by Ed Goode
Have you ever been bored in church? Of course you have. Have you ever gone home and scrolled through Facebook wishing the preacher at your church was more engaging, the band was more rockin’, and the kids’ program more entertaining? This experience can be a challenge for the church shopper and the committed member, the seasoned pastor and the first-time planter, the new youth guy and everyone in between. What do we do when we are bored at church?
We live in a time when answering that question has become a multi-million-dollar industry. You can buy kits, download curriculum, and consult any number of experts who will tell you how to make your ministry more relevant or engaging. Of course, as we all know, relevant and engaging are just marketing words for “fun and enjoyable.” But for all the investment in the American church, it is hard to argue that we are making a difference in the lives of the average American.
What if that is because we are asking the wrong question? Instead of asking how the church can be more relevant, we should ask, “What is church?” Instead of asking what will get more people through the doors, we should be asking, “What is happening at church?”
The Means of Grace and the Preaching of the Word
What is God doing at church? What happens when we gather to worship each Lord’s Day? Miss the Christian Sabbath, and we miss everything. The Lord has chosen to do things in gathered worship that He has chosen not to do anywhere else, and He uses the means of grace to accomplish those things. Our secular age often lulls us to sleep: it tells us that the world is just stuff, and it closes the curtains and tries to convince us it is nighttime. The means of grace are gifts that remind us of reality. The means of grace are mini-apocalypses that pull back the curtain and show us what is really important. The means of grace are derived from the Word and point us back to the Word.
The best way to combat our boredom in church is to remember that the ordinary means of grace are great gifts from God, to recover their role in our ordinary Christian lives and growth, and to rest in God’s way of doing God’s work. When we realize what God is doing in church, we can combat our boredom in a Biblical way.
The Word of God is the primary means of grace, the primary way the Lord Jesus has given Himself to His people. Even more than that, as Henry Bullinger reminds us in the Second Helvetic Confession, the “preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God. Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is preached.”[1] The Psalmist sang that the “law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul” (Psalm 19:7, ESV). Paul agreed, writing in his second epistle to the Corinthians that “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (3:18).
Preaching is out of season at the moment. Most evangelical preaching today deals with how to have a better marriage or better finances or better teens. The truth is you can go to Barnes & Noble and find fifteen books on each of those topics. Is not preaching to do something more? Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 1:21 that it is the preached Word that saves people. Preaching is not, “This is what the Bible tells you to do later”; instead, it is, “This is who Jesus is for you now.” Preaching is feeding the God Who saves to the people who need salvation.
I do not merely aim at immediate applicability but eternal usefulness. Preaching is Romans 13:14: helping people put on the Lord Jesus Christ. That is why we should be careful about always encouraging people to take notes in a sermon. John Piper says “Taking notes is not the greatest thing during a sermon. I’d rather people just be stunned and listen and have their hands be paralyzed with wonder rather than take notes like it’s a schoolroom.”[2] Preaching is not a lecture; it is the offer of life. Preaching is not an information download, it is the offer of a satisfying meal to people who are starving. As Jonathan Edwards put it, “I should think myself in the way of my duty, to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided”—and then he gave two qualifications—“provided they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with.”[3]
The preaching of God’s Word is the center point of the gathering of God’s people. Everything points to the preached Word and flows from it. No part of the Christian life has suffered more from our race to the lowest common denominator than church attendance. But if sung worship is meant only to produce feelings, and preaching is only downloading information, can we blame people for staying at home? “Why should I come to church?” is a question, if we are honest, for which most of us have struggled really to find an answer.
But that feeling puts us in a unique place in history—and not in a good way. The last verse of Ezekiel tells us the evangelical city is named the “Lord is there.” Psalm 87:2 tells us that the “Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob.” The great hope through the Old Testament is that somehow man will get back to God. The great surprise at the start of the New Testament is that God comes to man. The great challenge of the church age is to remember that Christ will return for a bride—not a harem—and that our gathered worship is the key to being faithful, fruitful Christians.
A robust understanding of the means of grace explains this truth. It is the church for whom Jesus died and the church for whom Jesus will return. Fifty-nine times in the Bible we are told to do something to or for or with “one another.” We cannot do those things outside the local church. Outside the local church we cannot celebrate communion. Outside gathered worship we cannot see our own salvation story re-enacted as new family members are added, which we symbolize through the ordinance of baptism.
Gathered worship demonstrates that we have different priorities from the world around us. Gathered worship reminds us that Sunday is not a second Saturday or a prep day for Monday but the Lord’s Day. Dane Ortlund points out that if we really understand Sunday, we will get seven-and-a-half extra weeks of vacation every year.
The relationship between gathered worship and private worship is an interesting one. If we think of gathered worship as a supplement to our private worship, then we have got it entirely backwards. The Old Covenant week ended with the Sabbath, God’s people working their way towards God’s rest. The New Covenant week begins with the Sabbath (the Lord’s Day), and everything we do flows from that first-day worship of God, which is supplemented by our own private worship. Of course, we have a great privilege to read the Bible for ourselves. While we must not make something that has been unavailable to most Christians through most of church history the sole mark of our maturity, it is foolish (if not sinful) to let our own Bibles gather dust.
Conclusion
In his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace began with the following parable: Two young fish were swimming along, and they happened to meet an older fish swimming the other way,who nodded at them and said, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swam on for a bit, until eventually one of them looked over at the other and asked, “What is water?” Water is our context, our culture, the prevailing climate of the imaginative world we live in.
What is it like to be a Christian in 2024? I do not know; it is my water. But the means of grace pull us out and remind us of objective reality. The means of grace remind us there is a rock to stand on, a line to hold and above all a Lord to love. The water we swim in is not everything. In fact, the means of grace can be seen as mini-apocalypses in the truest sense of the word. An apocalypse is not an ending but a revealing. The means of grace reveal to us the world as it really is, not the world as we see it all around us. We need memory, recovery, and rest to rescue us from the water and wake us up to reality—to bring us to Jesus.
About the Author: I grew up in a happy home and came to Christ at the age of seventeen. After graduating college, I served as an associate pastor of a church near where I grew up in the UK, before moving to North Carolina in 2008. Rachel and I were married in the summer of 2009, and after serving together in three churches in eastern North Carolina, we moved to Richmond in 2016. I served as pastor of First FWB Church in Richmond between 2018 and 2021, when I moved to Champaign, Illinois, as the lead pastor and planter at Bridge Church. My passion is to make known the Lord we meet in the Bible for God’s glory and our joy. Rachel and I enjoy reading and watching old television shows in our spare time, as well as exploring the Midwest. I enjoy college football and baseball, but I will always prefer soccer and cricket.
[1] The Second Helvetic Confession, https://www.ccel.org/creeds/helvetic.htm.
[2] John Piper, “The Pastor as Prophet: Session 2,” Desiring God, February 26, 2010, https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/the-pastor-as-prophet-session-2.
[3] Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Yale Edition, 26 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977–2009), 4:387.
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