Are Streamed Sermons a Giant Missed Opportunity?
For a few weeks now churches have been scrambling to do everything they normally do in a world dominated by Covid-19. I don’t work at a church, and I don’t envy my many friends that do right now. Trying to minister vocationally is an impossible job under some very difficult circumstances. Most churches have moved everything online, at least as much as something that revolves around community can be virtual. But over the last couple of weeks a question has been bouncing around in my brain about how most of us are presently functioning in the body of Christ.
That question is this: Are at least some of the efforts to live-stream or to stream a recorded sermon a giant missed opportunity in the making?
I think there’s a good chance that sermons are overvalued in America. To clarify, I’m not saying the Word of God and its proclamation is overvalued, but the way in which we prepare and present sermons may be. I love sermons. I’ve preached them, and I have heard many which had a great impact on my life. They are important and God-ordained in the life of a body of believers. But in some respects a sermon is like going out to eat at a nice restaurant. Someone, hopefully someone who is well-trained and proficient in what they do, prepares it for you and you consume. The true beauty of the sermon isn’t really in how “good” it is (that is probably a topic for a probably a different blog post), but like any good meal it is special because a group, in this case a congregation, all partakes of it together. The Christian who eats one solid meal a week is at best emaciated, and at worst on life support spiritually. And unfortunately, that describes too many people filling (virtually these days) the pews.. If a pastor’s congregation is unable to feed themselves and those around them, particularly in a time of crisis, there is a problem. The Sunday-morning sermon is immensely valuable, but it can’t be the only source of sustenance in a life with Christ.
In far too many churches the people of God have been exempted from the reality of the Christian life. I suspect this is rarely by design. Sometimes the people are at fault, and sometimes the leadership has a role to play. There are many reasons for this, but the ultimate job of those elders and staff is to prepare the body to do the work of the ministry (Ephesians 4:11). The job isn’t to deliver good sermons, it is to equip the saints. Sermons can and should be part of that equipping, but it may be that we’ve emphasized the pulpit to the exclusion of developing believers whose spiritual life isn’t codependent on what someone says from the pulpit on Sunday morning. This crazy, mixed-up, pandemic-crazed world may be just the environment needed to shift that paradigm.
What if, instead of everybody sitting down on Sunday to watch a recording of their pastor, church members spent time digging into and studying the same passage? What if those same people then gathered together virtually to ask the pastor and each other questions about the passage and to learn? What if the sermon was outsourced to the people themselves? What if we all started thinking of sermons as collaborative efforts rather than a Lone Ranger affair? What if this time was used for the chef to hold cooking classes, not to package takeout meals?
I love sermons, and this is certainly not a criticism of those pouring their hearts out to preach then in adverse circumstances, but maybe we shouldn’t be trying to conduct business as usual. Maybe we are staring at a massive opportunity that we shouldn’t let go to waste.