THE REASON FOR A BROKEN SOCIETY
David Cameron repeated this week his analysis of Britain as a ‘broken society’. This is a major plank of the Conservative Party’s approach to the next election. Gordon Brown and the Labour Party strongly reject this and claim that by and large the nation is in good order. Much of the debate is merely political with both parties deliberately stressing those aspects of life in the UK which most suit their arguments.
However as Christians we do see a ‘brokenness’ in our society but we are speaking about something profoundly different from Mr Cameron. It would be possible to spend a great deal of time pointing out the evidence for this ‘brokenness’ in the moral decadence of our modern culture. One of the great examples of this decadence is the content of much of the entertainment that is on offer to us. The real point is that those who understand God’s expectations of men and women know that our society falls dramatically and horrendously short, and is an offence to God. That is society’s ‘brokenness’.
The real issue for us to consider is why this is the situation in our society. What has led to the state of things we see around us? A recent piece of research carried out by Durham University’s Codec Research Centre provides the answer, although they would not realise it.
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the College of Preachers at Durham University they examined the attitudes of people to preaching. They took a sample of 300 of Britain’s 3.6 million regular churchgoers and discovered that 96.6% “looked forward” to the sermon with 60% saying it gave them a sense of God’s love. Evangelical Christians looked forward most to sermons. Roman Catholics were most keen on sermons that educated rather than challenged them. Anglicans wanted to be entertained. Baptists spoke about sermons that would convert them. The new, independent evangelical churches wanted to be challenged and encouraged. Apparently “Baptists and Catholics were more enthusiastic about the Bible being mentioned than were Anglicans and Methodists.” One of the researchers, Rev. Kate Bruce, said that “in a culture which values entertainment and likes stand-up, over a quarter (of respondents) said they wanted preaching to be entertaining as well.”
There was also a difference on the ideal length of a sermon. Many Anglicans wanted less than ten minutes (although up to 20 minutes was fine if there was no “waffle”). Some Baptists wanted to sit through over an hour! Catholics wanted their homilies to be completed within ten minutes. Ruth Gledhill of The Times speaking about the sermon observed, “in many churches this most vibrant of moments has withered to little more than 20 minutes of tired droning that serves only to pad out the gap between hymns and lunch.” It was suggested by the researchers that part of the appeal of the sermon was in fact that “it gave (the hearers) time to switch off.”
Here is the reason for the ‘brokenness’ of our society. 95% of the population never hear a sermon of any kind, and of the 5% who do only a fraction hear true preaching.
God has ordained that His will and truth should be made known to men and women through the medium of preaching. But what is preaching? That is a question that we increasingly need to ask. There are a vast number of definitions but in the end we have to take the Bible’s view. Preaching is very prominent within the passages of the Bible and men who preached had certain aspects to what they said and how they said it. We can sum it up as follows:
Preaching is the declaration of the mind of God - preaching takes what God has said (the Bible) and presents that truth to the hearers. There is no preaching without the Bible - even though the speaker is talking about religious subjects.
Preaching has distinct elements - saying what God has said; explaining it carefully and accurately; illustrating it so the hearers can understand; applying it so the hearers know what to do to please God. How often the last element is missing these days! These four elements must all be present. Where they are not it is not preaching.
There is a trend in even Evangelical circles to move away from this comprehensive view of preaching, to emphasise other word ministries and to discount the full activity of the Holy Spirit. That is surely why the Church is having so limited an impact on our society. We need Spirit empowered preaching in our day to turn our nation around. Let us pray for this.
There is one more element about preaching. In the above description, the work of the Holy Spirit on the hearers was included. That is because hearing the Word of God is vital to our own spiritual health. You have only to consider how much time is given to hearing the voices and ideas of those who do not know God and compare that to the amount of time Christians spend hearing God’s Word to see that we need to hear as much preaching as we can. Of course, believers will also be listening to God through their personal devotions and maybe through written and recorded media, and that is good. Nevertheless attending on the preaching of God’s Truth as often as you can is the way to spiritual vitality and to being an influence on our ‘broken’ nation. It is therefore incumbent on us all to make sure that we are good hearers. Let us pray for this as well.