'Pastor, Why Aren't You Preaching About What's Happening?' [Part 1]

In May of 2012, a sitting American President publicly and favorably addressed same-sex marriage for the very first time. I didn’t mention this historic event in church the very next Sunday, or any Sunday for that matter.

A year or two after that particular event, I sat at a roundtable discussion with a dozen pastors. One of the leading pastors in our city told the rest of us that he had set aside his prepared sermon to address President Obama’s remarks and instead talk about marriage. The way he relayed this detail more than implied, “All good pastors do the same,” and I wasn’t a good pastor.

I used to wonder if he was right.

ONE QUESTION UNEARTHS A DOZEN

This experience and many others like them get me thinking. Answering the one question of whether to address an event involves asking and answering many other questions.

If a pastor does address a current event, when should he do it? Should he address it with the church’s weekly email and Facebook page? Addressing events this way allows us to do so outside of the regular worship service, which has advantages.

But if the event should be addressed during the service, should this happen between worship songs, within the announcements, during the pastoral prayer, or in the sermon? And if during the sermon, how much time should it receive? A passing comment to show awareness or an in-depth analysis?

“If a pastor does address a current event, when should he do it?”

Here’s another layer of complexity. Was the current event a national or global event, such as a hurricane, wildfire, shooting, or airplane crash, and thus not specifically related to your city? Or, is the current event a local one, such as the terrorist shooting around Christmas two years ago in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where I live? On a lighter note, when the Penn State football team wins their bowl game, should I mention that? (I did last year but not this year.)

Furthermore, pastors must consider timing. How soon should the event be addressed? For some events, waiting a week or more misses the opportunity. While for other events, waiting brings clarity.

Finally, who decides whether an event’s importance justifies an address? I promise you that what some in my congregation consider important is not at all important to others. Some find the latest tweet from President Trump obnoxious, while others applaud it. And still others in my church don’t know how to use “the Twitter.” God loves us all and so do I.

NO EASY ANSWERS

These questions are not theoretical to me. Between one of our two worship services, a regular attendee placed his phone in my hand to show me his social media feed. He wanted to know if his pastor knew if such and such an event had happened while we all slept the night before and whether I would address it during the second service because I failed to do so during the first.

My friend’s intentions were in the right place, but the second service began in forty-five seconds, and we still stood in the foyer. The event was not large enough that anyone else mentioned it to me. Right or wrong, I made the decision not to address the event in the second service. I wrestle with scenarios like this fifty times a year, especially in the wake of the coronavirus and George Floyd’s death. I’ve probably used the word pandemic in my sermons three dozen times in the last few months.

If you are reading this and you’re not a pastor, you probably have an opinion about what should be done in your church. Some people even leave churches and join others because of the way current events are addressed (or not addressed).

So, let me ask, how do you arrive at an answer?

A GUIDING FRAMEWORK

In the aftermath of the unrest in Charlottesville nearly three years ago, author Trevin Wax wrote,

On social media, multiple people counseled churches on how to respond the next morning. Some called for condemning white supremacy and Neo-Nazis by name. Others offered prayer for pastors who were revising their sermons or penning statements to read before the church. This sentiment popped up a few times: If your church doesn’t address this tomorrow, find another congregation. The social media fever implied that failing to speak on the issue indicated you were taking the side of white supremacists.

Wax goes on to mention how his church addressed Charlottesville and offered several thoughtful questions he now uses as a filter in considering whether to address such events:

1. Is this a history-making event that demands the church’s immediate response?

2. How “top of mind” or “close at hand” is the recent cultural event?

3. Are you in danger of leading your church to be driven by current events?

4. Are we in a cultural moment where the church’s guidance may be necessary?

These questions are helpful. I commend Wax’s whole article to you.

DON’T NEGLECT THE NINTH COMMANDMENT

Much more could be said than I’ve done so far. For example, I shouldn’t fail to mention the necessity that everything said on Sundays be absolutely true. Christians shall not bear false witness, especially in a worship service. I can walk back or even repent of a tweet I hastily thumbed into cyberspace. But we must take vigilance that this is not needed for something said in a sermon.

When I was in seminary, the church we attended often had a children’s sermon in the middle of the worship service. I distinctly remember a woman sharing with the children sitting at her feet the spiritual significance of each of the twelve days of Christmas and how the gospel connects allegorically to each day.

The next week at church she told us how everything she taught the week before was wrong. An article making rounds on the Internet touched her heart, showed up prominently in our worship service, and then needed to be retracted. The congregation laughed at her mea culpa, her “oops—my bad.” But this should not happen. “Not many of you should become teachers,” writes James, “for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1 ESV).

Above, I linked to an article about a shooting that took place in Harrisburg. But that article was published days later, and in it, The Philadelphia Inquirer still wrestled with whether to classify the shooting in our city as a terrorist act.

“A media dogpile doesn’t obligate me to jump too.”

If you know for sure that a terrorist shooting happened in your city on Saturday, of course you mention it on Sunday. But question your epistemology. Before I say in a sermon that our city experienced an act of terrorism—or a hundred other things—I need to know for sure that we did. This level of assurance cannot be reached with a quick scroll through social media between services, which means I tend to be slow to speak and careful when I do (James 1:19). A media dogpile doesn’t obligate me to jump too.

So what’s a pastor and a church to do? In Part 2 of this article, I’ll explore how our church approaches cultural issues from the pulpit and why you might want to take a similar approach.

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