David:     Been there and done that. I never liked that expression or what it implied.

Karen:     Well, that’s because what it implies is boredom. Nothing is new or exciting. And here my little kid’s saying, I’m bored. I’ve been there and already done that.

Intro:      Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author, Karen Mains. Here’s David at Karen Mains.

David:     Been there and done that would not be an accurate description about the ministry of Jesus, right?

Karen:     I guess not. When Christ visited various synagogues during his life here on earth, people’s reactions were quite strong, the opposite of ho-hum.

David:     Sometimes the reactions were positive and other times they were negative, but his presence was not marked by a ho-hum of life as usual.

Karen:     But that sense of anticipation, that what’s going to happen, should also apply to Sunday. What’s going to happen this Sunday? Does this anticipation mark Christ’s church all that much nowadays?

David:     Yeah, I’m thinking Jesus, just to emphasize what I’m saying. He got incredible reactions. Sometimes almost how in the world do they react that way? I’m reading from the book of Luke. It’s where Jesus picks up the scroll in the synagogue and says, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me because He’s anointed me to preach good news to the poor” and so on. Then He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of everyone in the synagogue, we’re fastened on Him. And He began saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.  And all spoke well of Him. And were amazed at the gracious words that came from His lips. ‘Isn’t this Joseph’s son,’ they ask. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Surely you will quote this proverb to me, Physician, heal yourself. Do here in your hometown what you have heard that you did in Capernaum. I tell you the truth.’ He continued, ‘No prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time when the sky was shut for three and a half years. And there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them but to a widow in Zarephath, in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet no one of them was cleansed, only Naaman, the Syrian.’ All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, took him to the brow of the hill in which the town was built. In order to throw him down the cliff, but he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.” I mean just a total opposite of what you would expect in this furious, furious reaction.

Karen:     I remember a friend we had. He was a very highly educated friend, a wonderful person, a man. And he was trying to find a church and it was sort of on the cusp of renewing his faith, I think, his early faith. And he couldn’t find a church he wanted to be a part of. And his comment was, “They’re all the same. Sunday after Sunday, it’s the same thing. It just get boring.”

David:     I remember who you’re talking about now. He said, you go there, you sing some songs and then you listen to a guy talk for 20 minutes. And if you go the next week, it’s the very same thing. It’s the week after that. And on and on. And it’s just not interesting to me anymore. So, he gave up his search and it was kind of a sad thing to see that happen because he was a good, good man.

Karen:     There’s a good man. So, David, why did you bring up this topic? Been there, done that? Why are we talking about this today?

David:     You had to ask that, didn’t you? Okay. We have been in a new church for about a half a year now.

Karen:     We’ve said this before in the podcast. We’re living in a little town of 27,000. I think it is now. And it’s highly Hispanic. 58% of the town are non-white. And so, we wanted to find a church in our own community where we could contribute and grow and perhaps find a way to reach out through that church to the Hispanic community. And so, we started to go to this little church.

David:     We started going to many churches. We visited 18 different churches in this town and close by towns. And we finally settled on this one.

Karen:     What we love about this church, it’s small, 30 to 40 people every Sunday. It’s a group of families. They’re three bi-vocational pastors. So, they have full-time jobs as they’re also functioning as elder/pastors in this church.

David:     They’re interesting to listen to. They work hard on their sermons.

Karen:     Yes. They’re well-prepared and they’re actually good communicators. But the test question that we would give to pastors to measure the effectiveness of their sermons is: do your people remember what you preached when they get to the car in the parking lot? Do they remember when they get home or the next morning? And you have done a lot of interviewing of laypeople and generally they cannot remember even in the parking lot what their pastors spoke on or certainly when they get home or the next day. It has no application to their lives at all. So years ago you began to work with communication theories that would help pastors preach in such a way that their people would remember. So that’s a little bit about what we’re going to talk about this morning.

David:     I would say that this church probably would fail on that test. Do you remember what your pastor preached on yesterday morning? If you asked that on Monday, they would say, our pastors are good people. They would not want to say anything negative whatsoever. And they love them. But my guess is that it would be hard for them to pull back what was said the day before.

Karen:     Sometimes they’ll remember an illustration or a joke.

David:     A joke maybe.

Karen:     Yeah, something that pulls them in. But the content or the thrust of the sermon is just gone over their heads. Now pastors don’t want to do that and these pastors, these three who are bi-vocational, they have full-time jobs. So, they’re working on their sermons. We saw one of them come in and he was running off his notes that morning as he came to church. And that’s not a criticism. It’s the reality of what their lives are like. They’re all very intelligent people. But what you would like to do is to begin to dialogue with them as far as how do you make your sermons and services memorable enough, interesting enough, not the same old, same old, someday after Sunday so that your people begin to remember those sermons. And then apply what they’ve learned in their week and get back to you with it. And saying, “Pastor, this is what that sermon did for me. The Lord has used it in my life in this way.”

David:     I would say that I would take it even further than I would like to have the sense of excitement and this aspect of the unexpected. There’s a certain routine that becomes repetitive and therefore not as interesting week after week in most churches. But you did get me wrong when you say “What I would like is.” I would like just to be left alone. I’m getting old and I would say to the Holy Spirit, get somebody else to challenge these pastors and this congregation in a different way. I don’t find that that’s going to happen, and I do sense that the Lord is wanting me to respond once that’s initiated by these pastors. And unfortunately, last week, one of the pastors said, “I’d really like to get with you and pick your brain.” And I thought, “I’m in trouble now.” I’m in real trouble because I will be open and honest. If you push me, I’m asking them to jump through a hoop that is much higher than what they think it should be. And that brings back that sense of excitement and thrill. And oh, my goodness, the Lord was present. The Lord was present and he’s changing this church and we had a visitor come again this Sunday and he came back.

Karen:     Brought his family.

David:     And pretty soon, instead of 40 people as a high, they’ll be saying, this whole section of the sanctuary is filled. Did you notice that? Well, of course you notice it.

Karen:     We’re going to this church in this town because it’s typical of many of the churches across the country. Most of them, I would say the majority of them. The churches in America are dying. They’re closing their doors. Pastors are leaving the pulpits because it is not attracting growth. The younger ages, let’s say 30 down, are no longer attending the churches where the services are the same as the ones we knew in our childhood, actually.

David:     There are churches where there are those younger people. It’s basically because of the music being different. There are no hymnals in those churches where the young people are coming. They’re singing songs to instruments that were formed to the church 20 years ago or probably 30 years ago, and say, “Where it all leads?” In my mind, there is going to have to be a gargantuan change for the church to again feel that sense of the presence of the Lord.

Karen:     So specifically, what does that require?

David:     I would say that one of the things that it requires is planning much further ahead than most people anticipate. My feeling is that every Sunday in most churches and the place where we are attending, all the effort has gone into that service from Monday through Saturday of the previous week. There needs to be the change that you’re planning way further ahead than that.

Karen:     So, months ahead, you’re saying?

David:     I would say that you pick certain Sundays as high points of the year, whether that’s Easter or whether that’s Thanksgiving, whether it’s Christmas, you know.

Karen:     It could be Father’s Day.

Karen:     Yeah, it could be any of those, but you have certain Sundays that are high point Sundays. And you plan for them a long way ahead of time. But at the same time, you also get into a mindset that says, “While we’re working on this Sunday, we’re also working on the following Sunday and the Sunday after that.” And that’s kind of good in the church where we are because you have different voices that are speaking. If you take those three and say, “We’re only going to have one of the lay persons speaking, at that point you’re where most churches are.” And then you have this exhaustion factor of the ministers where they think Sunday is every other day because the week is also fast.

Karen:     Particularly when you’re bi-vocational, my goodness, I mean these men have very important successful professions, these three men in our church.

David:     They’re good at it.

Karen:     They’re good at it.

David:     They’re good at referencing their work that ties closer to where the congregation is in most cases.

Karen:     As far as lay people, lay people’s employment.

David:     As contrasting to a minister who is in a very specialized area of expertise. So, I think that they may be open, but I don’t know.

Karen:     Well, let’s take it out of the specific, darling, and say “What do churches need to do?” And one of the things that we know needs to happen has to be more lay involvement in the planning. And if a staff is just doing the worship planning, they’re missing out on a huge pool of resources. Now one of the things that happened at this church recently was they had a lay person dialogue with one of the pastors. And he was dialoguing about witnessing in his workplace. Do you remember what his profession was?

David:     Well, the guy was a boiler maker.

Karen:     A boiler maker. And it was fascinating to hear that lay perspective. I think that when you use lay people and you invite them into the planning, you begin to get a perspective that’s other than the professional minister’s perspective, which is very enlightening and very engaging for the rest of the congregation.

David :    I think you almost have to change the world of how people think. People who preach sermons, whether they’re lay or professional, they think. subject and outline. That day is over. Nobody says point one, point two, point three, except when you’re talking church. Then they talk that way. But you need to think in terms of concepts. How do I put into a sentence what it is I’m trying to say? And to be able to do that is very helpful once you get used to it, because it’s a lot easier than going to the outline form.

Okay, but with all of these when you say we can figure out what the thrust of the sermon is going to be, not only this Sunday, but the following Sundays as well, and moving toward key Sundays, such as Easter will be the next one in the churches. All of a sudden you are able to tap into where the church people are in the sense that you say we need to have the scriptures really pop this Sunday. How do we make that more effective than normally it is when it’s read?

Karen:     Now when we were in church renewal work, we began to read the experts, of course, that come out of evaluative situations and seminaries, for instance. And one of the points they made was the reading of scriptures on Sunday morning was rated by congregations as one of the most boring times in the worship service. I mean, it just kills you when you think of the dynamism of the scriptures. So, we began to work with that form and we invited lay people to dialogue with us and how do we make scriptures meaningful. One of the most powerful ways that we found was someone would memorize a whole long passage of scripture. And of course, they were assigned this scripture weeks before. He or she got up to read it.

David:     Let’s have somebody memorize the scripture instead of reading it. Now our church, they do have lay people read scripture and sometimes they substitute scripture for a reading. Maybe CS Lewis, someone like that. It’s not a comment on that being equal to the scripture. It’s just that it changes the format of the service a little bit.

Karen:     When someone memorized scripture and our experience, there was a dynamic quality in the listeners just looking. And there was one man I remember; he had done passages and he would close his eyes. So, you knew he was not reading. It was coming out of his very being and he had come to love the scriptures that he has memorized. And that got transmuted to the whole congregation. Another example or two, one of the things we discovered was you could take scriptures and you could make them into dynamic scripture readings. Scripture would be scripted in a way where you might have two voices intertwining or echoing one verse. Both reading at the same time. And that just brought the attention of the congregation to the point of let us hear the word, this is dynamic.

David:     I think those are great illustrations. And again, it’s necessary that you’re working ahead of time, which means that you say, this is the scripture that’s going to be, say, three weeks from now. Well, that gives you a good jump. Maybe not long enough to memorize.

Karen:     That would be for your planning team. Yeah.

David:     But you’re able to say, “Okay, we’re projecting four or five weeks ahead knowing what’s coming and we have different people working on the service. However, the person who’s preaching, we need to know in a sentence what’s going to be said or otherwise we’re going to go in different directions.” And I think a service that has really four or five very beautiful parts, whether the prayer time is another time, you have to have this central thrust. Otherwise, you’re in trouble. However, it’s not that hard for ministers or especially when you have a team of three who can say, “Okay, I can project to the next time I’ll preach. I just preached this last Sunday. So, I got three weeks to go, and I know the direction that we’re headed.” You just get used to it. It’s a whole different kind of thing.

I think another point just to make when we’re talking about the morning service is how long is that sermon going to be? I would say that where we are, the sermons average about 40 minutes and that’s too long. And we need to have some voice again. Who’s going to be the loud mouth saying “This is too long a sermon.” I just think in today’s world, you’re talking about a sermon losing its effectiveness after about 25 minutes. People just aren’t used to listening.

Karen:     That’s right. That’s because everything we have is done in little clips, little sections, television wise, everything that people are watching. They don’t have anything really that’s unless it’s a political speech somewhere that is longer than just five or 10 minutes. And then they move to commercials, or they move to break.

David:     That’s one of the good things about church. You have no commercials.

Karen:     You have no commercials. One of the lovely things, I think, that I’d like to see done, and I think this church has the possibility of doing that is to invite people to give testimonies out of their lives on the sermon topic. That just enlivens the whole concept. You say we’re talking on not lying.

David:     Ok.

Karen:     All right. When was the time in your life you told a lie and you got caught? Then just all of a sudden everyone in the congregation is engaged with that because they’ve all lied. We had times when we were caught, and we vowed not to be liars. And that just brings anticipatory participation on the part of the listeners and the chairs are in the pews.

David:     You have to with all of those know way ahead of time what is going to be preached at a given time. Maybe you say, okay, there’s going to be a series on the tongue. We’ll talk about common tongue problems from a spiritual perspective.

Karen:     What does the scripture say about the tongue? I mean it’s pretty dynamic as far as what the scripture says.

David:     Which gives you opportunity in that instruction time to not always say everything has to ride with the sermon. However, it should coordinate with the sermon so that you have a thrust for the whole service. I would say you need also in the church where we are a better understanding of the different aspects of a Sunday service. I like it where you begin with worship. You attribute worth to God and it’s not just a general worship. It’s a specific worship. We prays you that you are truth and that is chosen by what is going to be preached. It’s important that truth is followed by the people of God. Otherwise, what kind of a world if you can’t trust those people who supposedly are followers of Jesus?

Jesus said, “I am truth.” So, the question is what is the format of that service? Otherwise, it gets kind of sloppy. I would say a lot of churches, they say worship and they mean the elements of the service.

Karen:     I think they just mean the singing time. It hasn’t been defined in a clear enough way for the lay people to grasp and it also shows that the folk who are planning the service are not gearing in on what the meaning of worship is either.

David:     It’s not all built in a beautiful way. It’s why this gentleman you referred to earlier, he says, “Yeah, you sing some songs and you listen to a guy talk for 15, 20, 30 minutes and then you go home. Then the next week you sing some songs, and you listen to the same guy talk again for a long time. After a while, it gets repetitive. And it doesn’t really challenge me because I need to see participation of people other than just the one guy who’s talking all the time or the people who are leading in the music all the time.”

Karen:     So, what are we saying in a sentence, David?

David:     Oh man, we’re saying a lot and I hesitate to even put this in a sentence because it’s going to come back to me.

Karen:     Is it finger pointing or what?

David:     Oh Yeah. A ministry that accurately represents Jesus should never be boring. Instead, one would expect it to be exciting and challenging, emotional and life changing. You know, when Jesus talked, there was an excitement that was there. And it was relevant, and he interacted. He taught, yes. But he even used a form of teaching that was not like we say preaching as much as storytelling.

Karen:     Storytelling or parable. It didn’t tie all the ends together because it meant that the hearers had to sort of ponder it out themselves. What is the meaning of what he’s trying to say to us?

David:     He almost said enough to get them talking. I think he meant this. No, I think he meant this, you know.

Karen:     Yes, this is how it hit me.

David:     I think that there’s this sense with Jesus that it was never dull. It was always interesting. There was the unexpected. One of the things I don’t like about church is that you always expect what is going to happen and that gentleman was right. He said, yeah, you’ve been to one service, you’ve been to all of them. I don’t think he ever came to the place where he said “He’s been there, done that.” But that’s what he was implying.

To change that, oh man, it is going to be the war of the world because people are so rutted in terms of what they are used to and yet I do believe that maybe it could be done.

Karen:     David, why don’t you repeat the sentence?

David:     Can do. Okay. A ministry that accurately represents Jesus should never be boring. Instead, one would expect it to be exciting and challenging emotional and life changing.

Karen:     I don’t think there’s anything more exciting than to see a church become vibrant. One that’s been a good church, a church where people love one another but doesn’t have a growth pattern. And all of a sudden it begins to grow, and people are excited about going to church. And they talk about the service and the sermon afterwards and in fact into the dinner table conversation when we go home.

So, this is something that is worth working toward David for us all. And if church in the country are dying and they are, then we need to make this one of our major emphases, even in our old age. So, hopefully there’ll be a lot of young ins coming along saying, “How can we help? I’ve got this idea or whatever like that.” But that has to happen in order for the church in America to come alive again.

David:     I think that the Lord is speaking to me. He doesn’t speak out loud, but he tends to put something on your heart and make the timing right. And if all that comes together, I’m ready to say, “Okay, I’ll go for it.” The thing I don’t want, Karen, I don’t want to cause a split in a church. I don’t want people to be upset. Sometimes Jesus upset people. I mean, he healed people and they got mad because he did it on the wrong day. So, you’re dealing with imperfect people and I’m certainly not the Christ. Yes, something has to happen not only in a general sense, but in that church where the Lord has said, “This is where I want you to be.” So anyway, pray for me, sweetheart. You know, I can mess things up.

Karen:     But we’re good at that.

David:     Yeah, we’re good at it. And we’re also good at being heart-headed. So anyway, we will see. I appreciate you talking about it because it’s where I am on a spiritual basis right now.

Outgo:     You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2023 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.