The Twentieth Century which you and I live in is not the Nineteenth Century, nor is it the First Century. In fact, the second half of the Twentieth Century in which we are living is not even like the first half of the Twentieth Century in which many of us have lived and laboured.
Human nature never changes. The good news message of salvation certainly hasn’t changed. Man’s urgent need to meet the living Lord in his everyday life is still the same as it always was. But what has changed, are the conditions under which we are working. We cannot afford to be using the methods of the First or the Nineteenth or even the early Twentieth Centuries.
The manifest appetite for learning which was so encouraging to politicians, educationalists and religionists in the Nineteenth Century has been stultified by now. The desire for freedom which men manifested in the Nineteenth Century has been vitiated. Hence, “learn of me”, or, “the truth shall make you free”, have neither meaning nor appeal to the vast majority of people today. In an age of narrow-minded and short-sighted permissiveness, the kind of broad long view understanding which we have of life is not attractive. To a generation that has more than it needs, visions of the kingdom in the future are no more relevant than a kingdom in the sky after they have died.
Of course, this is not to say that, here or there, there are not some sincere seekers after truth. We’ve got to find them! We still hear often and thankfully of the baptism of one who has walked in off the street into one of our halls, attracted by an advertisement or lecture title. So we must never dismiss entirely the traditional lecture. It is still working in some places.
Perhaps, though, we ought to give very earnest thought to its design, its content, its presentation, and above all, to the reason for holding it. It is not sufficient to say that we have always preached this way and therefore what was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us. As far as we can say from New Testament records, they never held lectures in the First Century. Why then, do we? However, as we do, let us use all the teaching aids which science has placed at our disposal. Why else have they been developed if it isn’t to help us to preach the gospel? But we should never forget that they are teaching aids and also that they are only used to make the teacher’s thoughts more impressive. They are not for us all to use. They are only for the teacher or the speaker to use, and he’s in the minority in a congregation of any size. But we certainly ought to encourage our speakers to use them.
The person who writes for literature in answer to an advertisement and then comes to hear a lecture, or does so voluntarily for any reason at all, deserves the very best consideration that we can provide. In the second half of the Twentieth Century they are exceptional people! They need encouraging, and God has brought them to us for that purpose.
Moving Out
When we toil all night through, and seem to have achieved nothing, we still have to launch out into the deep and let down the net on the right side. Paddling about in the shallows doing your own thing because nothing seems to succeed; or fishing on the left when the fish are on the right, done however enthusiastically, is completely useless.
We are to go and teach everyone who will listen everywhere they will listen. But even without this express command of the Lord, whoever amongst us would think callously of leaving our contemporaries in the dark when we are in the light or selfishly suppressing the good news when the world sinks under its continual burden of bad news? We have a healing ministry to be involved in — not of bodies, but of minds. The sin of the one-talent servant was that he did nothing, neither for his Lord nor for his contemporaries. If we are blindly preaching to people that are not there, we are doing nothing!
Why then are we not teaching where they are?
As long as the Jews would listen to the Apostles, the Apostles went into their synagogues. Many churches nowadays have weeknight discussion classes where they welcome interesting speakers, I don’t know whether we are exploiting that situation or not. There is a great area of opportunity there in other people’s places.
Do we write letters regularly to the national, the provincial, and the local presses? Why not? What better purpose could these newspapers serve than to be the media for telling the good news of salvation? Why do they exist if it isn’t that we might write to them? Of course, if we are offensive and arrogant in presenting the good news, either on other people’s premises or in the newspapers, then we shall quickly lose those opportunities. So let us remember that we are to be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.
Let us lead and persuade rather than drive and browbeat.
Seldom a day passes without letters appearing in the newspapers. Why don’t we write to the people who write these letters, even if they’re not writing about religious matters? There is the name and address. Why can’t we write to them? The newspaper will pass it on if no address is given. We can write a letter, can’t we? Well, that’s true of many of us. Then let’s send the good news in the form of Glad Tidings, or one of the numerous leaflets available.
Communicate
But the major difference between today and yesterday in respect to formal preaching activities, is that a great and fundamental change has overtaken man. Of this we are largely ignorant, or to it we have closed our eyes.
The greatest threat to the Gospel today in our Western industrial society is not communism, apathy, humanism, impurity of doctrine or worldly compromise, it is the breakdown of communication, not only from the church to those who are outside, but also the breakdown in communications in every field of activity.”
That’s a quotation from a book called “The Gagging of God”. It’s worth reading. It’s written by a churchman who is concerned because his church isn’t reaching out to people. They have meetings and people don’t come, and he’s worried about it. He might almost be writing having been to some of our conferences where we have been considering these things.
Marshall McLuhan in “The American Observer and Commentator”, suggests that the biggest nail in the coffin of communication was the invention of mechanised printing, Previously, he claimed, men and women and children met together in their villages listening to one another, talking to one another, discussing together. Then the printing press enabled them to stay at home and read the newspapers and their books. A person reads his newspaper alone; he reads a book alone. Marshal McLuhan says that was the beginning of the end of communication. That was 500 years ago, of course. It’s taken a long time.
But then came the industrial revolution, that curse of modern times, which corrupted us with affluence and took people from the freedom of simple village agricultural life and condemned them to live tied to machines for long hours in ungodly towns away from nature. And so they ran away from these conditions, ran away from their fellow man into themselves. Communication broke down even further.
There was a time, of course, in the Nineteenth Century, when they struggled against this. The pub, the music hall and the working men’s clubs, Mechanics Institutes, and the churches and chapels, all tried to meet the needs of communication. But then these were for specialised groups. Everybody didn’t go into the pubs or the working men’s clubs or into the churches or into the chapels. Only a select group went to each, and there was no communication between them. There was no communication, for example, between those whose centre was the pub and those whose centre was the church, except when the Salvation Army went into the pub and sold the “War Cry”.
Then the final nail driven into communications came in the second half of the Twentieth Century — radio, television and the motor car. Affluence provided comfortable homes into which men escaped, from a world that they did not like. Radio and television could be enjoyed, hobbies and gardening and drinking could be indulged in their own homes, and the motor car became an extension of home — a little box on wheels.
They weren’t communicating!
Exclusive societies still, of course, exist in our own times. The photographers meet together, the town’s Women’s Guild, the Horticultural Society, Amateur Dramatic Society, Parents’ & Teachers’ Association, the Christadelphians — all these little exclusive groups meet in their various corners. And they don’t know that anyone else is there, largely. We’ve got our own exclusive society just like everybody else, and we have failed to communicate; not because we don’t want to, but by the very nature of the society in which we live.
It’s quite clear we haven’t got the opportunities of Jonah at Nineveh, where 120,000 men and women passed on the message, one to another. Jonah couldn’t have addressed a crowd of 120,000 men, women and children. They must have talked about it. Would that we had that kind of experience. Even Billy Graham can only talk to a limited number. How many does the Wembley Stadium hold? About 80,000? It’s a drop in the ocean of humanity, isn’t it? And most of those who attend when he speaks in Wembley Stadium are part of this exclusive society over which he rules.
It’s clear that we haven’t the opportunities of the New Testament situation when they gathered together from Galilee, Decapolis, Jerusalem and Judea, and beyond Jordan, to hear the Lord Jesus; or when the people of Pisidia, Antioch and Ephesus gathered to witness the preaching of Paul. It’s also clear that we haven’t the opportunities of John Thomas in the Nineteenth Century when hundreds and thousands flocked to hear him in public halls,
What Then Are Our Opportunities?
Ought we not to start by imitating the wise Jehoshophat in Old Testament times? Whenever faced with an imponderable situation like this, He said, (2 Chr. 20:12) “We do not know what to do but our eyes are upon thee”. We can pray. Brethren and sisters, we must pray about the situation.
Then, having prayed, we must ask the relevant question, “where are the people to whom we ought to be speaking?” Because, speaking we certainly ought to be. Generally, they may be found in two main areas. They’re with us at work and without us in their own homes or in their own little exclusive groups. Perhaps there are ways of infiltrating into these exclusive clubs. I’ve already suggested that we ought to be visiting the church discussion groups. Is there a way of getting into ‘Rotary’, or ‘Inner Wheel’, or ‘Round Table’, or ‘Town’s Women’s Guilds’ and so on?
There are old peoples’ activities in all of our towns. Have we tried to talk to them? They’re always willing to listen at first to any interesting speaker; they are so desperately short. Whether we keep on going depends first of all on whether we have interested them and whether we can go on interesting them. But at least we go. We want to reach out to where they are, rather than expect them to come to us.
Going back to the first area — at work —the best teacher of all is one who lives his lesson. Are we respected at work because we reflect the love of God, the compassion of the Lord Jesus and the insight of the word of God, or are we rejected because we are considered to be narrow-minded bigots? Will people come to talk to us because we manifest a concern for them and a gentle understanding of human problems, or do they avoid us because we attack them and beat them over the head with our views?
We are dealing mostly with people who think that Christianity has nothing to offer them. They weren’t thinking that way in. the Nineteenth Century, but we’re still treating them in the same way.
The Dogmatic, Hard Approach Of The Nineteenth Century Will Only Increase Their Resistance.
We have to learn to infiltrate into their consciousness by the example of Christianity’s effects on us. This is why, perhaps more than ever before, the power of the living Christ must be first in our hearts and be seen in our lives before our words ever begin to penetrate into the minds of others.
It’s not enough to be recognised as a dedicated bookworm, educated in Biblical interpretation.
The word of God, the living Christ, must be seen in our hearts. To be aloof, condemnatory, holier-than-thou, is not enough today. It never was! It is the death of communication!
The Lord communicated with publicans and sinners and was hated by many of his “good” contemporaries because he held out his hands towards them when everyone else was standing with their backs to them.
People At Home
Now to the second area where the people are — in the homes. How do we communicate with them? How do we get inside? Immediately of course, we might answer, “by canvassing”. But knocking at the door is not necessarily for all of us. We have to find a way in which all of us can reach out to communicate with people.
Are we using the Post Office and the newspaper enough? Why do they exist? Has not God inspired men to provide means of spreading His Gospel? Without the Pax Romana of the First Century, the Roman roads, the common language, how could Paul have travelled so far with the good news? God moved men to prepare the way so that His servants might reach out to them.
Why does the Post Office exist, why do newspapers exist, if it isn’t that they might be used by us in the Twentieth Century? We can’t work in the way in which they did in the Nineteenth Century — there’s no communication. But people read newspapers in their homes —people receive postcards and letters in their homes. Any name or name and address in any newspaper or magazine is an opportunity to post a copy of Glad Tidings. It costs little. If you can include a short, pleasant note, handwritten, all the better.
We have to reach out to people in their homes.
And what then? If they reply pleasantly we can do two things. We can offer to visit them, or, far better, we can invite them to our homes. Why have we got homes? A very good question isn’t it? The answer is the same as it was about the Post Offices and the newspaper. They are there to be used by God’s servants, for God’s will.
In the Twentieth Century, it is the home which is the effective teaching centre, not the church. In the church assembled, visitors will find an assortment of brethren and sisters and friends. They will hear us sing and pray and read and preach and it will be a varied experience. But in our homes they will find the enthusiastic person, the family that loves God, that loves their neighbour enough to invite seekers after the truth into their homes. We are reaching out to them personally.
Around The Fire
I find it difficult to justify conglomeration into huge Ecclesias, even in the Nineteenth Century! Why we imitated the free churches in their organisation and services I personally find difficult to understand. Far more effective work has always been done privately and in homes than ever was done in huge assemblies. Huge assemblies seek to make an impression. But the effective work was done in the quiet conversation around the fire, even in the Nineteenth Century; how much more in the late part of the Twentieth?
Here it might be said (and I quote again from “The Gagging of God”), “That a large percentage of churchgoers might well prefer to listen passively to sermons”. Isn’t this true of ourselves? We prefer to listen passively to sermons than to take part in a learning-aimed group. No response, no checking on progress, no questions to answer, none of these things is required in the hearing of a lecture. But with the give and take of a group there’s no chance of escaping from involvement.
You’ve to learn, or you drop out.
But perhaps you’ve no home to which you can invite others. Or perhaps you protest, “I cannot talk”, or “I wouldn’t know how to begin if I invited my neighbours in” and “What happens when they ask me questions to which I have not got an answer?”
Now, those three points:
- I can’t talk,
- I wouldn’t know where to begin,
- What happens when they ask me questions to which I don’t know the answer.
… to me show the abysmal failure of our Nineteenth Century traditional preaching methods. In large church-type groups there are vast numbers of us that can’t talk about the Truth because all we’ve done is listen to somebody, else talk about it.
We’ve corrupted one another “Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh”.
So perhaps we ought to consider beginning to split up our congregation into smaller groups for intimate study and discussion. A dozen here and a dozen there in the homes of brethren and sisters — is not a new idea. It’s practised widely by many church teaching groups and we shall find that some of our neighbours may well be already attending such house groups.
Missed The Boat?
Once again, instead of launching out into the deep, I find we’ve missed the boat. We can, of course, enjoy our self-satisfying, large congregations say once a month, if we have to have them, provided we work, every single one of us, the rest of the time.
This might have an additional side effect or two. We could afford to be more selective of our public speakers as fewer would be needed. But far more important, each family would become the active centre of others and teaching themselves, too. A start has already been made (in U.K.) in the production of home class material to stimulate’ those who may feel afraid to make a start. But, you know, there are really very few of us who can’t talk about our dearest possession and liveliest hopes, especially if we have an attentive listener. You know it’s not the doing that’s the problem, it’s the thinking about doing which seems to frighten people.
So, brethren and sisters, what shall we do?
We shall pray tonight and every night that we shall be led by God to meet someone tomorrow who’s looking for the Lord Jesus. We shall the more earnestly seek and find the Lord Jesus ourselves. We shall more widely open the door of our hearts to admit Him and His Father that they may fulfil their promise to fill our lives and then overflow to others.
We shall seek to understand others, so that we may talk to them from their own experience to the Word of God. It has to be that way. We’ve never been very good at that. But it has to be from their experience to the Word of God — it cannot be from the Word of God to them, because they don’t know what we’re talking about. We’re talking a foreign language; we’re talking about things that they cannot even imagine exists. We must start from their experience to the Word of God. That is the way the Lord himself taught in the First Century.
We shall launch out into the deep, into a brave adventure, and let down our nets on the right side of the ship. On the right side, because we’ve asked God to guide us. Who knows what the harvest will bear now, immediately, and at the return of the Lord? The results are in the hands of the Lord and little or much must not be our concern. So, again, brethren and sisters, WHAT SHALL WE DO?
The Parables of Jesus – (Part 6) – The Wedding Banquet