Or, "Why I am sick of 'worship services and their sermons'"
A thought came to me a week ago or so. Someone was leading a prayer, and it broke into the typical need to evangelize sort, and ended up in a mini-sermon. Usual sort of stuff was rehashed, love God, thank you for sending Christ, yadda yadda, we need to repent, blah blah. After mulling it over and complaining about it to my wife (the content, not the actual act of praying) the reason why was quite clear.
Let me refer to a couple of NT quotes:
1 Corinthians 13:11 "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me."
Hebrews 5:12-14 "In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. "
I have grown much since infancy in Christianity and my spiritual nutrition wants, no, demands more than the infant milk menu. Do I really need to here every week that God loves everyone, sent his Son, etc? I would wager the vast majority of sermons are nothing more than the basics, the "elementary truths of God's word" simply repackaged time and time again. I can't remember the last time I was listening to a sermon and thought "Wow that was really deep!"
How many more believers and parishioners of countless churches are in the same boat? How exactly does a congregation grow if the only sustenance is milk? Now that is not to say that there are indeed infants in Christ, who still need to be treated and fed as a child, carefully and lovingly, but their care is certainly not to be at the expense of those who have grown.
So my challenge in this little niche of cyber space is for pastors is to create sermons that feed both. Moreover, please consider the audience at the very least. When speaking, preaching or leading prayer with others who have matured (like another group of pastors, elders, chaplains, deacons, etc) it is this author's humble opinion that any use of the basics other than a moment's reference to, should be cut completely. When I eat dinner, I don't mind a glass of milk along with my fettuccine alfredo, but I don't sit down and expect to have (nor enjoy) 1 noodle swimming in a bowl of milk.
