Believing the preacher

Written by Marv Thiessen

Pastor Marv Thiessen

Calgary First Mennonite Church

June 13, 2010

 

BELIEVING THE PREACHER

Acts 17:1-15

A few years ago, I told you about a church conflict at Beside the River Mennonite Church near Winkler, Manitoba. The church was experiencing strong disagreement between members over the question of what things women could do in the life of the church. The ministerial leaders of the church eventually presented their position on the question to the congregation. While a number of members of the church disagreed with the minister’s position on that subject, many were especially alarmed and dismayed by the view the ministerial leaders took regarding their leadership in the church. When the ministerial group’s view on their role in leadership was challenged in a public meeting, the ministers put their role this way. They told the church that the church had elected them as their ministers and leaders. Therefore, the church now had to heed their wisdom and position. The members of the church should not really debate the question of the role of women in the church that had given rise to some conflict. They had chosen ministers to discern the correct position and should now accede to the authority of the ministers they had chosen and decide to agree with the position the ministers had taken on this issue.

You can well imagine that this pronouncement met with limited success when it came to quelling church conflict. It could have been successful. All the members who questioned the ministerial’s position on the question of the role of women in the church could have accepted the minsterial’s position as the best biblical understanding regarding the question and could have submitted their ideas to the ministerial’s views. But that’s not what happened. Instead, many of these people openly questioned the correctness of the ministerial’s view regarding women in leadership and also its view of how to exercise leadership in the church. Eventually, they simply were no longer willing to live together. The ministerial leaders were not willing to have their view about women’s roles in the church and their own leadership studied seriously and discussed by the entire congregation with openness about the conclusion. Meanwhile, those who were unwilling to accept the minister’s viewpoints were not willing to submit themselves to the ministerial leaders’ decisions. It’s not hard to understand that worshiping and serving together became very difficult. Eventually, the people that disagreed with the ministers became a group that met separately for Sunday morning worship in the church building earlier than when the group loyal to the ministers met. This was still a difficult situation and, when neither side would or could make the moves necessary to bring them together again, a split eventually occurred. The group that could not abide by the decisions of the ministers purchased their own building and developed their own church.

Without probing and analyzing the various factors involved in leading to this church split, we would still profit from considering the way this split occurred at Beside the River Mennonite Church. As we do so, we will be served well by the story Luke tells in Acts 17 about the apostle Paul’s ministry in Berea.

Paul and his missionary companion, Silas, arrived in the city of Berea and found their way to the Jewish synagogue (or gathering place for the believers) that was located in the city. There Paul preached the good news of Jesus as he did wherever he went. The storyteller, Luke, doesn’t tell us the exact words that Paul preached, but we know that Paul told Jews in every place he went about Jesus and that Jesus was the Messiah for whom they had been waiting. They needed to believe in Jesus for their salvation.

It’s interesting to note the response of the people of Berea. They didn’t necessarily believe Paul’s message immediately. But neither did they reject it. They viewed it as a message that was worth their careful examination. It seems that they were excited by the message but they weren’t going to believe it without careful examination. After they heard the words that Paul preached, they went home and examined the Scriptures to see if what they had heard was in agreement with the written Scriptures they had. And they didn’t do this just once. Luke tells us that they did this every day. Evidently, they determined that Paul’s preaching was in line with the Scripture since Luke tells us that many of the Jews believed along with a number of Greek women and men.

This reaction contrasted remarkably with the reaction that Paul had received in the previous city where he preached. When he had preached that Jesus was the Messiah in the synagogue in Thessalonica, quite a few Jews and Greeks believed but other Jews did not take the time to examine Paul’s teaching. They rejected it out of hand because it made them jealous. They got together a mob of people and tried to find Paul and Silas. Clearly, they meant them harm. When they couldn’t find Paul and Silas, they took Jason, Paul and Silas’ host, and accused him of harbouring people who were a threat to the Roman empire before the city officials. While some had received Paul’s message in Thessalonica gladly, the reaction that won out was a rejection of the message without any examination of its merits.

Luke analyzes this contrast in reactions to Paul’s message very succinctly when he tells us that the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians in 17:11.

It seems to me that Luke doesn’t mean that they were nobler simply because they accepted Paul’s message more warmly than the Thessalonians. They were nobler because they chose to take the message seriously and they were nobler because they took the time to analyze Paul’s message in the light of Scripture. When they heard a message that contained new elements to them, they took the time to compare those elements to the Scripture that Paul had cited in order to come to personal conclusions.

I believe that we can draw some useful lessons for our lives as followers of Jesus from this story. These are lessons that address the relationship between preachers and those who hear the preaching in church. And these are lessons that speak to the need for all the participants in a church to take the study of Scripture seriously.

I’d like to suggest that the first lesson to take from this is that it is a good idea to listen to preaching with a strong sense that there may be something good and valuable in the preaching. Sometimes we listen to preaching that doesn’t excite us very much or that we think doesn’t meet our needs and we choose not to listen to it very carefully. Sometimes we think that the preacher uses language and ideas that we can’t understand so we stop trying. Sometimes we think the preacher is boring and we fail to listen to good insights because they aren’t presented in a very interesting way in our opinion. From the listeners at Berea we learn that the message presented by the preacher is worth taking seriously.

The second lesson is that there’s nothing wrong with questioning what the preacher has said. We shouldn’t approach the message preached to us with such unquestioning acceptance that we believe it without any careful examination. We should be people who think through what the preacher has said carefully and come to a conclusion about whether we agree that it has lined up with the Bible. In fairness, we should also say that our questioning the preacher shouldn’t be of the nature that we reject the preaching out of hand. We must give it a chance to be correct and to speak to us. I think that our bias, in particular when the preacher is the one that we have chosen for our congregation, should be toward believing the preacher. But while maintaining such a bias, we are still on good ground when we bring serious questions to the message presented by the preacher.

The third lesson is that we can’t be people who respond to preaching in this way if we are not people who take the time to study Scripture seriously. We can respond to preaching in this way either if we have studied the Scripture so thoroughly throughout our lives that we already bring a very good understanding of Scripture with us when we listen to the preaching or if we go to the Scripture after we have heard the preaching to study it carefully and compare. Both of those responses are good and the ideal response includes both: a good solid understanding of the Bible in advance and a commitment to test the preaching in Scripture after it is heard.

In relation to this, I was thinking about several disagreements concerning the rules of slow pitch softball in our game last week. As our team’s representative to the league, I’m responsible to work through disagreements about rules with the other team’s representative. Of course, in the heat of the moment, any player may be likely to jump into the disagreement. But when there is such a disagreement, a solid understanding of the rules is essential. I need to have read the rules in advance. I also find myself going back to the rules after such an event to make sure that what I said was correct. Study of the rules both before and after the point of discussion is necessary. So it is with our analysis of the preaching we hear. It’s fine to analyze, debate and disagree. But we had better do it with careful study of the Bible as our context.

This study of the Bible may be undertaken on our own through careful reading of the text as well as the reading of the explanations of scholars. This study of the Bible may also be undertaken as groups of Christians examine the Bible together. In our current discussions about how to discern God’s direction in Mennonite circles, we tend to value the latter especially. We talk about submitting our interpretation of the Bible to the wisdom of the community. When we gather at our Annual Assembly, as we will in a few weeks in Calgary this year, we process important theological questions by working them through in community. In much of our history, we have emphasized that decisions in the community of faith should be made by the whole group and not by just the leaders. So, our inclination is to give credence to the understanding of the group.

The bottom line is that we followers of Jesus need to be people who take seriously the need to be students of the Bible. That ties in with our special occasion this morning. We have celebrated milestones for students in our Sunday School program and we recognize that it is important that we provide good, sound teaching for people of the church, both children and adults. We encourage both children and adults to participate fully in the educational program of the church so that they can continue to learn and provide input for our communal decision-making. The call to be serious students of the Bible is also in keeping with the history of the Mennonites. It was because those first Anabaptists were serious students of the Bible that they had the courage to challenge the church dogma that they concluded was unbiblical. Again, we who are followers of Jesus take seriously the need to be students of the Bible.

I’ve suggested three lessons for how to listen to preaching as inspired by the stories of Paul preaching in Thessalonica and Berea. We should listen to preaching with a perspective that takes it seriously and with a bias toward believing it. But we shouldn’t be afraid to bring our serious questions to the preaching we’ve heard and analyze it carefully in the light of the Bible. In order to do that well, we need to be careful students of the Bible.

With those lessons in mind, what do we say about the church scenario I presented in the introduction? Who was right and who was wrong at Beside the River Mennonite Church? I don’t think we need to answer that question. Surely, both sides in this conflict made errors. It seems to me, though, that the biggest error was the inability of the two sides to examine the Scripture together honestly with openness to learning from each other and submitting their ideas to each other but mostly to Scripture. In my opinion, a second error that made the conflict worse was the belief of the preachers that the hearers should not question the word of the preachers. That viewpoint kept the two sides from learning from each other and from submitting their opinions to a comprehensive study of the Bible. The preachers were worthy of respect and the listeners should have taken their message seriously but the listeners were also on solid biblical ground when they questioned the message on biblical grounds.

I conclude with the thought that we should believe the preacher, but we should do so with a commitment to comparing it to the Bible and having a good personal understanding of the Bible. We should prepare ourselves with study of the Bible on our own, in groups, and in educational opportunities. With such preparation and such a commitment, we engage the preacher and bring careful and wise thought to our decisions about believing the preacher.