Skip to main content

Waste of time?

How much preaching is a sheer waste of time? We pray, we study, we reflect, we craft a sermon, we illustrate it with stories, we deliver it with passion and integrity – but it has very little impact on those who listen to it. They are too polite to say so usually, but it did not really engage their attention, address their concerns or affect their lives. Some give up after a few weeks or several years and leave our churches. How many of the thousand people a week who have left British churches in the 1980s and 1990s did so because they were bored by our sermons? Others remain and listen to perhaps 100 sermons a year, but with what result?

Stuart Murray Williams

Comments

ogre said…
If all their church is offering them is a sermon, maybe that's not enough. Maybe more needs to be offered--and more needs to be asked. People come to church, generally, seeking something--a handle on the universe, for one thing, and a place in a community (we need others...) and a way to affect the world. My sense is that we most frequently fail in offering a way to be a lever on the world--and insisting that people actually try to live up to the ideals that they espouse.

If it's just a sermon... well, then the future promises far more convenience and perhaps better quality at the Church of Podcast.
4:44 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Swords into Ploughshares

  "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." Isaiah 2:4 Palestine Action are doing just this: beating swords into ploughshares i.e. putting weapons out of use. In doing so they are fulfilling this biblical mandate. They are expressing God's peace as expressed in the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition. God desires that our swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, that we should unlearn war. That the government wants to make this action illegal has to be confronted in the strongest terms. To rush to condemn attacks on weapons but not attacks on children is perverse. To call attacks on weapons terrorism but not attacks on children is perverse. When government comes to such an extreme position - legislating that peace is war, that weapons need more protection than children - then they have fundamentally gone wrong. This is the definitio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is humanism theologically tolerant?

OK, well this might be controversial, but I feel the need to say it. Is humanist tolerant? Please note I'm not asking about humanism within society. Clearly humanism certainly believes in tolerance within society and I'm forever glad they are often the only people in the media calling for a separation of church and state. No, what I'm talking about is descriptions of Unitarianism like this and adverts like this , discussed at Peacebang here , which say that humanism is one option, Christianity is another, God is one option among many. The trouble is, humanism, by definition is theologically opposed to theism. This is very different from the relationship between Christianity and Buddhism. These two traditions may be vastly different, but Buddhism, by definition , is not opposed to Christianity, and Christianity, by definition , is not opposed to Buddhism. But humanism is consciously defined in opposition to Christianity and theism. So to say that humanism and theism can bot...
14 comments
Read more

Drop the Free Christian!

Let me preface what I'm going to say by first saying this: I am a Christian. It's taken me a long time to be able to say that, and to know what I mean by that, and I'm very lucky that in the Unitarian church I have been given the space to come to that decision in my own time, on my own terms. But I am a Christian, I'm more Christian now than I have been for years. Now: I want us to drop this "Free Christian" from our title. It's a silly phrase that we need to get rid of. Why? "The General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches" is a long and unwieldy title. It would be much better if we traded under something like "Unitarians in Britain." It gives the impression that there are two separate and distinct groups: "Unitarians" and "Free Christians," this is not the case. It's not that there are Unitarians (who are not Christians) and "Free Christians" who are not Unitarians. There are not two dif...
21 comments
Read more