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The mission of Church & Family Life is to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for both church and family life.
A Pastors Discussion on "The Indispensable Presence of the Preacher"
Jun. 17, 2020
00:00
-42:54
Transcription

Welcome. Hey, thanks for listening and we're here to talk about the whole matter of live streaming church and what church life really ought to be. And I've got Kevin Moore and Jason Doan with me. So hey, why don't you guys introduce yourselves and then I'll sort of open up the discussion. So Kevin, let's start with you.

Okay, yeah, I'm Kevin Moore. I'm a pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Paris, Texas, which is a couple hours north of the Dallas Metroplex area. You know, I was just in Texas yesterday. How about that? You were?

I was doing the wedding of one of my old interns, Levi Hopkins. It was such a joy. Got to preach to a couple of churches that actually gathered in a theater. They rented a theater and a couple of churches came together. It was really a lot of fun.

But I was in Texas. I got to feel the breezes of Texas and see what's going on. It was great. Well, it was a beautiful day yesterday, I'll tell you. Yeah, it's been nice the last few days here.

A little hot, but it's pretty nice. Yeah. Okay, So Jason Dome, who are you? I'm Jason Dome and I'm one of two elders at Sovereign Redeemer Community Church in Youngsville, North Carolina. I'm probably sitting 10 minutes away from where Scott's sitting, so we're sort of in the same locale.

There you go. Yeah, we could have just done this in the same room here. Oh, well. Okay, So hey, we're talking about church life. We're talking about what biblically ordered church life looks like, the blessings of it, the contours of it, and how important it is that we use the word of God to shape everything in our church life.

But like a tsunami, something has come upon us and it's sort of the remote live stream church that forced upon us, at least for the short term in this whole matter with COVID-19. But at the same time, this was part of a long-term trend. I mean, it wasn't too long ago that churches began to run multi-site operations where the actual shepherds of the church were not in the same building, they were broadcasting to large screens. You had sort of the rise of what I'm going to call touch-free Christianity, you know what a touch-free car wash is, you can just kind of cruise right through, and you don't really get any human touch points. And it seems to me like there are some people that kind of like that.

They like the touch-free Christian life, They like the live stream life where they can sit on their iPad, you know, on the beach or on vacation or in their pajamas and listen to their pastor whom they love to hear preaching. They just love his preaching. It's awesome and they appreciate it a lot. But they actually are not involved in the breadth of church life, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, the actual prayer with the Saints, saying amen to the specific prayers of the Saints, praying in the congregation, all the different things that church life consists of, the taking of the Lord's Supper, the observation of the baptism, not a remote baptism, but a real baptism. Churches did actually do some remote livestream baptisms.

So anyway, what do you do with all this? I'm disturbed about churches that are becoming content with actually participating in what I'm going to call non-Christianity. It's non-Christianity because it doesn't really supply the features, all the features of the experience of a local church. And so that's the concern. We don't want people to drift off in that direction.

So there it is. We did a broadcast with Steve Lawson about this last week and I just wanted to get your thoughts, your stream of consciousness about those issues that we brought up, your own experiences, admonitions that you have for church people or pastors. So I'll just throw it open. What are you guys thinking about all this? Just to recap something from last week's webinar with Steve Lawson, one of the things he did was Run through some phrases in Acts 1 and 2 one heart one mind One accord and he just drove home the point of how incompatible Zoom churches or Facebook live churches with one heart one one mind one accord gathering in one place And I was looking back at Acts chapter 2, he didn't actually, I don't think, read any of this last week, so I just wanted to read Acts 2, 46 and 47.

It says, so continuing daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house. They ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having savor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved. So, you know, just radically incompatible with COVID-19 and the government's disposition towards that and kind of how churches have been operating for the last probably 90 days. You know, when you read that, it just strikes me how personal, how invasively intrusive that is in your life.

I mean, you are there experiencing all those things. Yeah, you know, for us, this whole issue has really forced us into the online church arena. We had never even had anything like it until that first day. And I would say for the most part, our people are really ready to get back. And we have been back for a number of weeks to the real life, real church life, where there is some real interaction where you can actually see the tears on somebody's cheek from, you know, the hymn they're singing or something in the sermon that, you know, has impacted them in some way.

One of the things that Steve said, or maybe Scott, maybe you said this last week in the discussion is that the streaming church mentality is really incompatible with, not only is it incompatible with what real church is to be, but those who are on the margins of the church. And I think the phrase that was used was comfortable, cultural Christianity. And I think that exposes so much of what is, quote, comfortable and cultural. And you know, really, for one, it was a very grievous thing not to be able to meet. And I've never been through anything like that before, I know you guys haven't either, but it really, those that are comfortable with the way things are, I think are showing to be on the very fringe of church and really need to be taught and instructed and as a pastor, you know, it's kind of singled out for me those that really don't have a full or biblical view of What the church is and is really giving me an avenue some direction how to help them Do you guys you guys think that this has launched a deeper trend of the impersonal church?

I'm worried about that. I just want to know what you guys think. Do you think this is a trend, part of a trend line? I think time will tell. Something Steve Lawson said last week was, you know, something to the effect that real Christians won't be satisfied, except for the interpersonal interactions that real local church life affords.

And I do agree with that. It may be a part of weeding out, you know, nominally from people whose hearts are really burning to be with the people of God. You know, I spoke with a man in our town yesterday whose church has not met. I think this is the 15th week. Everything has been online.

This is a larger church in our town. He seemed to be very at peace with it. Him and speaking with him, their church life hadn't missed the beat. I think those churches that were already geared this way, I think this has really given them a boost, and it has kind of furthered them and pushed them along. Churches like our church and you guys, we begrudgingly went into this, but I do think that for a lot of churches in a lot of places, this has really ramped up the efforts of their online meetings.

And it's going to be in that realm and sphere, it's going to be a hard thing to put the brakes on I think. Scott, I was thinking about something that I think probably whoever is online would have a frame of reference for. A couple of different experiences, one particularly just sticks out in my mind, of hearing live preaching, being in the room. Scott, I'm thinking actually in particular of one sermon we heard together, we were in the room together in Montgomery, Alabama, and the sermon that was preached was absolutely electric in the room and had a profound impact on me. And maybe six months later I actually sought out the audio of it and listened to it and thought Hey, I mean it was fine.

It was the content was good. It was it was sound preaching, but I remembered You know the the room being so alive and a God God was there helping the preacher and helping the hearers. I didn't get any of that when I listened to the audio. Elementary schools might be able to pull it off over Zoom. You might be able to have college lectures over Zoom, but preaching is not just sort of a subcategory of a college lecture.

God helps the preacher and helps the people who are hearing, and he's present when his people gather. Sometimes it's electric in a way that you could never get the audio and it really moves people in a way that no electronic quote-unquote equivalent really is an equivalent can do. I bet everybody online has had that experience remembering a really powerful sermon and then listening to the audio later and thinking wow that's not the same thing. Yeah I wonder I wonder what why it is that way you know I don't I don't recall myself being all that moved by a video preaching. I just don't recall that experience, you know, in my past.

But there are many times where, you know, that just being there was very helpful, very moving. There's a difference between information and really appealing to souls. And to be reminded of the fact that preaching, we often think of it as a one-way communication, but it's really a two-way interactive communication. And how many times have you spoken to someone after you finish preaching, or maybe you've been the one speaking to the preacher after the service, And you felt like that sermon was just for you. And it's as the preacher made eye contact with you, though it may have been just a second or two, you know, those are the kinds of things that the Spirit of God uses in the gathered body of the church to really prick the conscience of someone.

I'm sure we've had those experiences where, maybe even to the point of offense, people thought, you were preaching just to me. Really our response was, No, we weren't. It may have seemed that way. That's the work of God upon this foolish thing called preaching. It is a communication.

I like what Steve said. A lot of preaching is done after the sermon is over. The interaction where people ask questions or... You know, I really like his encouragement because it's always been an awkward thing for me when someone comes up and is thanking me for a sermon. Those can be some awkward moments, but Steve helped me when he said, respond with the question, what ministered to you?

What did you get from this? Not just a generic thing, but be pointed. Those kinds of conversations don't take place after the sermon if we're just watching online. We click the screen off and we're immediately back into our own culture of our home or sitting beside the pool or whatever it may have been and so it's like the Lingering effect of the word of God that the Spirit would use, it's immediately turned off. So I like that aspect of the ongoing communication after the sermon is actually over.

That element is gone online. You know, you're serious to say that, Kevin. You just brought me back to many Sundays, Sunday afternoons. We have a fellowship meal after the after the preaching every Sunday. And My mode of operation for those fellowship meals is to, I wanna try to sit down with several different people.

I don't just sit in one place and just have lunch and stay there. I move around. And my general practice is to ask, you know, what really hit you, you know, what ministered you, and what's stuck out, you know, in, in the preaching or anything, the thing, things that happen in the service. And it's a it's a good time to continue that. I mean, we want, we want the people at the fellowship meal to talk about this early.

You know, that that's really what we would like them to talk about, because we don't govern it, but we just encourage them to have conversations around what God actually ordained through that preaching. Uh, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly, maybe. And, uh, but that's, you know, you want time for there to be interaction with that preaching. You know at the beginning of this whole thing one of the first things I said to our church was hey we don't want to get used to this. How did you did you guys shepherd your your churches in different ways as this thing is unfolded?

I mean, I would say we said those things maybe in different ways, but we definitely wanted to put a stake in the ground very early on that we were not, this was not the new normal. This was the new abnormal and we were eager to get back to the old normal just as fast as we could because really the the the old normal has 2, 000 years of You know God God working through it Yeah, we don't we do not want a new normal. It's it's not a better normal Yeah Just say for us. I mean, I I told our people, you know, we would use this technology as long as it was absolutely necessary. And you know, we went five weeks without meeting in person.

And we've been back now for, I don't know, eight weeks or so. But I'm curious if you guys have had this in your congregation or talked to pastors. There is a remnant in our church that wants to continue this as an outreach tool. I don't know if that's... I have been minister to you back in the days when you would get a CD, Scott, from you at a conference and listen to it again on the way home or something like that.

I really want to be careful and really shepherd people well through this idea of making a distinction between what can be an outreach tool and what must be gathered worship of the body of Christ look like? And those are some of the questions that we're working through here with the folks. Yeah, now we've always live streamed our services because, but primarily if someone was sick, either for a short period of time or a long period of time, we've made it a priority. The other thing is that, I mean, my understanding of our calling is that we're supposed to spread the word of God as far and wide as we possibly can. Throw it out as far as we can, find every means.

You know, when the praying press was invented, we should use it. When radio was discovered, we should use it. So I think that we should prioritize that. But we've also been very careful to talk to our people about the priority of the gathered saints. We don't want we don't want people using our live streams as their church.

Exactly. Yeah. I mean that's a danger and I think there was a period of time where we said, and I know pastors who still think, who are still thinking this way and I don't despise it, that they've just said look we're not going to live stream anything because we don't want people thinking This is the church. Some people will use it as their church. And every once in a while, I'll hear about somebody who's been using my sermons as their church.

And it's also, it's always very disturbing to me. Yeah, we'd have to be real careful, you know, to make the distinction. This is not being made available as a substitute for your able-bodied attendance with the Christ. But, you know, for those who may be shut-ins who are part of the church, or even my parents, for instance. Yesterday, we were live streaming for those that don't come.

My parents live at a distance. It's really not feasible for them to come to our church. They have their own church that they're a part of. But my mom was really upset that our, we had some technical difficulties and she couldn't sit after her own church and then watch for service. So, you know, I understand that it ministers to people and that it can be useful, but I agree wholeheartedly with you.

We can't continue it in the sense of it being a substitute for the corporate worship of the church. I would say, go ahead use the live stream for general teaching or the recording of it, but don't you dare use it as your church. So here's a question I think is sort of brings things into focus and it makes for an interesting thought experiment. What are you willing to allocate your risk taking to? All of life is filled with different levels of risk taking, almost nothing involved, no risk.

And so people will make decisions on what they allocate their risk-taking to. As you get more gray hairs, you take less dumb risks, but you're still taking risks. And what you don't want is for people to think that going to church is taking a dumb risk. The Lord's Day is a special day. And I'm sure long before COVID-19, you've encountered people who didn't want to take the risk of going to church if it was a time where kind of sickness was going around the church because they might miss work.

That's exactly backwards. You're allocating your risk-taking to the wrong thing if you're protecting a work day at the expense of the Lord's Day. That's right. So There's never been a time where you haven't gone to church and taken no risk. Where you've gone to church and taken no risk.

And I think our encouragement should be that people should be willing to allocate some of their risk-taking to hearing live preaching, being with their brethren for worship. Yeah, you don't want to live in a world where you want the risk to be hovering around zero before you get in the car and go to church. That's not right. Right. Right.

Yeah, hey, and the way that God has ordered disease is that you often don't know that you are contagious until symptoms have advanced, and You know, God must want you to be with people who are sick from time to time Yeah, you know if this were if this were really a killing plague which it isn't You know almost no one who's healthy It's having any real problems You're not dying. You've got to be in bad health or over 70 years old or something. You have to be already very vulnerable to have that effect. To be afraid to go to church because of this, I think it's fairly well known that there's really not much risk. You know young people, you know young people wearing masks, to me it's just so totally ridiculous because there's no risk at all for them.

They're so healthy anyway and if they got it then they would have antibodies. They'd probably be healthier. So yeah, we should not be afraid. Christians are supposed to visit the safe If you have a killing plague you're gonna be really careful about how you visit the same for sure you should But that's not what we have going on here. So Scott, could I take us back to preaching for just a minute?

Sure. I wanted to read two really famous verses. You'll instantly recognize them. They're from 2 Timothy, the end of chapter 3 and the beginning of chapter 4. The two verses that I'm going to read are only separated by two verses, so there's an uninspired chapter break between them, but I just want to say that they're in in very, very close context to each other.

So the first is 2 Timothy 3 16, all Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work." So you're really familiar with that, but it's talking about the Word of God and its uses. Doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction, and righteousness. Now going over the uninspired chapter break into chapter 4 verse 2, Paul charges Timothy this way. He says, Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and teaching.

So it just drives home the point that I was starting to make earlier, which is just how different preaching is as a category than lecturing. Scott, I think you described as the difference between imparting information and really moving your hearers to action in their thoughts and in their lives. When you think of someone preaching to convince, to rebuke, to exhort, It's sort of a fundamentally incompatible activity with not being in the same room. These are the kind of things, you know, online review, try to make sense of that or online exhortation. These things are built for physical presence.

How do you review people that you don't know? It's hard to come alongside someone via the screen as well. Yeah, when you think about preaching in the language that's used, it's very personal. And It has to do with real things going on in people in real people's lives. You're focusing on that.

And it does require some kind of knowledge. You're not just imparting a doctrine, which, I mean, my view is that that's not the same. You know hearing a doctrinal treatise, a doctrinal message is different than actually hearing preaching. You know I've listened to both of your sermons, you know, online. Really appreciated them.

I've benefited from them, but you didn't know I was listening. And so I'm sure I didn't take it so personally, you know, but I did gain from them, but it was very different than an experience of a man wrestling with your soul. The sermons that I've heard from you men have been about particular texts or about particular doctrines and I listened to them because I wanted to be equipped. I wanted to learn from you and so I was learning from you and and and I was I was learning from you to you know enhance my own understanding of the Word of God and that doctrine that I was hearing you speak about so I I don't I don't think we're here to say that we should never listen to a man online, but local churches are different things. What I was doing was not local church oriented, and even Even though you preach those messages in your local churches, I was benefiting from them.

But how would you describe the distinction between what I did when I listened to your sermon, Kevin, and your sermon, Jason, and you preaching that to your congregation. Do you have a way to describe the difference? Well, I think we've all done that type of thing and like you said we've benefited we have benefited from it When we do so, you know there is a That exists in a local body You know, I think in some assemblies there is an expectation as the sermon begins, or even as the worship service itself begins, as we begin to sing and pray, this expectation builds to the Lord is going to speak to us and we are in treating him to do so and so you know if you go online and get on the sermon you're missing that preparatory work I think of the spirit to really tune your heart to what's going to be preached but also I think I love this and I think Steve said this last week, you know, a congregation needs to see me and needs to see you guys walk into the church with our life, our family in tow to see we are a real pole.

And you know that we are not just, you know, so detached from, from everything and from everyone. But, you know, all of the elements just aren't there. If you if you just come in and watch via the internet or listen. You know, certain audio is a great tool. I love it.

We implement it in our church. Lord willing, people are benefited by it, but it's just different than exposing yourself to everyone else in the congregation, being vulnerable. You lose a sense of vulnerability when you're not in the service of worship. Those are things that I think you just can't experience in any other way than a physical presence in the church. You know, interestingly, as you're talking, Kevin, I was thinking, I've also had both of you preach to me live personally at a conference.

And I mean I could remember one time Kevin specifically in Texas, I can see the room, you know, and I thought it's also different even in a conference context where you have someone preaching and he's your friend right like you know him and it's that was very different than me just listening while I was driving down the road to one of your sermons. Totally different. And I just have a real clear recollection of how different that was. And Jason, I've heard you preach to me many, many times at conferences and in churches and stuff like that. And it's just different.

How would you describe it, Jason? Well, yeah, I'm not sure I'm up to the task of describing it but it's making me reflect on one of the things that Steve Lawson said in last week's webinar, which was his ability as the preacher to read the room and how his preaching is actually impacted on what he's experiencing between himself and the congregation as he preaches. Pace, points that he slows down and camps on or moves on from more quickly depending on what he's seeing as he looks out on the congregation. That's definitely a reality for preachers who have been at it a while and their their minds have been able to slow down because they're a little more experienced and they can actually look out on the Congregation and make adjustments sort of as as they're preaching You can tell as a preacher, you can tell when the Spirit of God may be really bearing down upon someone in the congregation, whether it be tears or just through their, you know, intense, you know, they're really keyed in on what you're saying. And you know, that to me is helpful because there's something about that that really spurs on preaching and you don't tire of it.

I was going back to remembering just a few weeks ago when I was preaching to just a screen and you know here in my living room at home, I had the iPad set up, my family was in the room, but it was more so just me speaking to a screen and there is no interaction. It's like speaking to deadness, you know, and you know, is anybody hearing, is this benefiting anybody at all? But when you're in the congregation, you're in the pulpit, you can see the Word of God performing its work. And so that's one of the, to me, one of the big differences is just being able to see someone else's face. Yeah, Well, okay, so I think what we're trying to say, you know, the Bible actually defines what preaching looks like, what local church life looks like, and it's highly personal.

It's and it's highly personal, it's relatable invasive that it requires knowing something about, something enough about the congregation to where you can in good conscience, reprove, rebuke, exhort with great patience and humility. Even that word humility means that you're calibrating yourself with those people, right? And you know, so you have a man who's knowable and you have a congregation that's knowable. This is the sufficiency of Scripture for the preaching of the Word of God in a local church and losing it is a tragic loss and our people should not be coddled into thinking that this is normal or good, or it's not even biblical local church Christianity at all. And if they're thinking of it that way, they should stop that and they should go to their local church, they should get in their car and they should be with the people and they should weep with those who weep and they should respond to the preaching and they should get involved in a relationally invasive experience with a local church.

It's local church life, and we've been big advocates of that for many years. And I pray that at least the people that are part of us would not drift off, but that there would be a real recognition of the danger of what's happened with this as pastors and people have gotten kind of comfortable with the remote, I'm just going to call it non-church experience. So anyway, I really appreciate your thoughts. Any of you have any final thoughts before we sign off here? One last thing for me, just reflecting again on last week's webinar, something Steve Lawson said, He talked about how live worship services where we're all in one place together have a vertical aspect.

We're worshiping God together. It's one heart, one mind, one accord, and it has a horizontal aspect as well. We're having fellowship with one another even in the worship. We're singing to each other. We're praying with one another, And when you take it all internet, you totally strip out the horizontal aspect, but even the vertical aspect is impacted.

Worship is sweeter and deeper and better when we're worshiping together. You know, for us as a family, there was an element of ease involved in the weeks that we went through meetings. I didn't dress like I would normally dress to go to our church meeting, nor did my children. There wasn't the hurry in our home on Sunday morning. That's usually there trying to get everyone ready to go.

And so I know that this appeals to some just because of the ease of it. There's not the work involved in actually getting to the meeting, but the Lord uses all of those things to Prepare us to get us to where we're going And so, you know, I would just I've had a conversation at least one in along these lines of You know church local church life is really not easy. It's it's oftentimes a lot of work And you know too I think one way that we can encourage those who are are leaning towards You know the the online stuff you're you are depriving the body of Christ of the gift of you. Whatever the Spirit of God has supplied the body of Christ with in giving you to them, then just know that you are willfully depriving the rest of the church, of what you represent. That's an important reminder, I think, and it really makes people think that going to church, it's not what I get out of it, but it's what I can give to once I get there.

That's an aspect that's obliterated through this whole ordeal. Amen. So true. Okay, so Kevin, now that you've, you confess that you didn't dress, you know, your best on the live stream. So I'll make a confession.

Since you opened up the door, I'll come to your confessional. Now I did wear a tie when I was preaching on the live stream. Okay, I wore my nicest coat and my favorite ties, but I did something other than that. I did preach in my Levi's, which I never do. I never come to church in my Levi's, but I did preach in my Levi's.

But I did look like I wasn't preaching in my Levi's. No, same for me. From the waist up, I looked normal. From the waist up. Yeah.

So That's the great thing about the live stream. You know, you can look good from the waist up. So Scott, the night before we had our first Internet Sunday, I told my family because I was so concerned about this dynamic, I told my family, you have two choices for dressing tomorrow. What you would normally wear to church are nicer. So I'm a lot more holy than you hypocrites, that's the point.

Well, I had a young man who, I have a young man who was living in my house and you know, he made me feel like a terrible hypocrite. Cause I was on the live stream, My Levi's looking very good from the waist up and he walked in with his, I mean, he he was like in full dress. I thought, boy, you didn't have to do that. So, Kevin, I think that you should write a book about pastoral ministry called From the Waste Up. From the Waste Up, that's a catchy title.

Yeah. Catchy title, you know. All right, guys, thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful week getting ready for the Lord's day and that God gives you great fruit from it. Thanks for talking.

We'll see ya. Thanks, Scott. See ya.

Join me, Kevin Moore, and Jason Dohm for a video round table discussion on "The Indispensability of the Presence of the Preacher." On June 9, I had a live online video discussion with Dr. Steven Lawson to discuss "The Indispensable Presence of the Preacher." This is a follow-up discussion to multiply biblical principles that are important to consider for the pastors and families in our network. 

Speakers

Kevin Moore serves as pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Paris, TX, where he is committed to expository preaching, Christ-honoring, Word-governed worship, and biblical church growth. He and his wife, Bambi, have been married for 24 years and have been blessed with ten children. 

Jason Dohm is a full-time pastor at Sovereign Redeemer Community Church in Youngsville, North Carolina. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992 with a BA in education and proceeded to a lengthy career in electronics manufacturing. Jason has been married to Janet for thirty years and has six children and five grandchildren.

Scott T. Brown is the president of Church and Family Life and pastor at Hope Baptist Church in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Scott graduated from California State University in Fullerton with a degree in History and received a Master of Divinity degree from Talbot School of Theology. He gives most of his time to local pastoral ministry, expository preaching, and conferences on church and family reformation. Scott helps people think through the two greatest institutions God has provided—the church and the family.

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