Preaching in Wollongong and the World

When I still lived in Australia I had a bit of a beef with the preaching.

You see, I'm from a really conservative part of the world: Sydney Anglicans (though I actually attended a Baptist church for the last 7 years or so, but it was a Sydney Anglican Baptist Church). And I was starting to get pretty tired of the preaching (and I'm happy - especially now - to admit it is almost definitely more of a reflection of my own sinfulness than the quality of the preaching). Nevertheless, I was tired of the anecdotes, illustrations, and depth. I was, and still am, sick of stories in sermons. On the odd occasion I will admit that a story can help you understand a difficult concept. But the problem is, that sermons almost never deal with difficult concepts - no depth. So stories become cute-sy asides rather than genuinely useful tools. On top of that there's the problem that as soon as a story is being told, my ears prick up and I take interest! Again, this may be a reflection on me, but I really feel like a story is told with a lot more enthusiasm, in general, than biblical exposition and exegesis.

Enter migration:

We recently moved to Germany. We have been attending what I think is just about the best church in our area, and the preaching (I'm really sorry if anyone involved in this particular church ever reads this) sucks. It's this vague pop-psychology crap that occasionally refers to a verse here or there with any notion of context either discarded or worse, misunderstood. It's like, if the topic is "family", then I could have just googled "family help dysfunction counselling", printed off the top 5 results, and spent the next 45 minutes reading that and the sermon would have been almost identical, except that it claims the name of Christ.

Now the really scary bit: This is the state of preaching throughout the world. As far as I understand this is exactly what most of the world expects from the pulpit, and what I get back home is really really rare. This idea of working through a passage, understanding its context in both the book that it's in and the Bible as a whole, understanding really well what it says and then figuring out how that touches on our lives, and of course, that route is taken via Jesus - well this is just not done in most of the world.

On our way home from a record 1.5 hours of a record amount of drivel (admittedly not the usual preacher, but the youth worker - like that's an excuse), and while lamenting the number of encouraging "hmmms" and nods we heard and saw throughout the service, my wife raised the very interesting question (which we only cannot understand because we're not smart enough or big enough or godly enough): What is God doing with his church?

No question it'll be impressive, but geez it's not obvious.