Concerns in Christianity

This past Sunday I preached a sermon on Communion. Preaching on things like communion, baptism, grace, eldership, and other “doctrinal” positions can be rather technical. While I recognize the need for technical sermons, I strongly dislike to preach them. I like to creatively weave the technical through a story I am trying to communicate. So when I have a sermon to preach dealing with a technical subject I turn to podcast to see how other preachers have approached the discussion.

As I turned to my podcasts, I pulled up two churches that I love to listen to their ministers preach.  Both churches are doing amazing things in their communities for Christ. Both have astronomical numbers for their weekend worship services. But as I looked through these two mega churches I did not find a single sermon on the topic of communion in the past two years. Now to their credit they may have preached the sermons, and I could have missed them due to their title for the sermon.

But for the sake of this concern let’s say they didn’t. If they didn’t preach on communion in the past two years, and the only thing the people in their churches were hearing about communion was from the meditation before hand (and lets be honest, most communion meditations are not that good, sorry to all the guys giving them, but for the 16-17 years I have been in “Big Church”, hearing roughly 832 meditations, I have learned very little about communion … Sorry, off my soapbox now … by the way, I feel they do help set the mood, but many of them just do not teach us anything), how many people attending their services are in the dark about what this meal is. Both of these churches are Restoration Movement Churches towing the party line of Christian Church/Church of Christ. Both of these churches are churches who practice communion on a weekly basis. Both would say it is an central part of their weekly services. But to go two years+ without preaching on this, that is amazing.

Communion has such a wonderful and spiritual blessing for the Christian. A good sermon at least once every couple of years would be great to teach and instruct. But I guess my real concern is not over the sermon topic of communion more as it is to doctrine in and of itself. I think in many ways we have gotten caught up in trying to preach sermon’s that help us live better lives and lead people to a closer walk with Christ. I am guilty of this myself, and will make no apologize for doing so. I think preaching life relevant sermons is needed in our society. But I think at least once in a two year span we need to get back to the basics. We need to discuss what are some of the core teachings of Scripture that unite us as a local body of believers.

Its kind of funny, the one church on my podcast list that had a sermon on communion was a church that is relatively new. They began in 2007 and is doing a great job reaching people far from God in the suburbs of Cleveland. They saw that teaching on this, as well as other doctrinal issues was highly needed. Thank you Dan Smith and Momentum for tackling this issue.

 

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