“Have It Your Way” – An Interview with T. David Gordon

In the new issue of Credo Magazine, “Churchy Gimmicks: Has the Church Sold Its Soul to Consumerism?”, we interviewed T. David Gordon about the consumeristic entertainment culture that has crept into the church. T. David Gordon is Professor of Religion and Greek at Grove City College and the author of Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers (P&R) and Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal (P&R). In this interview Matthew Barrett, executive editor of Credo Magazine, asks Gordon a handful of questions about what the church looks like when it absorbs a consumeristic mentality.

Here is the introduction to Gordon’s interview, “Have It Your Way: Has the church sold its soul to consumeristic entertainment?”

Throughout history our culture’s primary medium has been the book. But in the mid-twentieth century there has been a shift to the image and the electronic. Does this shift in the medium affect the art of preaching? Does the medium change the message?

In my little book, Why Johnny Can’t Preach:  The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, I suggest that a culture dominated by books and reading shapes certain sensibilities that contribute to good preaching:  reading texts carefully, being attentive to the significant (as opposed to the trite), and the sensibility of the relation of written to spoken language.  “Scanning” a web page is not the same neurological or psychological process as reading a Shakespearian sonnet carefully, for instance.  The one is very literalistic, and one only notices the overt and obvious; the other is very attentive to the figurative and the subtle.  So when our waking attention is given less and less to the written word and more and more to images and sound bites, yes, our neurology is changed and our sensibilities are changed, and we become (intellectually and literarily) fourth-graders, rather than adults.  Though the apostle Paul once spoke and reasoned as a child, he later “gave up childish ways” (1 Cor. 13:11); we tend to do the opposite and remain childish in our use of language.

In our world of facebook, twitter, and countless blogs, pastors and laypeople alike are consuming an overwhelming amount of information that is typically skimmed. Few, however, are actually spending time reading a text anymore. What implications does this have for ministry, especially in those churches that have been traditionally centered around the exposition of the biblical text?

If the challenge to the twentieth century church was relativism, the challenge to the twenty-first century church is weightlessness.  We cannot notice or sense the weight of what is significant by skimming.  The reason our contemporary hymns are ordinarily so trifling is because our faith itself is so trifling; we “skim” Christianity, and only notice—if we can even use that term—the most obvious information or data.  But the realities of our faith are not mere data.  We cannot comprehend a hymn like Bernard of Clairvaux’s “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” by skimming it; its various clauses require us to meditate and reflect, e.g. “Mine, mine was the transgression, but thine the deadly pain.”

The detached, ironic, hip sensibility of our culture is entirely out of step with the religion of the cross, of Isaiah 53 (“and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”), or of Bernard of Clairvaux.  To use Wordsworth’s phrase:  “For this, for everything, we are out of tune.”

It is common today to hear preachers who sound more like comedians than expositors of God’s Word. Others treat the sermon as an opportunity to talk about themselves. Has preaching become entertainment-driven, and even in some cases narcissistic?

I do not have any sociological or empirical data on how common bad preaching is; I have only 50-plus years of experience in a variety of religious contexts.  From that experience, I can only observe that American Evangelical Christianity, perhaps more than any other form of Christianity, is almost entirely blind to the culture that has produced it, and therefore conforms to that culture and its sensibilities more than any other form of Christianity.  So yes, if our culture is characterized by entertainment, then our religion is also characterized by entertainment. (The best book on this topic may be Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, especially chapter seven, “Shuffle Off to Bethlehem.”)  If our culture is characterized by marketing, then yes, our churches are characterized by marketing.  I honestly do not understand why Evangelical Christians even bother to attend church at all; they find nothing there that they would not find everywhere in the culture anyway, so why bother?  I would rather attend my own funeral than attend a typical Evangelical “worship” service, emceed by some grinning, blow-dried, story-telling “pastor” who acts as though the fallen world has never wounded him or anyone else, who is entirely unacquainted with “the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief.”  I don’t wish such people any ill; I just wish they would go away.

Read the rest of Gordon’s interview today!

To view the Magazine as a PDF

The Evangelical church in the twenty-first century has in many ways absorbed the consumeristic mentality that is so prevalent in the culture. Churches approach worship as if they were selling a product and the attendee were the consumer. Since the product is up for sale, churches must show that their product is more entertaining than anything else the world has to offer. Therefore, churchy gimmicks are the name of the game. Whatever keeps people coming back for more takes first priority and becomes the controlling principle for all things church-related. The preaching must be relevant, the music must entertain, and church events must keep people on the edge of their seat. If the church doesn’t sell itself, then it will be out of business.

In this issue of Credo Magazine we hope to pour an ice-cold bucket of water in the face of the church. No longer can we turn to the culture to decide what the church should be and do. God, his gospel, and his bride are not products to be sold. And those who walk through the church doors on Sunday morning are not customers to entertain. Such an approach makes man the center and treats the church like a business. In contrast, our aim in this issue is to draw church-goers and church leaders back to Scripture, which we believe should be our final authority and guide for worship. In doing so, we must recover the ordinary means of grace that God uses to equip the saints and transform us into the image of Christ.

Contributors include: Brian Cosby, Dennis Johnson, Harry Reeder, Mark DeVine, T. David Gordon, Heath Lambert, and many others.