglect to care for the flock that God has given you, you are unqualified to preach to anyone else. Preach to your people.
PREACH TO ALL OF YOUR PEOPLE
It can be easy to identify a particular affinity group or generation in your church for whom you will craft your messages. You may be tempted to preach to those with your own age-group. If you are in a church with a strong senior-adult presence who exerts significant control, it can be very tempting to tickle their ears with sermons and a worship style that is particularly agreeable to them. One of the greatest temptations is to preach only to the people you hope will fill your church.
This is one of the weaknesses of a “seeker-sensitive” approach to ministry. When Rick Warren set out with his team to plant Saddleback Church, they famously crafted a fictional character who depicted the kind of person they were aiming to reach. Their efforts at engagement were focused on reaching “Saddleback Sam,” the proto-typical man who occupied the community surrounding Saddleback Church. Missionally, it is wise to know your community and work to engage with the people within your community. However, no community is monolithic. Even if a church begins as a mono-cultural organism, a healthy church will quickly morph to include all kinds of people—different races, different socio-economic groups, different age groups, married people, single people, and even people from different religious backgrounds. As a result, the sermons can’t all be focused at reaching “Saddleback Sam,” they must be applicable to Sam’s cousin, and girlfriend, and boss, and even Sam’s homeless friend from the gym. Over time, Sam will age and Sam’s situation in life will change. Therefore, even preaching that reaches Sam ten years from now will need to vary from the preaching that first brought him to Christ.
As the pastor, you must work to preach to allof your people. Not every sermon will be equally applicable to every person within the church, but every effort should be made to engage with a wide audience in your preaching. Make sure that your choice of scriptures is broad enough to engage people at every level of Christian growth. Use illustrations that appeal to doctors and lawyers, but to farmers and plumbers as well. Preach to all of your people so that you can build up the entire church.
PREACH TO CONNECT
Preaching to your people involves more than being satisfied with your station in life. Preaching to your people means knowing them well enough to preach sermons that connect with them. The Word of God doesn’t change, but the portions of it that you preach and the way that you preach that word will change depending upon your situation.
When I went to Malvern Hill, they were about ten years removed from a church split. The reasons for the split were varied, but everyone agreed that a pastor had begun to teach the tenants of Calvinism and in so doing had brought division. For reasons that only he can give, the doctrines of grace became a hobby horse that he continued to ride, even as he split the church. By the time the ugly scene ended, there was little grace to be found. The church was divided and nearly devoid of leadership.
Knowing this about the history of the church, I didn’t set myself to preach on the TULIP in my first twelve months. In fact, I avoided those issues like the plague for the first eighteen months or so of my tenure. However, as I prayed through this division and saw the lingering effects in conversations with people about that very hard time in the church’s history, I became convinced that we needed to stop running from the pain, and face it head on.
Our church was about evenly balanced theologically between those who would define themselves as Calvinists and those who would define themselves as anything but a Calvinist. As a result, biblical words like election and predestination were off limits in teaching and conversation. A conversation about eternal security could be disastrous (the accepted terminology was “once saved, always saved”). I felt like I walked on eggshells in my sermons and I didn’t believe the church could fully heal until she dealt with the pain. As a staff, we prayed and I began a sermon series through Ephesians. I still remember the look of concern and pain on one of our pastor’s face the Sunday morning I broached the doctrine of election.
What happened? Nothing monumental that day. I didn’t get fired and I don’t remember an altar flooded with people praying and repenting of sin. What I do know is that we began to heal. We began to bring the skeletons out of the closet. The pain was brought into the light and the gospel began to work its healing power. But, that was only possible because I knew my church and I knew her people. I had listened to their pains and their struggles. I knew that they wanted to move on, but I also knew that they were afraid. They had seen the division and the strife. They needed someone to lead them to the healing waters of the Jordan.
Preaching to connect doesn’t just mean preaching with the correct vocabulary or culturally appropriate illustrations. Those things matter, but they probably don’t matter nearly as much as getting to know the people you are preaching to well enough to be able to speak into the real life of the church from the pulpit, and not the imagined church of your fantasies. Preaching to connect also means preaching with enough patience to wait until the time is right. Had I tried to lead our church through the doctrine of election in my first two months, I wouldn’t have survived. It wouldn’t have been their fault, it would have been mine.
PREACH TO THEIR HURTS
We often focus on the hard-heartedness and stubbornness of the Hebrew people as their reason for not listening to Moses. However, in Deuteronomy 6:9, the Bible tells us that “They did not listen because of their broken spirit and harsh slavery.” God has sent you to a people and they are not a blank slate. Just as you come to them with baggage, so too they come to you with baggage. Consider your church’s collective history and the individual stories of those to whom you preach. They may be hesitant to hear your preaching, they might not initially be the best congregation to preach to. But, maybe they aren’t as mean-spirited and hard-hearted as they appear. Perhaps they’ve been burned. Maybe they’ve been beat up by pastors and preachers or maybe they’ve just been beat up by life.
Preach to the real people in the pews. God has called you, not only to be their preacher, but to be their pastor. You are their shepherd and the shepherd who will bind up his broken sheep must first know their ailments. So too, you must get to know the pains and the struggles of your people. Investigate their stories, and pray for wisdom as to how God may have you preach into these stories.
There is a balm in Gilead, and you can take them there, but only if you will shepherd them.
