The charge that some preachers are not serious is a strange one, in my mind.  I’ve never met a preacher that thought interpretation was a lark. There are people that put on a show, but at the root they take preaching seriously. Or maybe better said, they take the content of their presentation seriously.

Typically when people start measuring seriousness they really mean to measure someone’s commitment.  Listen to the average youth pastor beat the seriousness drum and they are inevitably trying to pound teenagers into some form of actionable loyalty. The message is ultimately no different with adults; it just doesn’t get the same traction. Most adults already have a life full of commitment, so they only thing left is to denigrate their specific values in service to another value i.e. their specific ‘seriousness’ to other commitments.

And in context to the comments above the presumption is a commitment to someone’s specific interpretive conclusion.  When one says they “want to hear what the bible says,” they are really saying they have arrived at an understanding and seek to have that confirmed from the pulpit.

That isn’t measured by seriousness but rather is a measured by an interpretive methodology.

Canary is right, the SGM phenomena is not really a question of seriousness … that is commitment.  I suspect they read such criticism as an absurdity. They take their doctrinal refocus and pursuit of sound doctrine with utter seriousness. 80% of the conflict revolves around their immovable zeal to execute the logical commitment to the doctrines preached. I venture they look at those from without and ask the same question: “How come you are not more serious with such an extraordinary responsibility with stewarding the Holy word of God.”

And as I said, the issue is not really seriousness; the foundation of this issue is interpretive conclusion.  The underlying presumption is if one approached bible understanding the same way, reading it through the same lens, how could one possibly arrive at a different bible understanding?

The Standing in the Stead of God article is not really a measure of interpretive seriousness.  It is the presumed of interpretive preference. Or maybe said better: it expects that a select few men are uniquely qualified to understand TRUTH. And as the stewards of that TRUTH they represent God in determining human consumption of TRUTH. In other words, TRUTH is the property of The Church, and that really means the property of Church Leadership.

This core assumption is really the foundation of Papacy as defined directly by Catholic “orthodoxy” since roughly the Council of Constantinople in 553 which confirmed its commitment to judging doctrinal accuracy through this standard: “… the things we have received from the Holy Scriptures and from the teachings of the Holy Fathers and from the definitions of one and the same faith by four sacred councils.”

(The four councils referenced are: Nicaea in 325, Constantinople of 381, Ephesus in 431, and Chalcedon in 451.)

Pope Gregory the Great (600 AD), arguably the first Pope of Western Christianity, and set the governmental tone in Catholic practice through Europe for the next 800 years,  presumed that these councils held equal status with the Gospels. The inevitable conclusion of the logic manifest in the formal statements of the Council of Trent (1545 – 63):

“I accept Sacred Scriptures in the sense in which it is been held, and is held, by the Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge the true sense and interpretation of the Sacred Scripture, nor will I interpret in any other way than is in accordance with the unanimous agreement of the Fathers.”

SGM does not overtly claim papacy as such … but the real issue under their claims is in fact the resurgence of Papacy, just of the Reformation variety.

I always saw it as they took their “accounting of the saints” too seriously, as though they would be solely responsible for our souls on THAT day.  At least that’s what I remember hearing at times.  Thus, their need for such strict control of the saints…

After visiting 30+ churches of all different perspectives over the last two years, I can confidently say that this is a serious  problem with the American church.  We don’t take preaching seriously.  Preacher after preacher stand up and share their own stories and such, rarely teaching God’s word.  I don’t care what the pastor thinks.  I want to hear what the Bible says. 

Brent D just moved to such an area to plant one!

Hi there!