Musings on Spiritual Matters

As I was learning to preach, I would hear advice from preachers.  One of the pieces of advice was to “not be issue oriented.”  This meant not to ride hobby horses, just preach the gospel, and avoid pointless arguments.  This seems easy, but in reality it is hard to practice if the congregation you are at is issue oriented.  If all the people want is to debate, hear about, deal with issues, it is hard for a preacher not to speak into this situation.  Also, some congregations seem to live off of this stuff.  Who says what, who speaks where, who believes what.  There always seems to be a new ite.  Campbellite, Stoneite, whatever ite.  Some congregations seem to always be reacting to someone else.  This is why I am thankful for Waynesboro and Castle Rock.  At these congregations, both generally conservative bodies of Christ, but we never seemed to make directions on what someone else was doing or not doing.  We looked at the situations and tried to make the best choice for our context.  Also, it has been nice being a minister in these contexts.  Instead of having to preach issues, I preached the gospel, I preached Jesus, I preached a Bible that transforms more than indoctrinates.  I must admit, I am not a big issue guy.  I like the simple gospel, I life seeing Jesus have a powerful influence in life.  I am more of a lets do church so that God is gloried, people are saved, and people are walking with the Lord.  I have been called names before because of this focus, I am scared, I do not stand for truth, I am this or that, but if I am going to hang my hat on something, and if I am going to be remember for something, it is not being the great next issue guy, but a guy who helped the church like Jesus and do Jesus stuff.  And I know that someone might say, that the issues are important, and yes, I could debate these and do a ton of stuff with them, but hey, sometimes it is nice just to be in churches that love the Lord, love doing his work, and I love being the preacher for these kinds of congregations.  Not that there is not a time and place for this stuff, but I heeded the advice of preachers of old and avoided this mindset in my ministry.

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This entry was posted by Matthew on Monday, April 18th, 2011 at 11:07 am and is filed under Church News. 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.