Beware Tuneless Preaching...Continued from page 3

Majoring on communication techniques, at the expense of encountering God’s holy glory and mystery, such preaching justifies itself with doing church business by securing bottom-line results of numbers and finances. He sums up:

There is a widespread view that preaching is no longer intrinsic to the worship of God since, for many, worship has been reduced to the matter of individual “religious” preference or taste – a marketed “style” that functions instrumentally to promote the growth of the church or individuals rather than to create and transform a people for the praise and glory of God.¹⁰

Too much contemporary preaching and worship misses out the Trinity. In a provocative analysis, James B. Torrance sharply contrasts what he terms unitarian and trinitarian practices of worship. Of course, orthodox preachers rigorously reject any association with the formal teaching of Unitarianism, that God is one person only, with unacceptable denial of the divinity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. However, Torrance demonstrates that ironically such preachers may actually practice forms of worship that are Unitarian, because they are closed to Christ’s continuing work and the Holy Spirit. Too much worship is made by human hands for all too human purposes.

Much contemporary worship by its human orientation lacks awareness that it should be participating in God’s grace, flowing from the Father, through the Son by the Spirit, and returning by the Holy Spirit through the Son, to the Father. Human “unitarian” worship:

has no doctrine of the mediator or sole priesthood of Christ, is human-centered, has no proper doctrine of the Holy Spirit….we sit in the pew watching the minister “doing his thing” exhorting us “to do our thing” until we go home thinking we have done our duty for another week.”¹¹

Inevitably, if there is no conviction that God enables worship to happen through participation in relationships between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, preachers are likely to opt out of trinitarian language and exhort hearers “to do their thing.” In some contemporary churches preaching does seem to offer moralizing sermons that concentrate on individual needs - giving good advice instead of Good News. “Evangelical preaching is so obsessed with the need to apply everything that we are shifting into just another moral religion”.¹²

Paralleling this, worship leaders can also be caught up in “doing their thing,” planning services that appeal to popular taste, deploying marketed “styles” with an eye on the competition. Such worship leading inevitably focuses more on benefits for believers, than on disclosure and worship of the Triune God. When Marva Dawn call worship “a royal ‘waste’ of time”¹³ because its glory-giving is utterly for God’s sake and not ours, pragmatists really do deem it to be a waste of time! So style often seems to triumph over substance and self-interested, self-styled, worship packages prevail over God-focused trinitarian worship.