Preaching Contextually: Navigating Your Cultural Divide

During March Madness this year, I heard a commentator say something that stuck: Winners want to be coached. I wrote it down because I knew it applied to more than basketball.

A few days later, I sat down with Don Wilson for the Better Preaching Podcast, and he proved it. Don pastored Christ’s Church of the Valley in Peoria, Arizona, for over three decades, preaching to 25,000 people a week by the time he stepped away. Six live services on a weekend. No executive pastor for most of that run. And the thing that defined his preaching more than any of that was this: every Saturday, he walked off the stage after the four o’clock service, and four or five people followed him into a room and beat his sermon up.

That joke didn’t work. That illustration was too long. Why did you say it that way?

Then it was up to Don to decide what to change before the next service. He did this for years. Not because he was insecure, but because he wanted to get better.

Here’s the part that convicted me. Don said that in his post-ministry years, he’s worked with roughly five hundred pastors. Most of them say they want critique. But when you actually give it to them — when you ask hard questions about why they’re doing what they’re doing — most of them don’t want it at all.

I think he’s right. And I think I know why. Preaching is personal. You pour yourself into a message all week, you stand up and deliver it, and then someone tells you the story ran long or the conclusion fell flat. That hurts. But then again, growth usually hurts.

Don also said something about giving his wife to critique his preaching. He told me: I don’t need a wife who worships me. I need a wife who loves me. He meant that he needs someone honest enough to say, That came across a little judgmental, or You lost them in the middle. Not because she enjoyed saying it, but because he’d created the space for her to say it and she loved him enough to walk into that space.

The green room is comfortable. The critique room is where you get better. Most of us know which one we prefer.

We also know which one we really need.

I recently sat down with Ben Cachiaras for the Better Preaching Podcast. Ben has served Mountain Christian Church near Baltimore for thirty of its 201 years, and I wanted to hear how a kid from Rochester, Minnesota ended up giving his life to preaching.

He almost didn’t.

Rochester is home to the Mayo Clinic, and Ben grew up surrounded by doctors’ kids. He was bright. School came easily. Plenty of people told him medicine would be a noble path, and he was leaning that way. Then he went to church camp.

Pine Haven Christian Assembly sits on a Minnesota lake where Ben had been baptized years earlier. That weekend, the preacher in the hot little chapel was Ben’s grandfather—a Greek immigrant who came to Christ at Johnson Bible College in the early 1900s and served Minnesota Bible College from 1919 until his death in 1983. Picture it: folding chairs, restless high schoolers, and a nearly ninety-year-old man preaching with the passion of someone half his age.

At the end, he gave an invitation to salvation, and a couple of kids came forward. But he wasn’t finished. He issued a second call, for anyone willing to give the best energy of their life to serving the local church. To be a preacher. Then he added the line that undid his grandson: “If you think to yourself, ‘Yeah, I could probably do that,’ I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the one who knows you can’t do anything else and have peace with God.”

Ben melted. He walked the aisle crying, stood beside his grandfather, and repeated a confession the old man composed on the spot. Med school was over before it started. He enrolled at Minnesota Bible College, and the trajectory of his life bent toward the pulpit for good.

Looking back, Ben suspects his grandfather knew exactly who was sitting in those folding chairs that day. I suspect he’s right.

Here’s what stayed with me. Ben said that moment makes him want to grab every seventh, eighth, and tenth grader, look them in the eye, and tell them it’s not too early to think about ministry. I grew up hearing my preacher say the best and brightest of our generation should go to Bible college and enter the ministry, the highest calling any of us can pursue.

Somewhere along the way, many of our churches went quiet on that. We tell our sharpest students to pursue engineering or medicine, and those are noble callings. But somebody has to say what Ben’s grandfather said.

Who’s the kid in your congregation waiting for a bold, clear call?

Say it. They may be listening harder than you think.