Commit to Cultural Exegesis

In 2006, Dave Stone stepped to the podium at the North American Christian Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. He had just become the lead minister at Southeast Christian Church following Bob Russell’s retirement, a transition that would have rattled most preachers into playing it safe. Stone didn’t play it safe. He preached from Ephesians 4 and asked a room full of church leaders a deceptively simple question: What is the greatest benefit of serving together?

He walked through three answers — unity, maturity, and testimony — and built the case that all three are real, but the last one matters most.

What makes this sermon worth revisiting nearly twenty years later isn’t the exegesis, though the exegesis is solid. It’s the storytelling. Stone understood something every preacher needs to learn: the right story doesn’t just illustrate the point. It becomes the point.

He told about his Uncle Greg, a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, who went to a camp for developmentally challenged adults. A church member named John Miller volunteered as Greg’s counselor for four days, feeding him, dressing him, even rigging up a flotation device so Greg could swim for the first time in his life. At the end of the week, they asked Greg the standard question: What was your favorite part of camp? Greg raised his arm, pointed at John, and said one word: You.

That story does more theological work than a dozen propositional statements about humble service. And Stone knew it.

He closed with another story, this one from his own childhood. In 1967, his family was hit head-on by a hydroplaning car while on a trip in Illinois. His mother suffered a skull fracture. His father had twenty-one pieces of glass surgically removed from his eyes. Blind and alone in a strange town, the first visitor who took his father’s hand was an elder from a local Church of Christ. When Stone’s father mentioned that his congregation worshipped with instrumental music (a real fault line in the Restoration Movement) the elder said five words that carried the whole sermon home: That doesn’t matter. We just want to help a brother in Christ.

Stone admitted he’d forgotten that elder’s name. Then he landed the plane: I’ve forgotten the name on the back of his jersey, but I’m pretty certain what the name was on the front.

That’s how you close a sermon. You don’t explain the metaphor. You trust it.

Stone trusted it, and the room felt it.

On a recent episode of the Better Preaching Podcast, my guest Mark Christian said something that’s been rattling in my head ever since: “It takes a whole lot more talent to be at a church of 125 than it does to be at a church of over 3,000.”

Mark pastors one of the largest churches in Missouri, but before that he was the pastor of a small church in central Michigan. So, he isn’t romanticizing small-church ministry from the cheap seats. He’s earned the right to say it. Then he went further. He pictured a line forming at heaven’s gates, and the VIP treatment going not to preachers with podcasts and platforms, but to the faithful pastor who served nineteen years in a farm community nobody noticed.

That image stopped me cold. It looks a lot like my dad.

When I was a junior at Great Lakes Christian College, Dad became a freshman. He sold the family farm in his forties and spent the rest of his life as a bivocational preacher in small churches across North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. He called me once, discouraged, thinking about quitting. I asked how many attended the church when he arrived. Twenty. And now? Sixty. He had tripled the church in five years, doing the counseling, the marrying, the burying. And he thought he was failing.

He wasn’t. He just didn’t have a platform to tell him otherwise.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: a platform is a terrible feedback mechanism. It rewards what photographs well. It has nothing to say about the hospital visit at 2 a.m., the marriage you prayed back from the brink, the funeral where you were the only clergy anyone in that family had ever known, or the teenager who kept showing up because you learned his name. A platform doesn’t measure faithfulness; it only measures reach.

If you’re preaching this Sunday to forty people in a town of four hundred, hear this: the percentage of your community you’re reaching would embarrass most metropolitan megachurches. You are not waiting to be called into ministry. You are already in it.

Summon the heroes. They look like you.

On a recent Better Preaching Podcast episode, I asked Mark Christian for his parting word to preachers. He didn’t hesitate: “Let the text win. Let it win in you. Stand underneath it before you ever stand behind the pulpit.”

I haven’t been able to shake that line.

Let’s be honest; most of us don’t approach the text to lose. But we do approach the text to mine it. We come armed with an outline, a sermon slot, a series title already on the church app, and we start interrogating the passage to get it to confess what we need it to say by Sunday. The text becomes a witness we’ve subpoenaed. We’re the attorney. We ask the questions. We decide which answers make the cut.

That’s not preaching. That’s prosecuting.

Letting the text win is a different posture entirely. It means showing up on Tuesday without a predetermined verdict. It means reading slowly enough so the text has time to read you back. It means allowing the passage to ruin your first three ideas before it gives you the right one. It means getting uncomfortable in your own conscience before you ever figure out how to make your congregation uncomfortable in theirs.

You can’t fake this. Your people can tell the difference between a preacher who has wrestled with the text and a preacher who has merely researched it. The wrestled preacher limps a little. There’s a weight in his voice that commentary software cannot manufacture. He isn’t delivering information. He’s delivering testimony.

Here’s the ordering Mark got exactly right: underneath, then behind. If you haven’t stood underneath the text all week, you have no business standing behind the pulpit on Sunday. The pulpit doesn’t confer authority on your words. The text does. And the text only confers that authority on preachers who have been willing, privately, to be defeated by it.

This week, let it win. Let it corner you. Let it convict you before it comforts your people. Let it strip you of the clever turn of phrase you already had written in the margin. Let it hand you a harder word than you were hoping for.

Then, and only then, stand up and preach.