Premastication or kiss feeding is the act of breaking down food by chewing it for those who can’t yet chew, then passing the pulped food mouth to mouth. Most mother apes do it for their offspring. Pigeons and parrots do something similar, but they regurgitate. Some human cultures do it too.
I have to confess some of what I’m hearing from church platforms these days puzzles me. It’s not that it’s wrong, exactly; most of the Bible teaching in the churches I frequent is quite orthodox in terms of its conclusions. Nobody is indulging in heretical craziness or flights of wild fancy. Nor are speakers subjecting their audiences to a barrage of sentimental anecdotes at the expense of biblical content, as I found was common in the late eighties.
It’s more like the art of expounding the text of scripture has suddenly gone AWOL, and I miss it. No small number of Bible teachers have never learned to chew their food before they pass it on.
The Perils of Topical Preaching
In the last couple of decades, I initially resisted — then eventually welcomed — the platform trend from topical studies back toward sequential exposition (also called “consecutive ministry”). I firmly believe that in most Bible teaching the text should drive the topic, not the other way around. The danger of giving topic priority over text is that you can so easily pick and choose isolated verses to support your idea, prying them out of their context and risking making them say things they really don’t.
A secondary tendency in such sermons is to simply ignore passages that appear to contradict (or actually do contradict) one’s thesis, something that’s easy to do if you don’t read them to your audience. Only the more mature listeners will notice and say, “Hey, what about this verse or that?”
Topical preaching can also lead to Bible hopscotch, as speakers get you to turn here, there and everywhere in pursuit of other verses to support the idea they are putting forward. Hey, we want to be Berean about it, but I do not come to church to flip pages endlessly only to read a single verse each time. If that’s all you are going to do, simply quoting the verse will suffice. The Lord did it all the time. The audience can’t assess “if these things are so” if they’re not looking at what comes before and after any given statement. There’s no time for that in the middle of a meeting … unless the speaker deliberately makes time for it.
The Value of Sequential Exposition
It’s not that all topical preaching is a bad idea. Sometimes a local church urgently needs to have a specific issue addressed, and a comprehensive study of a single subject may be a useful exercise. Many of our weekly Anonymous Asks posts set out to do just that. But there’s a good reason scripture is not all isolated proverbs. Context gives the individual statements their meaning, and analyzing and understanding the writer’s thought flow put you as close as it’s possible to get to the mind of the Lord concerning any given passage of scripture. You cannot pick up the themes and subthemes of a book by reading individual verses here and there. Sequential exposition is also easiest for new teachers, as it does not require an introduction, three points and a conclusion. Your sermon structure is the structure of the passage. Someone else created it for you.
In reaction to an overabundance of topical messages and a concern we might be neglecting the important for the urgent, a fair number of speakers in my area, local and visitors, have moved into the era of so-called sequential exposition, which in theory ought to satisfy a crusty old critic like me. So why am I fussing now?
I will readily admit that I don’t know what the patterns are in your local church. You may not have this problem at all, and if you don’t, I’m happy for you; carry on and God bless. But do me a favor next time you sit down to listen to any purported exercise in sequential exposition: ask yourself how much actual exposition is going on. If your selection of local church teaching is anything like mine, it’s not much.
Devote Yourself to the Public Reading
Here’s what I’m hearing. The speaker reads his text, then restates its meaning in his own words. Back when everyone read the venerable KJV, this was a crucial step in communicating anything useful to the average congregant, since he may otherwise have been reading Chinese. Today, when speakers “give the sense”, what they have to say is usually remarkably similar to the wording of modern translations, and is therefore mostly redundant. With rare exceptions, the “expositor” then moves on to the next verse without further comment, leaving us to conclude that the text speaks for itself so unambiguously that no further exploration or elucidation is required. Speed-sermonizing of this sort allows the speaker to cover great swaths of scripture in a single message, perhaps even an entire chapter, a policy favored in many churches that feature regular sequential exposition. After all, we don’t want to get bogged down. We need to cover a lot of territory if we are to study the “whole counsel of God”.
Now, if the intended purpose is to survey the scripture from a great height for those entirely ignorant of its content, then perhaps this method serves. It will certainly increase familiarity with the subject matter of scripture, if nothing else. But here’s the problem: in flying over the text like a helicopter, the sequential expositor defeats his own purpose, which is to exposit. If all we wanted was to have the text read to us along with occasional expressions of agreement, we could all do the same thing at home. We don’t need teachers for that, though a nice reading voice beats what some of us are working with. There is some value in general familiarity. Paul tells Timothy, “Devote yourself to the public reading of scripture.” That is right and proper in any congregation that takes pride in being people of the Book.
But, you see, Paul doesn’t end there. He goes on, “… to exhortation, to teaching.” The teacher’s job doesn’t end at reading the text and affirming we should all “go and do likewise”. He has to get into the wording and actually explain what it means. That is not as self-evident as many relatively inexperienced speakers seem to think it is.
To Exhortation, to Teaching
Anyone can read a text for himself and develop an uninformed opinion about it. What he is far less likely to do, especially in our day of gnat-like attention spans, is to ask whether he has understood it as its writer intended. What words did the author choose to express his idea, and why did he choose those rather than others? Do these expressions have a history in scripture that his original audience recognized, and that supplied for them an understanding and background we do not have today? Are we missing anything in the process of moving from the original language to modern English? Assuming your audience is really paying attention and interested in what you just read, what questions would they ask the speaker if given the opportunity? How can we apply this to our lives? More importantly, sometimes, how should we NOT apply it?
In a modern forty-five minute sermon context, the audience never gets to ask these things. A good Bible teacher has to ask himself what his audience does not know and what questions they should be asking about it. Then he needs to answer those questions for them. That can’t happen in a moment. It takes the time it takes. Exposition involves explanation, including whatever illustrations and background are required to get the reader in the mindset of the original audience of the passage. I’m seeing far too many speakers who don’t take the necessary time to chew their food on the way down.
The result: spiritual indigestion.
Racing to the Finish Line
This is where the perceived need to cover a particular amount of scriptural territory in a single message defeats itself. It becomes a race to the finish line of an arbitrary, uninspired chapter division instead of a quest to understand a smaller portion of that passage accurately and to consider how we might begin to put it into practice. It makes it tempting to rush past the verses we think should be obvious in order to make sure next week’s speaker can pick up right where we left off. It breaks continuous subject matter into blocks of text that end when we come to the next “verse 1” rather than at the end of the writer’s divinely inspired idea.
The perceived need for speed also minimizes the use of helpful illustrations, historical context and playing the “devil’s advocate”, as my father was so fond of doing both from the platform and in conversation. It ignores questions like “What has the church historically done with this verse or passage?” and “What errors have resulted or might result from this or that interpretation?” In short, we end up doing “exposition” without any real expositing, and wrap up with only the most cursory application.
I’d like to see an end to speed-sermonizing. My guess would be sixty or seventy percent of the time, it’s not really teaching anything useful. Large numbers in our audience may not choose to read and contemplate scripture for themselves at home. We cannot help that, and we should not waste our time trying to do for others what they are perfectly capable of doing for themselves. What we can do as speakers is ask ourselves what our audience doesn’t know and needs to; what the spiritual gift the Lord has given us opens up easily for us that is not obvious to them. We need to ask ourselves what it is that we have that they can’t get anywhere else, and then we need to give them that.
“Not Much New Tonight”
When I hear a speaker say at the beginning of his sermon, “You won’t hear much new from me tonight” (Yes, I have heard this more than once recently!), I want to reply, “Then please sit down now, and next time you come, please choose a passage you actually care about.”
Don’t get me wrong, there is zero value in novelty for novelty’s sake. I dislike speakers who start by contradicting everybody else who has ever studied a verse or passage just for the sake of it. But if a Bible teacher is genuinely gifted by the Holy Spirit, then he possesses a combination of learned communication skills, a distinct personality type and style of presentation that will connect with somebody in his audience, study habits, maturity, life experience, sensitivity to certain ways of thinking and familiarity with the entire word of God that is, if not unique across the entire body of Christ, at least distinctive within his own congregation. The content of any given message may not be new, but the way it is expressed will be, much as the vast majority of what the Lord Jesus taught simply restated the Law and Prophets in different language for a new generation.
If we believe the Holy Spirit equips the members of a local church to minister to those he has placed next to us in the Body of Christ, then that gift of mine (or yours) will also be urgently needed.
Something You Can’t Get At Home
Be that, and do that. Otherwise, we are missing the point of traveling through scripture in order. If we cannot do something for the listener in passing through the text that he cannot do for himself, we may be better off going back to hot topics and warm-and-fuzzy personal stories. At least that way we may offer our listeners something they can’t get at home.
Now, it’s distinctly possible that a young Bible teacher of a certain type may have no clue what sorts of questions and concerns a single passage may generate in the minds of anyone who reads and meditates on it, so let’s make this really practical. In this Tuesday’s post, I’ll take a chapter of the New Testament and list every single silly and not-so-silly question it generates in my jaded mind on the way through. I guarantee this is the merest fraction of the questions it will generate in the minds of younger Christians who really want to know what the Bible teaches.
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