As is my habit, I’m always plodding through four of five books at once.

These days one of the books I’m reading is Love Big, Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church, by Winn Collier (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017).

The book consists of a series of letters from a fictional pastor named Jonas McCann, to his congregation, the Granby Presbyterian Church.

In one of his letters, he describes his experience at a ministry conference, and it got me to considering my ambitions for wherever the next place is I land:

This room of beleaguered souls needed a friend to bring them fresh water … Instead the speaker stuck to his game plan and pulled the crowd taut, coaxing us into his gripping story set in a poverty-stricken neighborhood. Using a subtle brand of guilt, he prodded us toward action. The story performed to perfection, and you couldn’t miss the emotional response rippling through the crowd. The speaker left the stage in triumph.

No, my ambition is not to be the kind of speaker Jonas McCann heard at the ministry convention.

In fact, if I ever even begin to try being that kind of preacher, please know that I’ve either been body-snatched or had a complete break from reality.

Because here’s the effect this gripping speaker had on the crowd of preachers:

I watched the sag of shoulders as my pastoral cohorts departed, weary and heavy-hearted. All these speakers had successfully launched their sermons, but they hadn’t preached to anybody with a name.

There’s two fundamental problems I see with much of what passes for preaching and ministering these days, and they’re summed up in the paragraph I just shared.

First, preaching is no longer about feeding the Law and the Gospel–especially the Gospel–to Christ’s weary and hungry little lambs. It’s become the well-executed inspirational story, buttressed with a few scriptures so it passes for a sermon, and ending with an appeal to: Go and do thou likewise.

It’s absurd. It’s trying to shame people into living life cranked up to eleven. God did not design preaching to be a brand of sophistry that you use to coax people into doing something they don’t really want to do.

But if you give them the Gospel of Christ, and you leave room for the Spirit to do His work, eventually you will get people who want to do amazing things for the Lord who loves them.

Second, much modern preaching comes across as inauthentic. We don’t believe the preacher really means what he’s telling us, or that he actually lives this way himself. Moreover, he might as well be preaching to some other congregation, because he’s not giving either the Law or the Gospel to us.

He’s not preaching to anybody with a name. He’s not preaching to the messy saints who are actually there, but rather to the church as he wishes them to be.

You can tell because these messages are generic, and they alternate between good people getting better, and shame on you–you can do better.

Moralistic pep talks delivered to no one in particular are only going to lead to the sagging shoulders Collier described. Because all you’ve done is burdened the flock. It’s an easy way to break bent reeds.

People might get an emotional charge and a brief kick in the seat of the pants hearing about the guy with a birth defect who baptized 700 people last year; and then the preacher tells them: Clyde has cerebral palsy–what’s your excuse?

But ultimately, those folks have got to go back home to pay bills and change diapers and care for aging relatives with dementia. What have you done for them but sent them away feeling bad because they didn’t personally baptize anybody this year?

Jonas’ experience at the ministry conference prompted him to reflect on his own ministry to the saints at Granby Presbyterian:

I wonder how many times I’ve done that to you. How many times have I missed your pain or your joy or your questions and just barged ahead with my theological treatise? How much energy have I exerted trying to “build the church” instead of loving the church–loving you? I want to preach sermons that would only fit in Granby. I want to live a life that wouldn’t make much sense anywhere else but Granby.

pages 134-35

That right there is my grand ambition for wherever it is God sends me next. Whether it’s southern California or North Carolina, or some other place I haven’t even heard of yet–I want to minister to real people. I don’t want to miss their struggles or their joys because I have my own agenda. I don’t want to shape them into the people or church I wish they were, but to allow the Gospel and the Spirit and God’s powerful magic of time to form them into whoever the Lord wants them to be.

I want to minister and live life in a way that only makes sense because of the place God has called me, and the people I am with.

St. Paul once counseled believers to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life (1 Thessalonians 4:11 NIV). I don’t want to preach rah-rah sermons. My grand ambition to quietly feed the Gospel of Christ to actual saints, and to honor their lives of quiet faithfulness.