Thoughts on Plug-n-Play Preaching & “Relevancy”

I recently received another promotional for a sermon provider service. It promoted such sermons as: Winter Olympics, Promise of Spring, Narnia, World Series Fever, Patriot Sunday, etc., etc. There were a few more traditional titles such as Easter series, Pentecost Sunday, and Thanksgiving... and it prompted my thinking. I realize that often times some of the hardest part of preaching is getting started and sometimes we can use some help with an outline, or someone’s thoughts that is the spark that helps to ignite the fire (of course expositional preaching through a book of the Bible does help alleviate this, but those special days of Christmas, Palm Sunday, Resurrection Sunday can still be a challenge). It seems to me that too often the plug-n-play preaching approach short circuit’s the message. It really isn’t very glamorous doing the study to produce a sermon that ministers to the people to whom God has called us to feed. Sermon preparation is just plain hard work. But picking up a devotional or a sermon someone else has preached and just dressing it up a bit and preaching it isn’t that effective. I have sat in on some of those. It is like serving fast food. It can be dressed up a bit, garnished a little, put on some fancier serving platter, but it is still fast food. It hasn’t really run through the heart and soul of the preacher first.

Another related concept is the phrase, “we need to make the Bible relevant.” The more I reflect on that, the more inaccurate I believe the phrase is. We don’t need to make the Bible relevant ... the Bible IS relevant. We may hide it’s relevancy with our preaching and teaching, but the problem is not the relevancy of Scripture, the problem is us. I believe that is the reason someone can pick up the Gospel of John, and come to a saving knowledge of who Jesus Christ is just by reading the text.

It seems to me that we can hide the relevancy of the Bible to daily living by trying to be so relevant (first paragraph) that Scripture is distorted and we make it irrelevant (or worse, inaccurate).